peacepalestine documents

Adib S. Kawar - Zionist Ban on the right of free and fair speech

2007-09-26T09:12:00.000+02:00

“The Zionist Organization of America” ZOA wrote an article entitled: “ZOA Condemns CNN's Christiane Amanpour's Series Falsely Equating Jewish & Christian Actions With Islamist Terrorists”, August 31, 2007 which is posted down below. As usual with Zionist propaganda it is stuffed with distortions of facts and lies. The article started with the following paragraph:

New York — The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned the CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for her three-part, prime-time series, ‘God’s Warriors,’ which included a lengthy segment equating Jewish (and Christian) religious fervor with that of Muslims who endorse suicide bombing and support jihad. The series, purportedly intended to examine the growing role of religious fundamentalism in today’s world, is riddled with falsehoods and actually distorts understanding of radical Islam by misrepresenting religious Christians and Jews as equally violence-prone and dangerous as Islamist terrorists.

FOR Contact: Morton A. Klein, 212-481-1500

“Although we wonder if it is not a waste of time and effort to defy the usual Zionist distortions of facts, which are well known by the vast majority of the unbiased and un-blackmailed international community, to stop and comment on the ZOA’s attack on Ms. Christiane Amanpour’s series on CNN entitled, ‘God’s Warriors,’ but still we shall do so because this program was aired by CNN, the most famous and influential news TV station in the U.S., which many consider as biased in favor of Zionism.

We should point out that we haven’t had the opportunity to see this series, but what interests us is ZOA’s commentary on it, and the distortions of facts that are rife in their review of it.”

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) published on its site an article entitled “ZOA Condemns CNN's Christiane Amanpour's Series Falsely Equating Jewish & Christian Actions With Islamist Terrorists” on August 31st 2007. We would like to start with the title itself. The ZOA wants to equate Christianity with Judaism and make of them into one united front in the face of what the ZOA considers “Islamist terrorism”.

We will begin by saying, and stressing, a very important fact that we Arabs (whether Christians like myself, Moslems or Arab Jews) differentiate between Judaism and Zionism, which are two fully distinct things. Judaism is a religion while Zionism is a racist political movement initiated by secular Jews, which aims at colonizing somebody else’s land and ethnically cleanse it by means of terror, massacres, expulsion and/or annihilation. Throughout history, Arab Jews were a part of the Arab people and are considered as Arab citizens. If Jews were ever, for one reason or another, persecuted among Arabs and Moslems, they certainly had suffered less then in any other part of the world, especially in Europe. European Jews were not only persecuted in Nazi Germany, but in other parts of Europe, such as Great Britain. We claim that the British issued the Balfour Declaration not for the love of Jews, but to get rid of them, and to use them to divide the Arab land and colonize it.

Secondly, we would like to refer to the ZOA’s heading of their stationary (Please see the ZOA’s article), namely combining the American flag with the Star of David. In the same manner they try to mislead the world that Christianity and Judaism belong to the same background and culture, this is while Zionism with all of its organizations and the Zionist entity itself try to do, and they actually did, blackmail America and mislead some Christians such as those who call themselves “Born Again Christians”, who are actually “Zionist Christians” (This if we can combine the two together as Zionism, being a racist movement is in contradiction with Christianity, a religion of love, international fraternity and forgiveness). See what is taking place in the U.S. governmental circles both the executive and judiciary branches, and we don’t know if they had the opportunity to do so within the judiciary system, espionage, for which we refer the ZOA to the Jonathan Pollard case, and terror concerning which we refer the ZOA also to the USS Liberty massacre. The Zionist entity tried to sink this intelligence military ship during the so-called Six Day War. The Israeli Zionist naval and air force launched a raid on the ship that lasted for hours, and resulted in killing 37 of its men and injuring about one hundred seventy of them. But because of pressure and influence of the Zionist/Israeli lobby, all U.S. administrations since then tried to cover up the attack by “America’s only true ally” in the Middle East!!!

The ZOA considers all that was said in the series as “false”, where in most cases it did not try to prove the contrary of the claimed fallacies. Quote, “It is filled with falsehoods, distortions, omissions, and a clear, monstrously biased agenda against Israel while diminishing the real dangers Islamists pose to the Western world”.

Zionists and their American allies had never tried to stop and ask why there is Islamic terror: isn’t it a counter act to western and Zionist terror practiced against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular?

Bias and distortion in Amanpour’s series: “Amanpour fixates on rare instances of Jewish terrorism…” To start with, although the list of Zionist acts of terror in Palestine, other parts of the Arab homeland and around the world is beyond counting, what is important to mention is that it is not a matter of numbers, for as long as terror is utilized by a certain entity once, it is always utilized - as is the case with the Zionist entity. History books of Zionist terror are bursting with examples; it started with the arrival of the first group of Zionist colonialists in Palestine during the second half of the 19th century, which started before Herzl held his conference in Basel, Switzerland, and long before Nazi Germany was established. The aim of Zionism is to occupy Palestine, displace and replace the indigenous Palestinian Arabs with imported Zionists, which is the worst kind of terrorism.

Palestinian Arabs used resistance, and it is this that Zionist and western colonialists label as “terrorism”. Resistance against occupation is justified by the Geneva conference. The ZOA added, “ignores the widespread support for terrorism in Arab societies and fails to note the widespread condemnation of terrorism in Israeli society and the absence of such condemnation in Palestinian and wider Arab society” (It is quite interesting to see that Zionists started recognizing the existence of the Palestinian society, which shall certainly make Golda Meir’s bones crack in her grave when Palestinian Arabs started their resistance against the Zionist occupation of Palestine).

Uri Avneri wrote in his Article dated 8.9.07 entitled “Bil’in – Bìl’in” that Zionist colonialists are not only using terror in the stolen land of occupied Palestine 1948, but also in the West Bank, they also: Who can now deny what we have been saying for years, that the settlements are a huge business of billions upon billions of dollars, which is entirely based on stolen property?”

Everybody knows the hard core of settlers, nationalist-messianic fanatics, who are ready to drive out, kill and rob, because their God told them so. But around this core a large group of gangsters has gathered, real estate operators, who conduct their dirty and hugely profitable business behind the screen of patriotism. In this case, patriotism is indeed the refuge of scoundrels.

The Z.O.A.’s claims are completely false, for although Arab resistance is justified, Zionist and the western media and most of its governments condemn it, and instead as many of them say, “Israel has a right to self defense”. As is said in Arabic, “The victim accepts and the killer doesn’t”!

The ZOA added, “Amanpour devotes no time to depicting the wall-to-wall opposition in Israel to acts of Jewish terrorism or to the public celebrations”. Quoting The ZOA… “FALSE”. How could this be true in a state that was established on terrorism, racism and unfounded myths? This is a very big lie. We are not saying that there is no opposition among Jews in occupied Palestine, but those people are a very small minority. Years ago some used to say there was an Israeli left, but now it almost exists no more, Zionist radicalism is the rule now.

Where does this fit in?
By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News
Published: September 12, 2007, 23:38
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/09/13/10153223.html

Carter's view, which is condemned by The ZOA all through their article:

“To top it all, former president Jimmy Carter appeared this week with the popular Amy Goodman, anchor of Democracy Now radio station which is beamed to 600 other radio stations. At one point he described the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories as "a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine".

“The former president also that "there are powerful forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land" - an obvious reference to the Israel lobby. "I think it's accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I'm familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their “legal boundaries” or publicise the plight of the Palestinians or even call publicly and repeatedly for good faith peace talks."

In addition to the Zionist entity being founded on terrorism and false claims, the Israeli writer Uri Avneri wrote in his Article dated 8.9.07 entitled “Bil’in – Bil’in” proves that it is also equally based on corruption. He wrote: Talia Sasson, a lawyer appointed at the time by the government to investigate the setting up of "illegal" settlement outposts, has concluded that most of the ministries and army commands have violated the law and secretly cooperated with the settlers. It may appear that they acted out of patriotic sentiments. I have my doubts. I dare to guess that there must be hundreds of politicians, officials and officers who have received large bribes from businessmen who made billions from these "patriotic" transactions building settlements (colonies).

Zionists say, “Had Palestinians loved their land they would have fought for it,” but when they fight to resist Zionist occupation and terrorism they are called terrorists!!!

The ZOA added, “Amanpour actually downplays the very real present massive threat posed by Islamist terrorists who have struck and are striking around the world -- in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Spain, Britain, the U.S. and a host of other countries.” It is of utmost importance to repeat that the mere act of occupation of a foreign land is the worst type of terrorism… and terrorism is supposed to be confronted with resistance, meaning inviting justified violence. And if we mention terror striking around the world, what about the acts of occupation and violence/terror against so many Arab states all the way from Tunisia to Iraq, and the interference in their internal affairs, like what is happening in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan and others where Zionism is trying to agitate minorities to separate from their states?

The ZOA proceeds mocking Palestinian Arabs about whom they said, as we mentioned here above, they should fight for their land if they love it, while they quote Palestinians saying: “Israel calls them murderers, we call them strugglers”; ”heroes fighting for freedom”) and named schools, streets and sports teams after terrorists who have murdered Jews”. We wonder how many streets; towns, airports, etc. were called after Zionist terrorist leaders starting with Herzl, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, Yitzak Shamir, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and probably the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refuge camps in the outskirts of Beirut where 1000 to 2000 people (mostly women and children) Palestinians and other Arabs etc…were slaughtered. Or are Zionists are a chosen people; who have the right to kill, but Arabs cannot reciprocate at least in kind, Jewish blood is sacred, but that of others is worthless!!!

We quote here some of the contents of the weekly reports of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (or probably it is considered unreliable as far as Zionism is concerned!!!) Israeli war crimes, 30 Aug. – 05 Sep. 2007 which is one that is comparatively to other weeks very mild; the injuries and damage inflicted on Palestinians were less than the average; so we shall quote briefly from other weeks’ reports:

“Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Continue Systematic Attacks on Palestinian Civilians and Property in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) http://www.pchrgaza.org

“16 Palestinians, including 6 children and a woman, were wounded by IOF.
Week: 02 - 08 August 2007 5 Palestinians, including a child, were killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
· 31 May – 06 June 2007 - 7 Palestinians, including 2 children and an old man, were killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
· 23 May 2007 - 32 Palestinians were killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip. 17 of the victims are civilians, including 7 children. 102 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 20 children, were wounded by IOF gunfire in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
PCHR weekly report: "6 Palestinian, including 2 children, killed,23 including 9 children injured"

The Palestinian Center For Human Rights, based in Gaza, published its weekly report on the Israeli violations in the occupied territories in the period between September 6 and 12, 2007. During the reported period, Israeli troops shot and killed six Palestinians, including two children, and injured 23 including nine children.
http://www.imemc.org/article/50408

“IOF have isolated the Gaza Strip from the outside world and a humanitarian crisis has emerged.

21 March 2007 - 2 Palestinian, including a child, killed by IOF in the West Bank. 13 Palestinian civilians, including 7 children were wounded by IOF. 8 of these civilians were wounded in Bi’lin village, west of Ramallah; 4 were injured by IOF gunfire at checkpoints. 2 of the victims were extra-judicially executed by IOF. 21 Palestinians, including a child, and an international human rights defender were wounded by IOF gunfire in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

“IOF arrested 44 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.

“IOF have continued to impose a total siege on the OPT.

· IOF war crimes were not limited to killing and injuring Palestinian Arabs and international activists that left their countries, universities, work and private life to come to occupied Palestine, not disputed territories as Zionists claim, to defend the human rights of occupied and tortured Palestinian Arabs. Other IOF crimes included:

* Incursions: During one week IOF conducted 35 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and 7 into the Gaza Strip.

Arrests: IOF arrested 49 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, and 7 others in the Gaza Strip.

At present there are over 10,300 Arabs including besides Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Syrians…. And God knows what other Arabs have been rotting in Zionist prisons and detention camps without trial. Since 1967 over half the total number of Palestinians living in occupied Palestine 1967, were during some time or another arrested and detained in Zionists prisons or detention camps mostly without trial and of course without conviction, as if an invader can convict members of the occupied indigenous population.

· Arresting democratically elected Palestinian officials: IOF placed 2 ministers, 3 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, 4 mayors and 3 members of municipal councils under administrative detention. The speaker of the Palestinian legislative council is presently in prison.

· And here is the sample story of A Mother of Seven Prisoners: By Hekmat Bessiso,

31 August, 2007 - Countercurrents.org

A Mother of Seven Prisoners
Latifah Naji Abo Homeed, 61 years old, lives in Al Am’ary Refugee Camp in the city of Ramallah – Palestine. Of her 10 children, one killed during 1994 by Israeli military and seven have been imprisoned by Israel. She longs to see them but has only their photos for comfort. She has asked to be taken to prison herself so that she can live with them.Latifah remembers how her son Nasr loved to play with his first son; his wife delivered his second child while he was in prison. She misses Basil’s jokes, Naseir’s kindness, and Muhamed’s helpfulness. Her youngest, Jehad, was always missing his older brothers, and now he, too, is a prisoner, awaiting his own conviction. Sharif is engaged and dreams to be free and marry his bride. Islam was known for his beautiful eyes; many girls tried to win his attention by being nice to Latifah.Latifah does not attend any weddings because she is afraid she will not be able to control her tears. She despairs that she will die before she can witness her own sons’ weddings. Though Latifah has not given up hope that her sons and other Palestinian prisoners will be freed, she often feels that no one remembers them and no one is fighting for them. She prays, searching for the strength and patience to endure life under Occupation and the unending separation from her sons.

The home Latifah shares with her husband have been demolished twice in the last ten years. She and her husband, 67 years old, have recently opened a small candy store in their home to try to earn money and fill their free time.This is the story of countless Palestinian women, who hope for the freedom of their sons, husbands, and brothers with every breath.Latifah Naji’s imprisoned sons:Name Age Year imprisoned Sentence Naseir 36 years – single 2002 7 lifers + 50 years Nasr 34 years – married with 2 children 2002 5 lifers Sharif 30 years – engaged 2002 4 lifers Basil 29 years - single 2004 4 years + 4 months + $2500 Muhammad 26 years - single 2002 2 lifers + 30 years Islam 22 years - single 2004 5 years + 6 months + $2500 Jehad 19 years - single 12/2006 Not yet sentenced.

· Injuring Palestinians: 102 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 20 children, were wounded by IOF gunfire in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during one week.

· 3 houses were demolished by IOF in Sour Baher village, southwest of Jerusalem. And IOF demolished 4 houses in Jerusalem. Thousands of buildings of various uses were demolished mostly for housing, schools, factories, offices… etc. (Just a small reminder: 418 Arab villages and towns were demolished in 1948/1949, and since then other neighborhoods are still being demolished in Palestine occupied in 1948 and 1967).
· Destruction of fields: Vast areas of agricultural fields were razed, thus increasing the poverty of occupied Palestinian Arabs.
· Uprooting of trees: Many more than a million fruit bearing trees especially olive trees in addition to forests were uprooted.
· Hindering Palestinian citizens’ movement: Over 750 roadblocks and checkpoints. The tragedies that resulted from them are well known all over the world.
· We repeat occupation and land theft, which are the worst type of terrorism that could be inflicted on any people.
· We should not forget the apartheid wall and fences, up till now 8 meters height and 600 kms long that steals Palestinian land and splinters it to open-air, Bantustan-like prisons, and fragmented land. The so-called Palestinian state is where the wall is found, as it was built mostly inside the West Bank.

The full reports available online at:
html format:
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2007/06-09-2007.htm
pdf format:
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2007/pdf/Weekly%20Report%2035.pdf

As for murdering and targeted assassinations, archives are available for anybody interested in this field, they are bursting with names of people targeted for assassination. These targeted assassinations are authorized by the highest Zionist leaders and authorities, noting that death penalty is prohibited by law in the Zionist entity; so they make a mockery of their own laws by not arresting but assassinating “wanted” resistance men and women killing in the way dozens of babies, women and elders in their beds. We are going here to refer not to resistance fighters, but to Palestinian and other non-Palestinian Arab intellectuals who had never carried a gun, but fought the Zionist enemy intellectually. These people were targeted by booby-trapped letters and parcel posts, booby-trapped cars, shooting in foreign countries and so on. Just few names out of many:

Dr. Anis Sayegh: General Manager of Palestine Research Center was targeted several times, by rockets shot at the center, and by a booby-trapped letter that blew up in his hands. He was extremely “lucky” to stay alive although he suffered severe injuries and almost lost his eye sight, damaged his ears, lost many fingers and the bomb caused him other deformities. He used his hands and brain to fight Zionist terrorism; so why not blow them up!!! To complete the crime during the 1982 Zionist invasion of Beirut they stole the whole library of the center, which documents all sorts of their crimes in addition to Palestinian history and Zionist crimes.
Hani Hindi: A Syrian Arab, his car was booby-trapped in Cyprus where he was managing a publishing house, the moment he started the car engine a bomb blew up and he lost his arm. He too was lucky to still be alive.

Ghassan Kanafani: A journalist, artist and writer, his car was booby-trapped in Hazmieh in the outskirts of Beirut in front of his home, he and his young 13-year-old niece were instantly murdered.

Basil Kubaisy: An Iraqi university professor was shot dead on the way to his hotel in Paris at night.

Naji Al-Ali: Considered to be the most famous Palestinian cartoonist was assassinated in London.

The ZOA shamelessly still say: “Instances of Jewish terrorism have been exceedingly rare, and have led to wall-to-wall condemnation of the act in Israeli society…” Who in the Zionist entity has condemned Dr. Baroukh Goldstein, who opened fire on Arab Palestinian praying in the Ibrahim mosque and killing 31 of them while at the same time injuring over a hundred more, and who committed suicide immediately after!!! His more racist followers erected a memorial for him to which they pray!!!

All the above aims at making life impossible in order that Palestinian Arabs decide to commit voluntary transfer and make Palestine free of its indigenous Arab population thus available for imported Zionist invaders.

Speaking about martyrdom in the Arab society that results from resisting occupation and land stealing, willingness to sacrifice their lives for it is a vital part of the love for one’s own land and its defense. Resistance has a big price to be paid. On the other hand, Zionists import young men and women from around the world, put them in military fatigues, train them, arm them and send them to steal somebody else’s land and assassinate its people, certainly they die in the process, or it is fine to get killed while invading but not while resisting!!!

One of the biggest forgeries is what they call “disputed territories” for the land occupied in 1967. The partition resolution, which Ben- Gurion considered the acceptance of which by Zionist colonialists as temporary till the opportunity would come along to occupy the rest of historical Palestine, in which many Zionist include Trans Jordan and other parts of the Arab homeland much further then Palestine and Trans Jordan. This is not strange for a colonialist society, the leaders of which consider whatever is occupied by the force of arms as becoming their “legal” property!!! This is what the Zionist racist neo historian, Benny Morris, calls “Survival of the fittest”. In an interview by Ari Shavit published in Haaretz, refer to Google and Yahoo. Morris justified Zionist colonialism to establish “democracies” as was the tragedy (annihilation) of the so-called Red Indians. We say in Arabic, “one of the family testified”.

The vast majority of Israelis are staunch Zionists thus they are among the “small minority” of the extremists!

If The ZOA wants to refer to Moslem “clerics” we also refer them to their gang of racist Rabbis who day and night call Arabs “animals” and so on and push Zionist youth to murder Arabs; so they would be better to drop the subject, which is not in their own interest.

· The ZOA wrote: “Amanpour repeatedly and falsely asserts that Jewish communities established in Judea and Samaria are illegal. This is not the view of many distinguished legal scholars, past and present, like former Dean of Yale Law School & U.S. Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow;” The ZOA names, “Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Meir Shamgar”. Among the “distinguished scholars” that consider the building of Zionist colonies on Palestinian stolen land legal. We are not surprised that Zionists and other pro-Zionist non-Jewish personalities do so. Any colonialist settler in Palestine would support the “legality” of the colonies, otherwise how would he justify his being in an occupied land?!

· This proves the colonialist character of the Zionist movement that day and night says that, it is the Arabs’ fault because they didn’t accept the partition plan, and as we said here above, Ben-Gurion himself defies this fallacy. Whether they accepted or not, the unlimited Zionist expansionist aim is to occupy Arab land even beyond the borderlines of historic Palestine… Simply calling these territories “disputed” proves the illegality of Zionist claims. The presence of the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine is the biggest illegality. It is easy to bring so-called scholars who are corrupt and/or colonialist in character and ideology, and make them support their illegal claims and fallacies. By thus speaking, scholars that confirm its legality makes them unscholarly. The Zionist lobby is full of the so-called scholars. And if The ZOA wants to refer to Geneva and its conventions, they better study their homework to pass their elementary school exams. The Geneva Convention legalizes resistance against occupation and terror.

· The ZOA said, “The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has never supported settlements”. So, they are not “scholarly”, and thus not Zionists. Zionist ideology is colonialist and racist by nature, thus it would not oppose the crime against humanity of stealing somebody else’s land, displacing them if they were not able to annihilate them.

· The ZOA added about Morton A. Klein, that he had to support Israel because his Christian constituents were pro-Israel). Moreover, a March 2007 McLaughlin & Associates poll found that Americans support Israel over the Palestinians by a ratio of 10 to 1.

· False, the Americans don’t support Israel by a ratio of 10 to 1, it is corrupt American politicians that support Zionism, because they are under its influence and their colonialist aims tally. Over and above “Reuters” wrote on Sept. 6th 2007 an article entitled: “An American Study: Jews Became Less Connected With Israel and Supporting it”. We quote from Reuter’s this very important article:
“Jews of the U.S., excluding Orthodox Jews, (Not committed to religious traditions) show an increasing tepidity if not disconnecting themselves from Israel, which is an inclination that they are not likely to retreat from.

“The study also showed that American Jews are merging in the American society, through marriages with others of different religious sects, and an inclination to considering Judaism as a religion rather then a race; this is a part of what is taking place.

“Roger Benita, vice president of “Andrea Charles Bronfman Charitable Society” that patron the study said: “The situation with our parents’ generation was the important question is how to look at Israel? But for the post 1976 generation the question became:” Why should we look towards Israel?”

“The study also showed that, “Perhaps there is a change in feeling of connecting (with Israel); warmth is cooling down and indifference is changing to full detachment”.

“The study discovered that only 48% of U.S. Jews below the age of 35 years shall consider the destruction of Israel as a personal tragedy for them, in comparison to 77% of those who are 65 years old or more. Beside that, there are only 54% of those 35 years old or less are “at ease with the existence of a Jewish state”, compared to 81% of those 65 years old or more. The percentage of support was higher among those that visited Israel, irrespective of age.

“There are 6,000,000.00 (six million) Jews in the U.S., and only 1/3 of them belong to a particular congregation. A Christian study showed that about 40% of U.S. Jews who could be considered liberal reformative, 32% conservatives, 8% are traditional (Orthodox).

“Steven Cohn, of the Hebrew Union College, which participated in conducting this study found out that American Jews are generally: “Inclining more and more to the American idea against what it means for somebody to be a Jew… Basically, a religious identity”.”

Certainly Iraq was invaded for two reasons, Zionist pressure and oil, and if you want to add, to control the rest of the Arab homeland. This is what is being repeated now in threatening Iran and Syria. It is just because Israel does not want anybody who is not under the full control of the U.S. and of course by proxy, of Israel itself. When the U.S. wants to invade a certain country, like what happened with Iraq it says W.M.D., which proved to be a lie, and this is what U.S. officials are claiming concerning Syria after the aerial Zionist assault lately, and when questioned about the triple kind of Israel’s arsenal of W.M.D. (atomic, chemical and biological weapons) the reply is ready, Israel is something else… Why should it be something else? It is because of the lobby, and common colonialist interests between this Zionist/U.S. Administration’s axis of evil.

· The ZOA claimed, “U.S. has taken many positions contrary to Israel’s -- imposing an arms embargo during the Arab invasion of Israel;” We are not going to question the embargo, because without U.S. supplies to Israel with the most sophisticated arsenal and technology, and besides the stolen technology, by Israel and those related to it in the U.S., Israel would not have been in existence today. Forcing Israel to withdraw from occupied Egyptian Sinai. According to Zionist ideology, is immoral of the U.S. to pressure the Zionist entity to withdraw from occupied lands of others. They believe that as usual the U.S. should support it and attack the occupied as is being done now in Palestine and elsewhere. And probably one should prepare for an air bridge to supply it with armed and manned tanks and fighters and bombers, when Israel was repelled from the shores of the occupied Suez Canal!!! What we are going to tackle is the often repeated; we don’t know what to call it, Arab armies invading Israel in 1948!!! Lets for argument’s sake that the U.S. had the right to impose on the UN to partition Arab Palestine and give the Zionist invaders 55% of its area, Arab armies didn’t even reach the borderlines of the Arab state as per the partition plan, while the Zionist gangs occupied 23% of the area allocated to the Arab state plus most of the international Zone of Jerusalem.

Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent, wrote an article entitled: “Poll: 71% of Israelis want U.S. to strike Iran if talks fail”. Israelis, whose state that has one of the biggest arsenals of atomic warheads in addition to chemical and biological W.M.D.s in the world were found to be:
Fully 71 percent of Israelis believe that the United States should launch a military attack on Iran if diplomatic efforts fail to halt Tehran's nuclear program, according to a new poll.

The survey, commissioned by Bar-Ilan University's BESA Center and the Anti-Defamation League, found that 59 percent of Israelis still believe the war in Iraq was justified, while 36 percent take the opposite view.

Some 65 percent believe that the United States is a loyal ally of Israel, with only 11 percent saying the opposite. A slightly higher proportion, 73 percent, described U.S. President George W. Bush as friendly. Forty-eight percent attributed U.S. support for Israel to strategic considerations, while 30 percent credited American Jewry and 17 percent cited shared values and a shared democratic tradition.
Regarding America's importance to Israel, there was near consensus: 91 percent said that close relations with the U.S. are vital to Israel's security.

· The ZOA proceeds saying: “Amanpour states and implies that the U.S. simply follows Israel’s line. False -- since Israel’s establishment in 1948, the U.S. has taken many positions contrary to Israel’s.” Since the creation of Israel the U.S. used its power of veto at the UNSC to protect Israel almost one hundred times. The ZOA can simply refer to the archives of the council and bother to waste some of its precious time and read the list, which we are sure it is well aquatinted with, and then it shall keep quiet in spite of its shamelessness.

· The only time a U.S. president stood in the face of Israel was when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered it to withdraw its troops from Sinai after the 1956 triple (British, French and Israeli) assault on Egypt. Otherwise the U.S. always encouraged Israel to proceed with its invasions, massacres, and destruction, the last example was the Zionist war on Lebanon July/August 2006. The U.S. kept pressuring Israel to proceed with its war crimes against an Arab state that it considers its government to be democratically elected!!!

· The ZOA added: “Amanpour only shows commentators agreeing with her false assertion of the illegality of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria”. If the Zionist rogue state of Israel blames President Eisenhower for pressuring it to withdraw from the Egyptian Arab occupied Sinai, then we would not be surprised if it claims that its colonies in the West Bank, the Golan Heights and previously in Sinai and Gaza strip are not illegal. This encourages us to say the truth that all the Zionist state of Israel is illegal. To consider former Zionist Christian president Regan as a reliable supporter for its claims, and blames president Jimmy Carter on the contrary!!! If The ZOA says so then it is falling in the same mistake that it blames other for.

· (President Carter) he was criticized for numerous inaccuracies, misuse of documents and above all for justifying continuing Palestinian terrorism…The ZOA expects everybody tackling the Palestinian question to refer only to its archives, otherwise their arguments will not be reliable. It is strange how sometimes people do not see their own mistakes not to say crimes, it is said in Arabic, “Had the camel seen its own hump, it would have fallen down and broken its neck”. As we said here above the list of Zionist terrorist acts is big enough to fill volumes, or unless The ZOA follows their racist historian, Benny Morris, who answered the following question saying:

· According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."

· The above is simply quoting Morris himself, who said, “These war crimes are simply the tip of the iceberg”. Morris was referring to massacres, raping, demolishing hundreds of towns and villages, annihilation and expulsion of over 80% of the Arabs in areas of Palestine occupied in 1948, in addition to more than 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank in 1967, not to mention the hundreds of thousands that are being gradually expelled by various means. Morris blamed Ben-Gurion for failing to complete the expulsion of all Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Zionist terrorism didn’t end by in 1948 and 1967. It is a continuous process; the most outstanding act of it, we stress on and repeat, is the continuous occupation of somebody else’s land and stealing whatever is on it and over it. We don’t forget the Apartheid wall, targeted assassinations, continuing of demolishing, building of all sorts of uses and razing agricultural land and uprooting millions of trees……..

· Palestinian resistance, what you may call acts of violence, is legal and justified by the Geneva Convention… It is simply resistance to occupation and Zionist state terrorism… Repeat resistance to state terrorism.

· By the way, how many Arab peace initiatives the Zionist state aborted?!
· Zionism considers the spilling of Arab blood to be permissible, while Jewish blood is sacred, and so is Arab land and property. Menachem Begin, like all Zionist leaders starting with Herzl, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion and the whole list of war criminals that followed, with special mentioning of Ariel Sharon in the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon under the leadership of Sharon over 20,000 Arabs including Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians… were murdered by the invading invading Zionist troops. Of course this is justified as only Jewish blood is sacred!!!!

· All Zionist acts of terror are obstacles to peace without exception.
· Zionist acts of terrorism are continuously driving not only Jews around the world including occupied Palestine and the United States, to become devoted in opposing Zionism and its state. We refer our readers to the above quoted: “Reuters” wrote on Sept. 6th 2007 an article entitled: “An American Study: Jews Became Less Connected With Israel and Supporting it.”

· We are glad that there are few members out of hundreds of congressmen and representatives that oppose Zionism; otherwise it would have been a tragedy for a deep-rooted democracy such as the U.S. We hope that this small piece of yeast would be enough to change the present conditions that are not at all in the interests of the United States of America.

· One of the biggest jokes that The ZOA makes is: Lacking any binding agreement on this territory, it remains disputed land, not “Palestinian land,” unallocated under international law. Moreover, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 Six Day War, provided for the drawing of final borders by agreement between Israel and the Arab belligerents of that war. !!! If it is still lacking any binding agreement, how and why does the Zionist entity give itself the right to occupy it and colonize it while its borders are still to be agreed on. Palestine had been populated by Arabs for thousands of years, what could justify its colonization? Ancient Hebrews following the myth of a divine promise are claiming this land. Is God so inconsiderate regarding human justice, or probably Zionist Jews have their own and special god?!

· As for UNSC Resolution 242, Zionists give their explanation, which followed that of the British who insisted on being granted the right of mandate to impose their own Balfour Declaration, and thus deprive the indigenous Arab population their right in their own land. The majority of learned people explain this resolution to mean full withdrawal from this occupied land and return to it for its people.

· How many countries in the world, with the exception of the Zionist state of Israel, got their legality from the UN? Colonialist powers were eager to grant legality to Israel to achieve their further colonialist ambitions. As we said above if this rogue state, which relies on the right of might, and the support of colonialist powers for its continued existence, this shall certainly not last forever, but if it relies on the partition plan that it never abided with, then with its present and ever-changing borderlines, it is fully illegal.

· Amanpour falsely portrayed Jewish-Muslim tension in Jerusalem a product of the city’s reunification by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. The conflict over Jerusalem didn’t start with its full occupation in the 1967 Zionist war of aggression. The conflict started with the beginning of the Zionist colonization of Palestine in 1880 or earlier. The Zionist movement as asserted by its leaders came with a plan to colonize Palestine and ethnically cleanse it by means of terror and massacres against its people. It is not a Jewish /Moslem conflict, it is an Arab/Zionist conflict, and Zionists want to make of it a religious conflict while Palestinian Arab Christians where in the front lines with their Moslem compatriots against Zionist colonization. Just to prove that, it happened that all the Arab national committee members of Haifa in 1948 were Arab Christians.

· And saying, “During the 1948-49 war, Jerusalem was a battle zone in which its historic Jewish quarter, with its 58 synagogues as well as cemeteries, was systematically destroyed and its Jewish community besieged and expelled.” It is important to mention here that the writer visited the Jewish sector of Old Jerusalem days before its occupation by Zionist forces in 1967, and although not populated by Arabs nor Jews, its buildings were standing in one piece, and unlike the hundreds of Palestinian Arab towns and villages they were not leveled to the ground. Zionist invaders leveled Arab towns and villages; so that their inhabitants will find no homes to return to, not comprehending that demolished houses could be rebuilt. Let us for argument’s sake say what The ZOA said is the truth, but this would be like a drop of water in the sea!

· What Zionists say is that in fact tensions started with the pogrom launched by Moslems in 1929, although the invaders are to be blamed... this is if it took place it was a matter of self defense, and Zionists do not need excuses and to be taught how to commit pogroms and massacres. Anyhow, just one example, have a look at what is happening in Al-Khalil (Hebron) nowadays, and the terror campaign that had been launched against its Arab population by the racist colonialist settled, Kiriat Arbaa. This is not to speak about terror that is being practiced against Palestinian Arabs in Palestine occupied in 1948 and 1967. Any reader can read and hear about that in the media. The ZOA attacks Christiane Amanpour claiming she “distorts the history” and goes to the extent of claiming, “The subsequent division of city and denial of access of Jews to religious shrines and only limited access for Christians to the churches in east Jerusalem,” Which is False.… The writer, a Christian Arab, had the opportunity to visit so many Christian shrines in the West Bank before its occupation, and they were flooding with prayers as well as tourists, but I have been denied the right to visit the Church of the Annunciation in my hometown, Nazareth since 1948.

· Another stupid joke: “Jerusalem is a primary importance only to Judaism, not Christianity or Islam.” We are surprised that nobody in the Christian west where the Zionist movement is supported, financed and armed is not reacting to such a fallacy or better to say, nonsense. Where was Jesus Christ crucified, buried and resurrected? In Jerusalem of course, where the Church of the Resurrection is built, and to remind Zionists that the Virgin Mary received the Annunciation in Nazareth where Jesus was raised is why he is called the Nazarene and Arabs call Christians besides “Masiheieen” “An-Nasarah”, (Nazareth in Arabic reads An-Nasirah), and of course he was born in Bethlehem, he made his miracles all over Palestine, and among these places are Lake Tiberius and Qana Al-jalil. How could Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine not be of primary importance to Christians? As for Moslems, they consider it of primary importance, and let’s for argument’s sake say it is a myth, what then should we call the Jewish myths (in plural)?

· The ZOA said: “Islamist doctrines and their anti-Semitic character are traceable to Wahhabi Islam, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and other streams of Islamist thought that arose simultaneously with, and were influenced by, European fascism.” They said the “whore is teaching chastity!!” As Benny Morris stated, Zionist terrorism against Arabs in its various forms was inevitable to achieve the Zionist dream and “democracy”!!!!

· What Zionist leaders want is to trade peace for peace, not land as per UN Resolution 242, which is too generous towards the Zionist state!!!

· “In fact, the then-Eshkol government offered almost a complete return of territory to the Arab belligerents in return for peace treaties.” The right reply on this statement is: “Zionism wants Palestine free of its Palestinians!!!” We suggest that Zionist leaders and their lobbies read their history as written by their founding fathers.

· The ZOA proceeds with its ungratefulness to the caretaker of the Zionist entity, the United States, it said: Amanpour falsely claims that Israel gets $3 billion per year from the U.S. while not putting this in the context of other recipients of U.S. support. In fact, the amount given to Israel has fallen over the years to $2.5 billion annually.” How many billions is Israel still getting over and above the official grants from various other American sources and tax free?!!! Israel was granted by Bush 30 billion dollars’ worth of arms free of charge for the period of the coming ten years, the value of which could be compensated to the US out of the US $ 20 billion dollars’ worth of arms to be sold to some, “moderate” Arab states at the same time??!! The Zionist entity with a per capita income of about US $18,000.00 per year, if not more, asked the US to shift the about US $750 million from economic to military support, which the US accepted without hesitation at the end of the Clinton regime.

· The ZOA said, “additionally, the U.S. has given the PA over $1 billion since the start of the Oslo process…” As a result of the Zionist/American siege against Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Palestinians that where living in abundance before the Nakbah, between 60 and 80% are now living under the poverty line.

The Zionist state wants to be treated better than all the Arab one put together, as all US Administrations want it to be more powerful than all of them together.
Speaking of corruption, Zionists would better not open this file with the successive corruption scandals in this “state”.

· Amanpour recycles the false claim that with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, “the peace process died that night.” It had been dead long before his death, it had never been alive among Zionists. It is like saying Zionists are giving painful concessions when the forced withdrawal from Gaza strip began… Begin said whatever was gained by force should not be returned… Then what other than force or resistance in all its forms can liberate occupied Palestinian land… disputed territories!!!

· The ZOA expects even occupied, terrorized, massacred and uprooted Palestinian Arabs to be in the front line fighting to protect the Zionist entity against themselves, all under their leaders, whether they are Yasser Arafat who even concluded the infamous Oslo Accords, or any other resistance leader or fighter.

· Amanpour claims that Meir Kahane’s far-right wing group, Kach, was banned by the Israeli government as a terrorist group after the 1994 killing of 29 Muslims in Hebron by Israelis. Amanpour again makes a massive factual error. Kach was banned in 1988, not 1994. This is not as a big mistake as Zionist lies, so permissible… Yes Israel has not only a racist group, as Amanpour alleged, it has also a terrorist group at the same time. These concepts don’t contradict each other, on the contrary, as far as Israel is concerned they are complementary to each other.

· Amanpour falsely claims that there is “Jewish terror to match Palestinian terror.” What is false is that Zionist terror is in abundance, while Palestinians violence is, we repeat, resistance against Zionist terror. Thus the contrary is the truth; Palestinian resistance is a response to Zionist terror.

· Regarding comparison of casualties between Arabs and Zionists Thd ZOA wrote: “Amanpour makes this statement in reference to a failed Jewish terrorist act, suggesting that the exceedingly rare incidents of Jewish terror, resulting in casualties figures in two digits….” Here below we quote from an Israeli source, THE ISRAELI INFORMATION CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, to show that The ZOA’s claims are the false and not those of the Arabs:

Fatalities

Click on the numbers for a list of individual names and details about the circumstances of their death.
29.9.2000-31.8.2007
Occupied Territories
Israel
Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces
4170 63
Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians
41
Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians
233 471
Israeli security force personnel killed by Palestinians
233 87
Foreign citizens killed by Palestinians
17 36
Foreign citizens killed by Israeli security forces
10
Palestinians killed by Palestinians
538

Additional data (included in previous table)
Occupied Territories
Israel
Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces
854 3
Israeli minors killed by Palestinians
39 80
Palestinians killed during the course of a targeted killing
367
Palestinians who were the object of a targeted killing
218
Palestinians killed by Palestinians for suspected collaboration with Israel
120
Palestinians who took part in the hostilities and were killed by Israeli security forces
1341 55
Palestinians who did not take part in the hostilities and were killed by Israeli security forces (not including the objects of targeted killings).
2014 5
Palestinians who were killed by Israeli security forces and it is not known if they were taking part in the hostilities
596 3

Notes:
· The data may change due to ongoing research, which produces new information about the events.
· The figures do not include:
· Palestinians who died after medical treatment was delayed due to restrictions on movement.

· Amanpour falsely claims that the so-called ‘secondIntifada’ (i.e. the Palestinian terror campaign launched in September 2000) “paralyzed the peace process.” More then once in these comments on The ZOA’s fallacies we mentioned who put the obstacles in the face of peace, so we don’t see a nicety to repeat.
“We fully agree with MSNBC’s Dan Abrams, who said of this program, ‘CNN should have called this program what it was -- a defense of Islamic fundamentalism and the worse type of moral relativism.’ With this series, Amanpour and CNN have hit a new low point. They owe all Christians and Jews an apology…” We said previously who are the terrorists, but what is important here is their saying, They owe all Christians and Jews an apology… But as we quoted The ZOA saying “Jerusalem is of primary importance only to Judaism, not Christianity or Islam”. Then The ZOA owes an apology to the truth and morality. Both Judaism and Christianity are in the same camp, and thus do not deny it its right in Palestine as a holy place!

The ZOA’s report ended saying: Klein concluded, “The ZOA condemns Christiane Amanpour and CNN’s pervasively biased, distorted and false depiction of the Arab war on Israel in this series as some sort of clash of religious fanaticisms in which fanatic Jews, fanatic Christians and fanatic Muslims are equally liable.” The Palestinian / Zionist struggle is not from the Arab point of view a religious struggle it is a national struggle, although secular Zionists hide behind a Judaic myths.

The ZOA said, “This program is virtually a case of blaming the victim”. Our apology, this is what Arabs who were attacked by Zionism in their homes and land have been rightly saying. Zionism wanted to avenge their persecution by Nazis by avenging against Arabs!

It is unbelievable to note that such criminals of war persist on continuing committing their war crimes, and appoint well known war criminals in decision making posts. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, that served as Attorney of Record in the lawsuit against General Yaron in Ali Aidi v. Yaron, 672 Fed. Supp. 516 (D.D.C. 1987), Palestine Yearbook of International Law, Vol. V, 1989.) wrote:

“Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has nominated former Major General Amos Yaron to serve as director-general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, while Barak himself retains the portfolio of Minister of Defense. According to the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, Yaron, whose appointment must be confirmed by the Israeli Cabinet, is a war criminal by virtue of his command responsibility for the murder of about 2000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians during the 1982 Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre in Beirut, Lebanon. Should Yaron's appointment be confirmed, the U.S. government wil lbe aiding and abetting the work of an infamous war criminal. In Fiscal Year 2000, Israel is scheduled to receive $1.92 billion dollars in U.S. militaryaid out of a total annual U.S. aid package to Israel worth $2.94 billion.

“In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, driving as far north as the capital,
Beirut, purportedly in an effort to expel the Palestine Liberation
Organization. In August 1982, special U.S. envoy Philip Habib negotiated the
withdrawal of Palestinian forces from Beirut. According to that agreement
the United States government guaranteed the safety of the remaining
Palestinian civilians and obtained Israel's assurance that its armed forces
would not enter West Beirut. Israel, breaking its own pledge (This is
standard behaviour of all Zionist bodies whether governmental or NGO’s) occupied West Beirut and surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps on September 15,
1982.

“On September 16, then Brigadier General Amos Yaron, acting under orders from
the Israeli Ministry of Defense under General Ariel Sharon, allowed
Phalangist troops to enter the refugee camps even though the same troops had
previously engaged in massacres of Palestinians living in Lebanon.”

We would like to remind The ZOA that they forgot one of the usual items of their propaganda saying that Arabs has 21 states; so Jews should then be allowed one state of their own. In reply to that we quote our good friend Raja Chemayel’s sarcasm saying: “If ever, some day, you are exposed to a Jewish-Dentist-with-Zionist-Convictions, just like him, please note my answer to him:

" If you would have had 21 million Dollars in your bank account would you allow me to steal one Million??" (only because I would have none).

One’s land is defended by all the strength, blood and soul, as one’s homeland is neither for rent, sale or to grant to others as charity. One can give his money, food or other belongings in charity, but it is a great sin to allow others to take your land. One other point to add is that Arabs never wanted 21 or 22 states, which were created by the British Sykes and the French Picot to divide and rule our Arab land. We want a unified Arab strong state to be able to rebel invaders, terrorists and colonizers.

It is well known that Zionist lobbies are experts in blackmailing, The ZOA went in that to the extent of pressuring American Christians too: “We also urge all to write to or call the advertisers, listed below, urging them to demand of CNN that it take similar action and expressing disappointment that their product/services have been associated with ‘God’s Jewish Warriors,’

On the basis of the above unmasking of Zionist lies, fallacies and distortion of facts we suggest that those who are not brainwashed with Zionist propaganda and misled by its lies to counter The ZOA’s misleading campaign, and blackmailing, as usual, utilized by the Zionist movement against the political body, business establishments, advertising agencies and the media to prove to them that the Zionist movement doesn’t have a free hand in threatening them…

“The Zionist Organization of America, founded in 1897, is the oldest pro-Israel organization in the United States. The ZOA works to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations, educates the American public and Congress about the dangers that Israel faces, and combats anti-Israel bias in the media and on college campuses. Its past presidents have included Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Dr. Abba Hillel Silver.” ZOA
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ZOA Condemns CNN's Christiane Amanpour's Series Falsely Equating Jewish & Christian Actions With Islamist TerroristsAugust 31, 2007 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Morton A. Klein, 212-481-1500 New York — The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned the CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for her three-part, prime-time series, ‘God’s Warriors,’ which included a lengthy segment equating Jewish (and Christian) religious fervor with that of Muslims who endorse suicide bombing and support jihad. The series, purportedly intended to examine the growing role of religious fundamentalism in today’s world, is riddled with falsehoods and actually distorts understanding of radical Islam by misrepresenting religious Christians and Jews as equally violence-prone and dangerous as Islamist terrorists. ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “This is one of the worse pieces of television journalism we’ve ever seen. It is filled with falsehoods, distortions, omissions, and a clear, monstrously biased agenda against Israel while diminishing the real dangers Islamists pose to the Western world. If this piece was submitted at a university as a student documentary film, the student would probably receive a grade of ‘F’. By attempting to equate Jewish and Christian extremism with Islamist extremism, Amanpour actually downplays the very real present massive threat posed by Islamist terrorists who have struck and are striking around the world -- in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Spain, Britain, the U.S. and a host of other countries.”Bias and distortion in Amanpour’s series:

· Amanpour fixates on rare instances of Jewish terrorism, ignores the widespread support for terrorism in Arab societies and fails to note the widespread condemnation of terrorism in Israeli society and the absence of such condemnation in Palestinian and wider Arab society: Although instances of Jewish terrorism are rare, Amanpour devotes a great deal of time to them. A particular focus of the program was the series of attacks on Arab mayors in the early 1980s, events that have little connection to anything happening today. Moreover, although Jewish terrorism against Arabs is exceedingly rare whereas Arab terrorism against Israelis is commonplace, Amanpour devotes no time to depicting the wall-to-wall opposition in Israel to acts of Jewish terrorism or to the public celebrations, as well as religious, social and political sanction given in Palestinian society towards acts of terror. The Israeli government, as well as the leaders of all Israeli political parties, has unequivocally condemned the rare acts of Jewish terrorism that have occurred over the years. In contrast, no Palestinian leader has condemned as a crime and moral obscenity any Palestinian terror attack upon Jews, no matter how horrific. Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas, for example, has only expressed criticism of Palestinian terror insofar as it sullies the Palestinian image (“it harms the Palestinian interest”; “I say this is not the time for this sort of attack”) and has often praised terrorists (“Allah loves the martyr”; ”Israel calls them murderers, we call them strugglers”; ”heroes fighting for freedom”) and named schools, streets and sports teams after terrorists who have murdered Jews.

· Amanpour fails to note the condemnation of terrorism in Israeli society and the absence of such condemnation in Palestinian and wider Arab society. Instances of Jewish terrorism have been exceedingly rare, and have led to wall-to-wall condemnation of the act in Israeli society, the banning of small far-right groups supporting or carrying out such acts and the full force of Israeli law and police used to prevent and deter future attacks. In contrast, terrorism and “martyrdom” are committed by all major Palestinian groups, are valorized in the PA media, advocated by PA-appointed clerics in sermons, and generally glorified by the PA, which names streets, schools and sports teams after terrorists who murder Israelis.

· Amanpour repeatedly and falsely asserts that Jewish communities established in Judea and Samaria are illegal. This is not the view of many distinguished legal scholars, past and present, like former Dean of Yale Law School & U.S. Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow; Australia ‘s most celebrated international legal scholar, Sydney University Professor of International Law and Jurisprudence Julius Stone; and former Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Meir Shamgar. However, no legal scholar appears in Amanpour’s program to rebut the claim that these communities are in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Article 49 prohibits the forcible deportation of one’s own citizens into external territory, not the right of these citizens to reside in such territories, which they do of their free will). The territories in question are also constantly referred to by Amanpour as “Arab” land (22 times throughout the program), whereas they are in fact disputed territories unallocated under international law.

· Amanpour does not challenge academic John Mearsheimer, author of a tendentious, hostile and factually flawed paper and forthcoming book on the Israel lobby, claiming that “because of the power of the [Jewish] lobby, the US has never been able to put pressure on Israel to halt settlements.” False -- the most important lobby group for strong US-Israel relations, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has never supported settlements. Even when Israeli prime ministers asked AIPAC to support settlement policy, it has refused to do so until this day. Amanpour did not interview any critic of Carter or Mearsheimer’s views nor did she mention the countervailing and very powerful anti-Israel Arab and oil lobbies.

· Amanpour does not challenge Mearsheimer’s false claim that the Congress supports Israel because the Zionist lobby gives Members of Congress free trips to Israel and other inducements . False -- Pro-Israel lobbying efforts would fall on deaf ears if the overwhelmingly majority of non-Jewish Americans did not support Israel. (Former Congressman Lee Hamilton even once admitted in the early 1990s at an anti-Israel conference in Washington D.C., attended by Morton A. Klein, that he had to support Israel because his Christian constituents were pro-Israel). Moreover, a March 2007 McLaughlin & Associates poll found that Americans support Israel over the Palestinians by a ratio of 10 to 1.

· Amanpour states and implies that the U.S. simply follows Israel’s line. False -- since Israel’s establishment in 1948, the U.S. has taken many positions contrary to Israel’s -- imposing an arms embargo during the Arab invasion of Israel; threatening Israel with sanctions if Israel did not withdraw from Sinai in 1957; refusing to honor commitments to ensure free passage of Israeli shipping blockaded by Egypt in 1967; condemning Israel’s 1981 destruction of Saddam’s nuclear reactor at Osirak; and withholding loan guarantees from Israel until it changed its policy on settlements, to name a few.

· Amanpour only shows commentators agreeing with her false assertion of the illegality of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and even distorts President Reagan’s remarks to support her point. Instead of seeking the views of the many legal scholars who could have explained the law, Amanpour only includes in her program testimony from various personalities, like former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, William Scranton, who agree with her frequently repeated assertion that Jewish settlement in the territories is illegal. She also distorts comments by President Reagan to support her false assertion that “American presidents both Democrat and Republican have spoken from virtually the same script.” In fact, Reagan stated explicitly in February 1981 in the New York Times that “I disagreed when the previous [Carter] Administration referred to them as illegal, they’re not illegal.” Nor, contrary to Amanpour’s implication, have subsequent presidents declared Jewish communities in the territories to be illegal. As President, Jimmy Carter, actually consulted government legal counsel on the question of the legality of settlements and was informed that they are not illegal.

· Amanpour falsely claims that former President Jimmy Carter was “criticized for criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians” after publishing his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. False -- he was criticized for numerous inaccuracies, misuse of documents and above all for justifying continuing Palestinian terrorism by writing that “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.”

· Amanpour does not challenge Carter’s false assertion that there was “no doubt” that Jewish settlements are the big obstacle to peace -- a statement that takes no account of the decades of terror and murder by Arabs of Israelis and three Arab-Israeli wars that preceded the construction of even a single Jewish community in Judea and Samaria. · Amanpour does not challenge Carter’s false assertion that no member of Congress can oppose Israel and win re-election. In fact, many Members of Congress, including current Senate Majority leader Robert Byrd and a host of serving and retired Congressmen, have done just that. Representatives James Trafficante, Dana Rohrabacher, Nick Smith, Fortney Pete Stark, Neil Abercrombie, David E. Bonior, John Conyers Jr., John D. Dingell, Earl F. Hilliard, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, George Miller, Jim Moran, David R. Obey, Ron Paul and Nick J. Rahall II, have all voted against aid to Israel and/or opposed other resolutions favoring Israel.

· Amanpour falsely implies that President George H.W. Bush opposed loan guarantees for Israel on account of its settlement policy but that he caved in and granted the loan guarantees due to Jewish pressure. False -- in fact, it was Israel that conceded, not the Bush Administration. Moreover, Bush’s pressure on Israel on the issue of loan guarantees to alter its policy probably played a part in the electoral defeat of Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud government and its replacement by Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor government, which offered concessions on settlement policy that were accepted by the Bush Administration. Moreover, Amanpour herself mentions that “Christian Zionists turn out in their thousands to demand that Congress support Israel and the Congress responds,” indicating that strong public support, not Jewish pressure, explains the support for Israel on Capitol Hill.

· Amanpour states that Judea and Samaria “is also Palestinian land. The West Bank -- it’s west of the Jordan River -- was designated by the United Nations to be the largest part of an Arab state.” Amanpour doesn’t mention that the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world rejected the U.N. partition plan that would have created this state and went to war with Israel at its establishment to abort it. Lacking any binding agreement on this territory, it remains disputed land, not “Palestinian land,” unallocated under international law. Moreover, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 Six Day War, provided for the drawing of final borders by agreement between Israel and the Arab belligerents of that war.

· Amanpour falsely portrayed Jewish-Muslim tension in Jerusalem a product of the city’s reunification by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. Amanpour asserts that “the 40-year tug of war over Jerusalem began when Israel bulldozed the Arab neighborhood next to the Western Wall and built a plaza where Jews now pray.” In fact, tensions began when Muslims launched a pogrom against Jews in 1929 after a campaign of falsely alleging Jewish assaults on Muslim shrines in Jerusalem. During the 1948-49 war, Jerusalem was a battle zone in which its historic Jewish quarter, with its 58 synagogues as well as cemeteries, was systematically destroyed and its Jewish community besieged and expelled -- but Amanpour does not mention any of this. The subsequent division of city and denial of access of Jews to religious shrines and only limited access for Christians to the churches in east Jerusalem, continued until the 1967 war when Israel reunified the city and instituted complete freedom of religion for all the faiths represented in the city.

· Amanpour distorts the history and religious significance of Jerusalem to Jews and Muslims. Amanpour clams that, according to Muslim scripture, Mohammed ascended to heaven around the year 630. Muslim scripture refers to Mohammed ascending to heaven from the “farthest mosque,” which could not have been on the Temple Mount, since the mosque there wasn’t built until well after the death of Mohammed. Moreover, although Amanpour notes the holiness of the Temple Mount to Jews, and some of her Jewish interviewees say as much, Amanpour only interviewed a senior Muslim figure, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, to give a Muslim perspective on Jerusalem, whereas no Jewish Rabbinical figure was presented to discuss the paramount religious importance of Jerusalem to Jews. Jerusalem is a primary importance only to Judaism, not Christianity or Islam. Jerusalem is never even mentioned once in the Quran. When the Old City of Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands, no Arab leader other than Jordanian King Hussein ever visited the city. The city is also not mentioned in the PLO’s Covenant.

· Amanpour uses ugly stereotypes of rich and pampered Jews defying international law in their support for Israeli settlement policy. Amanpour compounds her bias in claiming that settlements are illegal by depicting their American Jewish supporters thus: “Six thousand miles from Israel’s settlements, in the heart of Manhattan, defiance of international law comes dressed in diamonds.”

· Amanpour choice of interviewees is persistently selective. In addition to examples already noted, Amanpour interviews author Gershon Gorenberg, who argues flatly that Islamist terror, violence and anger caused by Israel: “You can’t understand the anger of radical Islam unless you understand the conflict between you know, the Jews and the Palestinians.” In fact, jihad against non-Muslims is a time-honored Islamic religious obligation, and Islamist doctrines and their anti-Semitic character are traceable to Wahhabi Islam, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and other streams of Islamist thought that arose simultaneously with, and were influenced by, European fascism. Additionally, the false implication of Gorenberg’s argument is that Muslim rage is primarily rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian issue, which disregards the earlier and profound forces driving radical Islam, including the titanic struggle between Shiites and Sunnis triggered in large measure by the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the Khomenist revolution and the expansion of Saudi Wahhabism across the Sunni Muslim world. Gorenberg also sates that Jewish settlements interfere with the possibility of a Palestinian state, but this ignores Ehud Barak’s 2000 offer of a fully contiguous Palestinian state in almost all of Judea and Samaria and with land swaps from Israeli territory to compensate Palestinians for land retained by Israel in the proposed peace settlement.

· Amanpour falsely claims that after the 1967 war, “the Israeli government was divided -- trade the captured land for peace or keep it and build Jewish settlements.” In fact, the then-Eshkol government offered almost a complete return of territory to the Arab belligerents in return for peace treaties. The Arab world responded later that year at the Khartoum conference with the formula -- “No peace, no recognition, no negotiations.” Jewish settlements began only later.

· Amanpour falsely claims that Israel gets $3 billion per year from the U.S. while not putting this in the context of other recipients of U.S. support. In fact, the amount given to Israel has fallen over the years to $2.5 billion annually, while Egypt receives only a little less -- $2.1 billion. Additionally, the U.S. has given the PA over $1 billion since the start of the Oslo process, despite the terror sponsorship and corruption of the PA.

· Amanpour recycles the false claim that with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, “the peace process died that night.” In fact, the Oslo process was already then in deep trouble -- the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was not fighting terror but was to the contrary allowing terror groups to operate freely and strengthen themselves within the PA, despite major Israeli concession of land and assets to the Palestinians. As a result, the Israeli public was turning against it. In fact, the rally at which Rabin was assassinated had been called to shore up Rabin’s government, which was then trailing Likud in the polls by 8 to 10 percentage points. Moreover, Rabin was succeeded by Shimon Peres, someone even more committed to making concessions to the Palestinians, yet still more terrorism followed.

· Amanpour claims that Meir Kahane’s far-right wing group, Kach ,was banned by the Israeli government as a terrorist group after the 1994 killing of 29 Muslims in Hebron by Israelis. Amanpour again makes a massive factual error. Kach was banned in 1988, not 1994, and for being a racist group not, as Amanpour alleged, a terrorist group.

· Amanpour cites Kahane referring to Arabs as “dogs” but she ignores all the obscene verbal characterizations of and attacks on Jews by mainstream, senior PA leaders, clerics and spokesmen. Two examples: In April 2007, the acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Dr. Ahmad Bahar, called for the murder of every Jew and American saying, “Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies… Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one” (PA TV, April 20, translation courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch, April 30). Also, in May 2005, the PA-appointed cleric, Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris, delivered a sermon in which he stated that “the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS” ( Al-Hayat (London), May 19, 2005, ‘Palestinian Friday Sermon by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris: Muslims Will Rule America and Britain, Jews Are a Virus Resembling AIDS ,’ Middle East Media Research Institute, TV Monitor Project, May 13, 2005).

· Amanpour falsely claims that there is “Jewish terror to match Palestinian terror .” Amanpour makes this statement in reference to a failed Jewish terrorist act, suggesting that the exceedingly rare incidents of Jewish terror, resulting in casualties figures in two digits, in any way equates with literally tens of thousands of terrorist acts launched against Israelis that have resulted in thousands of dead and maimed. Rather than noting the remarkable restraint of an Israeli society that hardly ever produces terrorists despite years of incessant, sometimes daily, terror causing carnage in Israeli streets, Amanpour suggests that the two societies are on par. An additional method used by Amanpour to minimize Palestinian terror is to use euphemistic language to describe it that doesn’t mention its victims. For example, she stated that during the so-called ‘second intifadah’ “Israelis buses, restaurants and markets were being attacked.” She didn’t say that hundreds of Israeli Jewish people were being massacred by Palestinian Arabs terrorists -- but refers only to buses, restaurants and markets being attacked. (In contrast, when she referred to Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 killing of Arabs in Hebron, she did not describe it merely as an attack on a mosque but spoke of him having “murdered 29 Muslims and injured at least 150 more”).

· Amanpour falsely claims that the so-called ‘second intifadah’ (i.e. the Palestinian terror campaign launched in September 2000) “paralyzed the peace process.” The peace process failed because Palestinians and their leaders did not accept the idea of negotiating a final peace settlement with Israel that accepted its permanence as Jewish state, not because of the terror campaign that Yasser Arafat orchestrated to obscure the fact of his rejection Ehud Barak’s peace offer at Camp David in 2000. Even before 2000, the endemic Palestinian violations, terror, incitement to hatred and murder within the PA undermined the belief and trust of Israelis in the possibility of peace with the Palestinians. Amanpour falsely claims that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate organization. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, an admirer of and correspondent with Hitler, and modeled much of its program and youth movements on the fascist movements then arising in Europe. Its followers assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 because he signed a peace treaty with Israel. It also has produced extremist intellectuals, like Sayyed Qutb and others who were the precursors of Al-Qaeda. Its Palestinian branch, Hamas, is a terror movement committed in its Charter to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. Klein concluded, “The ZOA condemns Christiane Amanpour and CNN’s pervasively biased, distorted and false depiction of the Arab war on Israel in this series as some sort of clash of religious fanaticisms in which fanatic Jews, fanatic Christians and fanatic Muslims are equally liable. In this program, history and truth have been distorted to serve the politically correct lie that Muslim extremism is but one and perhaps not even the most important factor in the current problems of the world. Israel has been a stable, democratic state with freedom of religion and separation of powers from the first day of its independence and it is simply a lie to pretend that Jewish religious extremism poses any comparable threat to the world. This program is virtually a case of blaming the victim. We fully agree with MSNBC’s Dan Abrams, who said of this program, ‘CNN should have called this program what it was -- a defense of Islamic fundamentalism and the worse type of moral relativism.’ With this series, Amanpour and CNN have hit a new low point. They owe all Christians and Jews an apology and further have an obligation to make amends by broadcasting a factual and truthful account of the history of this conflict and the special danger Islamist extremism poses at present to the world.”

****The ZOA urges all people of goodwill to call CNN (Jonathan Klein, President of CNN, at 212. 275. 7800) to demand that CNN undertake to correct the numerous errors of fact in this series before it is re-broadcast and to produce a program of equal length to rectify the imbalance inherent in the original program. People can also call CNN to leave a message on the comment line (404. 827. 1500) or submit a comment to CNN at http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form6a.html2.and athttp://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/08/22/amanpour.answers/index.html We also urge all to write to or call the advertisers, listed below, urging them to demand of CNN that it take similar action and expressing disappointment that their product/services have been associated with ‘God’s Jewish Warriors,’ which unfairly smeared pro-Israel American Christians and Jews as disloyal Americans while diminishing the real Islamist threat to America. Express concern that they have tarnished their reputation for integrity by sponsoring such a show and encourage these companies to redirect their advertising dollars to more journalistic professional networks. Urge them to speak to CNN about the program’s lack of standards. Always be polite. Anheuser-BuschAugust Busch IV, President & CEO1-800-342-5283Brinks Home SecurityMichael Dan, CEO for Brinks CompanyTelephone: 804.289.9600Email: info@BrinksCompany.com Centrum Silver (product of Wyeth Consumer Healthcare)Douglas A. Rogers, President, Wyeth Consumer HealthcarePhone (973) 660-5500Fax (973) 660-7111Circuit CityPhilip Schoonover, CEO804-527-4000Direct TVJon Gieselman, Senior Vice President, Advertising and Communications jtgieselman@directv.com HSBC direct.com HSBC Investor Relations 1-847-564-6478 Hughes Pradman P. Kaul, President and Chief Executive Officer Phone: 301-428-5500 Fax: 301-428-1868Intel Submit a comment on their Corporate Responsibility “Contact Us” form:http://www.intel.com/intel/finance/social/contact_us.htm Or call (408) 765-8080 and ask to speak to CEO Paul OtelliniNasonex (product of Schering-Plough)Fred Hassan, Chairman and CEO Schering Plough Headquarters(908) 298-4000 Salesgenie.com (subsidiary of InfoUSA) Vinod Gupta InfoUSA Chairman & Chief Executive Officer(402) 593-4500Verizon WirelessLowell C. McAdam, President and CEO(908) 696-2000Volvo Cars of North AmericaTel. 800-458-1552 Fax 800-992-3970 Wachovia G. Kennedy Thompson, President & CEO(704) 590-0000 Mary Eshet, Media relations(704) 374-2138* * *The Zionist Organization of America, founded in 1897, is the oldest pro-Israel organization in the United States. The ZOA works to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations, educates the American public and Congress about the dangers that Israel faces, and combats anti-Israel bias in the media and on college campuses. Its past presidents have included Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Dr. Abba Hillel Silver.

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Discussion on the Israel Lobby: Jeff Blankfort and Matan Kaminer

2007-04-12T23:46:00.000+02:00

Matan Kaminer refers to himself as an Israeli left activist. He is probably better known for his position as a Refusnik who was jailed for his conscientious objection. He recently wrote an article called The Colonial Drama of Israel and Palestine in Political Affairs, which Jeff Blankfort, activist, writer, photographer and radio speaker, forwarded to his mailing list. The article itself stimulated an epistolary exchange between Jeff and Matan, which they have permitted me to reprint here. A condensed version is available on peacepalestine

Jeff Blankfort:

The following article, The Colonial Drama of Israel and Palestine, I came across today in my email box and is quite interesting in that it represents a view of Israel's traditional Marxist Jewish "left." The author, I assume is the son of a Jewish American, Reuven Kaminer, a Marxist who emigrated to Israel decades ago and whom I met and interviewed there in 1983 when a son, Noam, was a member of Yesh G'vul, the refusenik Israeli reservists who refused to serve in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon,. The journal, Political Affairs, is a venerable publication which used to be close to the US Communist Party. I think the article is worth reading but did not want to send it without some critical comments.-JB

Dear Matan,

I have just read your interesting article in Political Affairs in which you asked for responses. There are a number of problems I have with it, but one in particular, is of immediate concern.. In dealing with one of the most serious issues that has enabled the current situation in Israel/Palestine to continue and worsen by the day, i.e., the role and influence of what in Israel is described as the American "Jewish Lobby," you end up with the same mistaken conclusion and make the spurious accusation or implication of "anti-semitism" that have blocked the arteries of the Palestine solidarity movement and contributed to its utter failure in the US and elsewhere. Frankly, they are only dissimilar in tone and length from the ravings of Alan Dershowitz and the ADL's Abe Foxman but carry the same message..

You write:

"On both sides of the Atlantic, demands to stop preferential treatment for Israel have treated this treatment as a kind of irrational gift, instead of as the self-interested maneuver it obviously is [5]. This stance comes within spitting distance of the various conspiracy theories surrounding the "Jewish lobby", and the road leading from these to blatant anti-Semitism is quite short."

To say that Israel is supported because two-thirds of its military aid is used to subsidize the US arms industry, a pittance when compared, for example, with the outright sales of the industry to Saudi Arabia, does not begin to account for the total hold that the lobby has held over both houses for Congress and both political parties for at least the past four decades, over the White House with the exceptions of Ford, Carter, and Bush Sr., or the well documented Zionist and philo-zionist domination of the mainstream media.

Only those who are ideologically blinded can fail to see that the lobby, that is the organized American Jewish establishment, has hijacked the America political system and has done so for Israel's benefit. (It is not the only culprit in the field, but the only one with total "bi-partisan" support) It is not a secret that all the presidential candidates are whoring after Jewish money and pledging their allegiance to Israel, something that they have, in fact, been doing for years, as have members of Congress, and that virtually ever big donor mentioned in the media is Jewish. Is this of no consequence or is even raising the issue and asking the question, "anti-semitic" in your eyes'

Similarly, you do not explain why "in Europe the economic and political profit accrued by the European bourgeoisie through its support of Israel is not usually an issue." While I am aware that the EU is Israel's largest trading partner, it hardly a significant one from the EU's standpoint and it is not clear what you mean by "political profit" unless you are referring to the monetary and political support that Judeophallic European leaders receive from Jewish organizational lobbies in their respective countries, such as the neo-fascist Sarkozy in France, Merkel in Germany or Blair in the UK.

What I have found disturbing, but after some years amusing and predictable, is that the only two sectors of US and Western society that view Israel as a "strategic asset" of the US and use this argument to explain the massive economic and critical support that the US has given Israel over the years is the organized world-wide Jewish establishment and what passes for "the left." It is not surprising that the former continues to show signs of ever increasing power, as we have most recently seen in the West's groveling response to Israel's most recent war on Lebanon while the latter, in the US, Europe, or for that matter, Israel, is barely able to draw a breath. It is something to think about.

I have copied this message to my entire mailing list along with your original article. You are quite likely to get responses from some of them. In any case, I will be happy to pass whatever comments you wish to make on to them.

Yours,

Jeff Blankfort

From: Matan Kaminer

To: Jeffrey Blankfort

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your reply. I am Reuven's grandson and Noam's son, by the way. I don't know how well I can respond to your criticism, as I am really not versed in the facts and figures of the "Israel lobby" debate. This is why the points I make briefly below will not be empirically based, but rather points of principle. Let me start by saying that if I came across as insinuating that any attempt to understand the question of the Israel lobby's power is anti-Semitic, then I apologize. Such smearing would indeed place me in the same ranks as Dershowitz and the others you mention, but it was certainly not my intention.

That said, there are several ways of approaching the question. The one undeniable empirical fact is that for three decades and more American government policy and the Israel lobby's demands have been very close. Not always identical - there have been crises - but certainly very close, in an almost unprecedented way. So the question must be addressed.

But there are a few pitfalls along the way. One is the conflation of the terms "Jewish", "Israeli" and "Zionist", which I think you are not being careful enough to avoid. The fact that many wealthy political donors are Jewish and may or may not belong to AIPAC does not mean that they represent the American Jewish community in any way (most American Jews are not wealthy); similarly, it does not mean that they represent the interest either of the state of Israel or of its citizens; neither does their Jewishness make their support of Zionism a question not worth trying to answer (not all wealthy Jews throughout history have been right-wing Zionists). In reality, the only generalization one can make about wealthy donors is that they are wealthy; this is where we should look for the connection, not in their Jewishness.

It is true that the Zionists conflate Jew, Israeli and Zionist. They are hypocritical in the extreme when they then turn around and label others who fall into that trap as "anti-Semitic" . However, this does not mean that "it is okay" to do as they do. In fact, this is one of the main points where leftists need to fight against Zionist propaganda, and this is what I tried to contribute to in my article. The footnote in the article, where I mention that most of the American funding for Israel goes right back to America, was not meant to suggest that the profit the US arms industry makes from this funding is necessarily the main explanation for the aid. The point was that this money should not be seen as just an irrational gift, and I stand by that.

I think that any real understanding of the support the US extends to Israel must take into consideration the US empire's own reasons for this support. I am not clear on whether you disagree with me on this. Do you think supporting Israel is bad for US imperialism? Do you feel that it doesn't make any difference, and that these are separate issues? Or do you disagree with the assumption I have made, up to now implicitly, that US foreign policy is, and always has been, imperialistic, and that progressive people all over the world should join the fight against it? Thanks again for your reply. Please feel free to send copies of our correspondence to anyone you like.

In solidarity,

Matan

Jeff Blankfort:

Thanks for the prompt reply and the family update.

One of the most critical failings in your analysis and of those who downplay the influence of the lobby, most notably Noam Chomsky, was expressed when you wrote:

"The one undeniable empirical fact is that for three decades and more American government policy and the Israel lobby's demands have been very close. Not always identical - there have been crises - but certainly very close, in an almost unprecedented way."

Chomsky and others have postulated this as proof that the lobby only appears to be powerful because its interests are in line with Washington's imperial interests whereas the lobby's critics, among them myself, question whether support for Israel has, in fact, been in keeping with the US global interests and take the position advanced by Stephen Green in "Taking Sides," that Israel and its supporters in the US define the limits of action that a US president may take in issues relating to Israel and it is left to the president to set policy within those limits. Any honest examination of the history of US-Israel relations shows this to have been the case.

What is not generally known since Chomsky and those who agree with him tend to ignore it, is that as Uri Avnery pointed out more than 20 years ago, every US president beginning with Nixon has attempted to get Israel to withdraw from lands it occupied in 1967 and with the exception of Carter forcing a withdrawal from the Sinai, they have been forced to pull back when Israel called on its US lobby to rally Congress on its behalf. Neither Israel nor its US lobby have ever forgiven Carter for Camp David despite it having removed Egypt as a military threat since, as I am sure you aware, as Ben-Gurion pointed out (in Sharett's diary), Israel requires external enemies in order to maintain a sufficiently high state of vigilance, not to mention diaspora support. These presidents were not seeking an end to Israeli occupation to benefit the Palestinians or the Syrians, but to eliminate an ongoing source of friction with the Arab and Muslim world which brings no strategic benefits to the United States.

Moreover, I have yet to see any argument of substance that demonstrates what strategic benefits the US gains from Israel's occupation and continuing theft of Palestinian land, while it should be obvious that a truncated Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would not only be of no threat to the US, it would most likely and quickly, out of economic necessity, fall right into the US orbit along with Jordan or face economic strangulation as it is experiencing today. Arafat certainly made it clear that he was ready to jump into the lap of any US president and Abbas and his pathetic spokesperson Erekat are even more eager to do so.

It was the late general Matti Peled who pointed out that the explanation that Israel receives support from the US because it is a "strategic asset" was invented to justify the continuing support of Israel by the US after Begin's election thirty years ago and the recirculation in the US press of the accusations made by Einstein, Arendt, and other prominent Jews in 1948 that Begin was a fascist in the Nazi mould.

This is not to say that in the absence of Israel that the US would be any less imperialistic, but its activities in the Middle East would have been markedly different. It would, I am sure, not have launched or have been able to launch the current war against Iraq without the public and hidden orchestration of a score of mostly Jewish neocons and the support of the lobby (of which the neocons are a key part !) that even as Madeline Albright recently admitted, is the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history and which was opposed from the start by the old line US establishment represented by the senior George Bush, by his former Sec of State, James Baker and their National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, none of whom were considered friendly to either Israel or American Jewry, and all of whom have far greater connections to the oil industry than anyone in the current administration, including Dick Cheney. And those divisions in the US ruling class over America's unconditional support for Israel run quite deep, a reality of which the ideologically encapsulated American left is totally ignorant and apparently wishes to remain so. I am not one to quote Lenin, but he is alleged to have said, or written, "Be as real as reality." I have yet to meet a self-styled Leninist today who meets that standard nor a Trotskyist, for that matter.

Now, I can well understand that given the censorship that is exists within the international left on the subject, that you would know very little about the lobby's history and its role in making Israel a country to which American politicians of both political parties routinely pledge their allegiance (more often than they do to the US) and why many of these same politicians who have no problem criticizing the president of the United States, or the head of state of any other country (but one), on the floor of Congress are literally afraid to criticize a prime minister of Israel, any prime minister, knowing that to do so would be a career threatening, if not career ending decision.

Whether or not the lobby represents the majority of American Jews is irrelevant when one considers that that it is made up of the entire organized Jewish establishment which includes more than 60 organizations, 150 community relations councils and federations, thousands of synagogues, and Washington's major think tanks.

If there is a single thread that holds them all together it is their support of continued US political, military and economic assistance to Israel and their universal opposition to the Palestinian right of return. I am not aware of a single organization of any significance among American Jews that does not subscribe to these positions and I have studied the subject quite thoroughly for a number of years.

As a group, moreover, Jews have long dominated the major donor list of the Democratic Party and by giving sums to key players in the Republican Party, assured their compliance with the lobby's wishes long before the Christian Zionists appeared on the scene. To pretend that their being Jewish is less significant than the fact that they are also wealthy capitalists may be comforting but will fool no one, least of all the politicians who are on the receiving end of their largesse.

To get an understanding of how the lobby works and how it shapes US Middle East policy, I recommend that you purchase over the internet the following books: Edward Tivnan's "The Lobby," Stephen Green's "Talking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel," former Congressman Paul Findley's "They Dare to Speak Out," JJ Goldberg's (the editor of the Jewish weekly Forward) "Jewish Power" and most recently, Jim Petras's "The Power of Israel in the US."

Also, you may be interested in three articles of mine: Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html
A War for Israel: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC28WebPages/WarForIsrael.html
Yours,

Jeff

Matan Kaminer’s response:

An article I wrote entitled "The Colonial Drama of Israel and Palestine" has ignited an intense online debate. The thesis of my article was that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle must be seen as a colonial conflict with a strong anomaly, that anomaly being the Jewish-Israeli colonialists, who differ in many respects from other populations of colonialists we know from history.

However, the virtual debate around the article has not been on this topic, but rather on a seemingly tangential subject, the power of the " Israel lobby" in the US. Now, this is a subject on which much debate has already raged. I doubt that I have anything of substance to add to it, as I have not done any empirical research in this rather complicated field. My article certainly did not attempt to address this issue. At the time it seemed to me that my reference to it was of little consequence. Of course, I now realize I was wrong about that.

As I wrote to Jeff Blankfort, I think that no reasonable person would deny the close correspondence between the demands of the "Israel lobby" and US foreign policy in the Middle East in the last thirty years. This correspondence, while meriting further investigation, does not imply any simple causal relationship. Mr. Blankfort's explanation, that the Israel lobby directly controls US foreign policy in this field, is certainly the simplest possible such explanation, but it does raise a host of other questions. Let me outline some of these.

First, what does the "Israel lobby" advocate, and on whose behalf? Blankfort approvingly quotes Edward Said, who characterized the lobby's views "as in some ways more extreme than those of Likud itself" [1], that is, far to the right of the views of the majority of Israelis. That in the terms of Israeli politics the Bush administration has been more "right-wing" than the Olmert government is well-known, at least in Israel; pressure from Washington is widely recognized as the reason for Israel's total rejection of Syrian peace overtures in the past year. How does the "Israel lobby" fit in here? Also, how do we explain the confusion that overtook this lobby as regards Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" project in 2005?

Second, in what sense is this group, which is often termed the "Jewish lobby", at all Jewish? An undeniably important component of it – the Christian fundamentalist movement – is not Jewish at all. Indeed, its ideology has a strong anti-Semitic flavor. On the other hand, the lobby does not answer to any representative body of American Jewry. Opinion polls of American Jews suggest that the views of the majority among them tend to left-wing Zionism; while being far from desirable, this is certainly not reflected in the politics of the lobby.

Third, how else can we characterize the lobby, other than in terms of its Jewishness? Well, like all lobbies, it is rich; that is one characteristic. In addition, as Mr. Blankfort has not failed to mention, it is interested in the furtherance of American imperial designs in the wider Middle East and the entire world. That "Israel" or "the Jews" have a vested interest in this imperial expansion may strike some readers as obvious and in need of no explanation; I certainly do not agree.

There are many other possible questions. I will not go into them here, as I think the ones I have raised are enough to look for additional explanations, other than the most simple one. However, I would like to clarify that I do not subscribe to the opposite, similarly simple explanation, which sees the lobby as nothing but an empty front, an excuse or a scapegoat for US politicians who do not dare own up to their own true affiliations. I do not want to make any outright claims here; but I strongly suspect that the truth must be more complicated than either of these polar opposites. Social life is full of complex relations between groups, real and imagined. One example (of no immediate concern to the issue at hand) of a worthy debate that has not yet been settled is that over the true actors behind the new, globalized imperialism. What is the role of the US? Of Europe? Of the new third world "superpowers"? Of the hypothetical post-national Empire proposed by Hardt and Negri in their influential book of that name?

As I mentioned above, I have no intention of solving any of these problems in this ad-hoc essay. But I would like to emphasize the importance of the perspective through which we address the problem of the Israeli lobby and other similar ones. This perspective is in large part determined by our vision of the future. It is one thing if we can only envision the creation of a Palestinian state which will be immediately subsumed under the imperialist-capitalist heel, as East Timor has been since its independence was gained. If we do so that means the best we can hope for Palestine is a grinding subservience and poverty like that suffered by the rest of the global South. We do not see any necessary connection between the liberation of Palestinians from occupation and apartheid and the liberation of the world from imperialism and capitalism.

This kind of perspective, as far as the Palestine solidarity movement is concerned, disconnects the movement from the burgeoning global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement. Once this happens, it is only logical to begin looking for a rapprochement with those circles inside the imperialist elite which may find it useful to create a Palestinian state. We begin to make strange bedfellows; while we ourselves are not anti-Semitic, it becomes legitimate to hook up with Ivy League paleo-conservatives whose anti-Zionism may have such a tinge.

The alternative perspective, which is my perspective, is an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist stance. In this vision, Palestinian freedom is at once much harder to achieve and much more meaningful: it is a vision of Palestinians returning to their homeland to live together with Jews and others as part of a Middle East free of capitalist exploitation.

For this vision we will find no partners in the ruling elites, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim. No powerful corporations or lobbies will stand by our side - the elite will close ranks against us. Whatever its exact ethnic and religious composition, the "Israel lobby" is an organic part of this elite. If we remember this, and the fact that this lobby does not represent the interests of Israeli citizens or of American Jewry, than the question of the exact relations between the lobby and the rest of the American establishment will become somewhat academic.

For a Palestine solidarity movement that is firmly aligned to anti-imperialism (as it indeed has been throughout its history) the important question is not who our enemies are – this is rather clear – but who our potential allies are. We should look for these not in oil corporation headquarters or on the Beltway but in the fields, factories, tenements and refugee camps of the global South, which is of course also present in the countries of the North, and even in Israel.

Matan Kaminer

[1]Quoted here: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights

2007-02-22T13:52:00.000+01:00

HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Fourth sessionItem 2 of the provisional agenda
implementation of
GENERAL ASSEMBLY resolution 60/251
OF 15 MARCH 2006 ENTITLED “HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL”
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rightsin the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, John Dugard*
Summary
Gaza has again been the focus of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In response to the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit by Palestinian militants on 25 June 2006, and the continued firing of Qassam rockets into Israel, Israel conducted two major military operations within Gaza - “Operation Summer Rains” and “Operation Autumn Clouds”. In the course of these operations, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) made repeated military incursions into Gaza, accompanied by heavy artillery shelling and air-to-surface missile attacks. Missiles, shells and bulldozers destroyed or damaged homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, public buildings, bridges, water pipelines and electricity networks. Agricultural lands were levelled by bulldozers. Beit Hanoun was the subject of particularly heavy attacks, and on 8 November 19 civilians were killed and 55 wounded in an artillery attack. Economic sanctions have had a major impact on Gaza. About 70 per cent of Gaza’s workforce is out of work or without pay and over 80 per cent of the population live below the official poverty line. The siege of Gaza is a form of collective punishment in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949. The indiscriminate use of military power against civilians and civilian targets has resulted in serious war crimes.

The West Bank has also experienced serious human rights violations resulting from frequent military incursions; the construction of the Wall; house demolitions and checkpoints. Over 500 checkpoints and roadblocks obstruct freedom of movement within the OPT. The Wall being built in East Jerusalem is an instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem by reducing the number of Palestinians in the city.

The construction of settlements continues. Today there are some 460,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A study by an Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO) has shown that nearly 40 per cent of the land occupied by settlements in the West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians. It has become abundantly clear that the Wall and checkpoints are principally aimed at advancing the safety, convenience and comfort of settlers.

There are some 9,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. There are serious complaints about the treatment, trial and imprisonment of prisoners.

Since 2000, over 500 persons have been killed in targeted assassinations, including a substantial number of innocent civilians. In December 2006 the Israeli High Court failed to find that such assassinations were unlawful but held that they might only be carried out as a last resort and within the bounds of proportionality.

Israeli law and practice makes it impossible for thousands of Palestinian families to live together. A new practice of refusing visas to foreign residents in the OPT has aggravated this situation.

Discrimination against Palestinians occurs in many fields. Moreover, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid appears to be violated by many practices, particularly those denying freedom of movement to Palestinians.

There is a humanitarian crisis in the OPT resulting from the withholding of funds owed to the Palestinian Authority by the Government of Israel (estimated at about US$ 50 to 60 million per month) and from the economic isolation of the territory by the United States, the European Union (EU) and other States in response to the election of the Hamas Government. The Temporary International Mechanism set up by the EU to provide relief in certain sectors has gone some way towards reducing the crisis, but over 70 per cent of the Palestinian people live below the official poverty line. Health care and education have suffered as a result of a strike of workers in these sectors against the Palestinian Authority and the international community for the non-payment of salaries. In effect Israel and sections of the international community have imposed collective punishment on the Palestinian people.

Persons responsible for committing war crimes by the firing of shells and rockets into civilian areas without any apparent military advantage should be apprehended or prosecuted. This applies to Palestinians who fire Qassam rockets into Israel; and more so to members of the IDF who have committed such crimes on a much greater scale. While individual criminal accountability is important, the responsibility of the State of Israel for the violation of peremptory norms of international law in its actions against the Palestinian people should not be overlooked.

The international community has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights - colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation. Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT. At the same time elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law. What are the legal consequences of a regime of prolonged occupation with features of colonialism and apartheid for the occupied people, the occupying Power and third States? It is suggested that this question might appropriately be put to the International Court of Justice for a further advisory opinion.

The Occupied Palestinian Territory is the only instance of a developing country that is denied the right of self-determination and oppressed by a Western-affiliated State. The apparent failure of Western States to take steps to bring such a situation to an end places the future of the international protection of human rights in jeopardy as developing nations begin to question the commitment of Western States to human rights.

I. INTRODUCTION
1. I visited the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and Israel from 1 to 8 December 2006 in order to collect information and opinions for the writing of this report. In the course of my mission I visited Jerusalem, Gaza, Jericho, the Jordan Valley, Jenin and Ramallah. While driving through the West Bank I took the opportunity to visit the villages of Bil’in and Bir Nabala, which have been seriously affected by the construction of the Wall; and Jiftlik and Al Aqaba, villages that illustrate the problems experienced in the Jordan Valley. Journeying through the West Bank inevitably exposes one to some of the worst features of life in the area: the Wall, Palestinian roads, checkpoints (both fixed and flying) and settlements. In Gaza, I visited Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, Jabalia, Gaza City and Deir el Balah.

2. During my visit I met with a wide range of persons - Palestinians, Israelis, foreign diplomats and United Nations officials. In Jerusalem, I attended two conferences: one on torture organized by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and Amnesty International; and the other on terrorism and human rights organized by the Minerva Center for Human Rights.

3. The Government of Israel does not recognize my mandate. Consequently, as in the past, I had no contact with government officials. This is unfortunate as it denies access to a valuable source of information and opinion. On the other hand, the Government of Israel facilitates my visit by providing me with a letter explaining the purpose of my visit to officials and requesting that they help to facilitate my movements. This has made crossing checkpoints considerably easier. I am grateful to the Government of Israel for its cooperation.

4. In the present report the term “Wall” is used instead of “barrier” or “fence”. This term was carefully and deliberately used by the International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of 9 July 2004.

5. At the outset it is necessary to stress the scope and limitations of my mandate. I am required to report on violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by Israel in the OPT. This means that it is outside my mandate to report on violations of the human rights of Israelis by Palestinians, on the violation of human rights by the Palestinian Authority, or on human rights violations in the OPT not caused by Israel. This does not mean that I am unconcerned about such human rights violations. In my report I shall refer to the fact that the firing of Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel violates international humanitarian law and is accordingly to be condemned. I shall also make reference to the strike in the West Bank, which has seriously damaged education and health, and to the increase of crime in the OPT, in the context of the humanitarian crisis in the OPT occasioned by the withholding of funds from the Palestinian Authority by Israel. I shall not consider the violation of human rights caused by Palestinian suicide bombers. Nor shall I consider the violation of human rights caused by the political conflict between Fatah and Hamas in the OPT. Such matters are of deep concern to me but my mandate precludes me from examining them.

II. GAZA
6. In August 2005, Israel withdrew its settlers and armed forces from Gaza. Statements by the Government of Israel that the withdrawal ended the occupation of Gaza are grossly inaccurate. Even before the commencement of “Operation Summer Rains”, following the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit, Gaza remained under the effective control of Israel. This control was manifested in a number of ways. Israel retained control of Gaza’s air space, sea space and external borders, and the border crossings of Rafah (for persons) and Karni (for goods) were ultimately under Israeli control and remained closed for lengthy periods. In effect, following Israel’s withdrawal, Gaza became a sealed off, imprisoned and occupied territory.

7. On 25 June 2006 a group of Palestinian militants attacked a military base near the Israeli Egyptian border. In retreating, they took Corporal Gilad Shalit with them as a captive. They demanded the release of the women and children in Israeli jails in return for his release. This act, together with the continued Qassam rocket fire into Israel, unleashed a savage response from the Government of Israel that went by the name of “Operation Summer Rains”. This was followed by another military assault in November with the name of “Operation Autumn Clouds”. These operations, which took the form of repeated military incursions into Gaza, accompanied by heavy shelling, rendered the question whether Gaza remains an occupied territory of academic interest only. Israel’s assault on, and siege of Gaza, in the course of Operations “Summer Rains” and “Autumn Clouds” is described in the following paragraphs.

A. Military action
8. Between 25 June 2006 and the truce that came into force at the end of November 2006, over 400 Palestinians were killed and some 1,500 injured. More than half of those killed and wounded were civilians. Of those killed some 90 were children; and over 300 children were injured. During the same period 3 Israeli soldiers were killed and 18 wounded, and 2 Israeli civilians were killed and some 30 injured in Sderot and its precincts by Qassam rockets fired by Palestinians from Gaza.

9. In the course of Operations “Summer Rains” and “Autumn Clouds” the IDF carried out 364 military incursions into different parts of Gaza, accompanied by persistent artillery shelling and air-to-surface missile attacks. Missiles, shells and bulldozers destroyed, or caused serious damage to, homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, public buildings, bridges, water pipelines and sewage networks. On 27 June 2006, the Israeli Air Force destroyed all six transformers of the only domestic power plant in the Gaza Strip, which supplied 43 per cent of Gaza’s daily electricity. This resulted in depriving half of the population of Gaza of electricity for several months. (At the time of writing, this power plant had been largely repaired, thanks to generous funding from the Governments of Egypt and Sweden, and is now able to provide 85 per cent of the electricity previously supplied.) Citrus groves and agricultural lands were levelled by bulldozers, and in the first phase of “Operation Summer Rains” F-16s flew low over Gaza, breaking the sound barrier and causing widespread terror among the population. Thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes as a result of Israel’s military action. Israel justified its assault on Gaza on three grounds: the search for Corporal Shalit, the eradication of militant groups and their arms, and, above all, the stopping of Qassam rockets that have been regularly and repeatedly fired from Northern Gaza into civilian areas in Southern Israel.

10. Beit Hanoun in Northern Gaza, with a population of 40,000, was subjected to particularly vicious military action in November in the course of “Operation Autumn Clouds”. During a six‑day incursion 82 Palestinians, at least half of whom were civilians (including 21 children), were killed by the IDF. More than 260 people, including 60 children, were injured and hundreds of males between the ages of 16 and 40 were arrested. Forty thousand residents were confined to their homes as a result of a curfew as Israeli tanks and bulldozers rampaged through their town, destroying 279 homes, an 850-year-old mosque, public buildings, electricity networks, schools and hospitals, levelling orchards and digging up roads, water mains and sewage networks. In April 2006, the IDF narrowed the “safety zone” for artillery shelling, allowing targeting much closer to homes and populated areas. This, together with heavy artillery fire, contributed substantially to the increase in the loss of life and damage to property. There was also evidence of the use of a new and unusual weapon in Beit Hanoun, and elsewhere in Gaza, which has resulted in an increase in amputations. This weapon is believed to be the Dense Inert Metal Explosive missile (DIME).

11. Israel’s assault on Beit Hanoun on 8 November 2006 culminated in the shelling of a home which resulted in the killing of 19 persons and wounding of 55 persons. The house, situated in a densely populated neighbourhood, was the home of the Al-Athamnah family, which lost 16 members on that fateful day. Of the 19 killed, all civilians, 7 were women and 8 children. I visited the destroyed home on 3 December and spoke to Mrs. Sa’ad Alla Moh’Al Athamnah, three of whose sons were killed and whose husband and a son were seriously wounded. Israel’s explanation that a “technical failure” in the radar system of the artillery was to blame is questionable on a number of grounds. First, 12 to 15 high explosive artillery shells were fired over a time span of 30 minutes. Secondly, the home is located close to open fields that Israel probably suspected were used to launch Qassam rockets. Thirdly, the home had been occupied for the previous three nights by IDF soldiers who made a full inventory of the occupants of the building. Unfortunately, Israel has refused to accept any international investigation into this matter. It refused to allow a Human Rights Council mandated mission which was to have been led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to enter Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory and at the time of writing, has yet to respond to a resolution of the General Assembly of 17 November, adopted by 156 votes to 7, with 6 abstentions, which required the Secretary-General to send a fact-finding mission to the area. On 11 November the United States vetoed a Security Council draft resolution calling for the establishment of a fact-finding mission into the events of 8 November in Beit Hanoun. The failure of Israel to allow an international investigation into the killing of 19 persons in Beit Hanoun, or to undertake an impartial investigation of its own, is regrettable as it seems clear that the indiscriminate firing of shells into a civilian neighbourhood with no apparent military objective constituted a war crime, for which both the commanding officer and those who launched the 30-minute artillery attack should be held criminally responsible. The failure to hold anyone accountable for this atrocity illustrates the culture of impunity that prevails in the IDF.

12. Israel has justified its attack on Beit Hanoun as a defensive operation aimed at preventing the launching of Qassam rockets into Israel. It is true that over a thousand home-made rockets have been fired into civilian areas in Israel without any military target and that 2 Israelis have been killed and over 30 injured. Such actions cannot be condoned and clearly constitute a war crime. Nevertheless, Israel’s response has been grossly disproportionate and indiscriminate and resulted in the commission of multiple war crimes.

13. In recent months Israel has resorted to a policy of terrorism by telephone. Militants are telephoned by Israeli intelligence agents and warned that their home is to be blown up within an hour. This threat is sometimes carried out and sometimes not. It appears that over 100 homes have been destroyed following such threats. In November, Palestinians rallied to the defence of persons threatened in this way by gathering on the roof of the house or in the street outside to prevent the bombing of the house. It is difficult to categorize such conduct as a war crime, as originally suggested by Human Rights Watch in a statement of 22 November (subsequently largely withdrawn in a statement of 16 December). Voluntary, collective action of this kind can at most be categorized as an act of civil disobedience against the occupying Power.

B. The humanitarian crisis
14. Gaza has become a besieged and imprisoned territory as a result of the economic sanctions imposed on the Occupied Palestinian Territory by Israel and the West, following Hamas’ success in the January 2006 elections, and the military assault on the territory, following the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit. External borders have been mainly closed and only opened to allow a minimum of imports and exports and foreign travel. This has produced a humanitarian crisis, one carefully managed by Israel, which punishes the people of Gaza without ringing alarm bells in the West. It is a controlled strangulation that apparently falls within the generous limits of international toleration.

15. There are six crossings into Gaza, all of which are controlled by Israel. Erez, which is used by diplomats, United Nations officials, international workers, approved journalists and a restricted number of patients travelling to Israeli hospitals; Nahal Oz, which is designed for fuel imports and has operated well below its capacity; Sofa, which is used for the import of construction material and some humanitarian supplies from United Nations agencies and has been open for only 60 per cent of the scheduled days; Kerem Shalom, which has been largely closed since 25 June, but has opened to allow the import of cables and appliances from Egypt to repair the Gaza power plant destroyed on 27 June 2006, and some humanitarian assistance.

16. Rafah, the crossing point for Gazans to Egypt, and Karni, the commercial crossing for the import and export of goods, are the principal crossing points. They are the subject of an Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA), entered into between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on 15 November 2005, which provides for Gazans to travel freely to Egypt through Rafah; and for a substantial increase in the number of export trucks through Karni. Since 25 June 2006, the Rafah crossing has been open for only 14 per cent of the scheduled opening days as a result of Israel’s refusal to allow members of the European Border Assistance Mission, responsible for operating Rafah, to cross to Rafah through Kerem Shalom. The closure of Rafah has resulted in great hardships. The sick and wounded have not been able to travel freely to Egypt; those wishing to leave Gaza have had to wait patiently, sometimes for weeks, until Rafah opens; and Gazans returning home have often had to wait for weeks in Egypt until the Rafah crossing opened. The closure of Rafah has been justified as a reprisal for the capture of Corporal Shalit. The situation at Karni is no better. In terms of the AMA truckloads crossing Karni were to increase to 400 per day by the end of 2006. Instead, the crossing has been closed since April for 54 per cent of the scheduled operating days (for 71 per cent of such days since 25 June), and only 12 truckloads of goods on average have been exported. This has had disastrous consequences for the economy of Gaza. The agricultural produce from the former settlements was particularly affected as it perished while waiting to be exported at Karni. In the end most of this produce was donated or destroyed in Gaza. Imports have also suffered seriously and many basic foodstuffs have not reached local markets. On 22 December 2006 the Government of Israel promised to allow 400 trucks to pass through Karni per day. This promise has still to be implemented.

17. The siege has had a major impact on employment. Construction workers are out of work as a result of the restriction on the import of construction materials; farmers (particularly those employed in the greenhouses of the former Israeli settlements) are unemployed as a result of the ban on exports of Palestinian produce; fishermen are out of work as a result of the ban on fishing along most of the Gaza coast; many shopkeepers have had to close their shops as a result of the lack of purchase power of Gazans; small factories employing some 25,000 workers have had to close; and the public service, while employed in theory is largely unpaid as a result of Israel’s withholding of funds due to the Palestinian Authority and the refusal of the EU and the United States to transfer donations to the Palestinian Authority. Consequently about 70 per cent of Gaza’s potential workforce is out of work or without pay. The signs of unemployment are distinctly visible. Construction works are abandoned; greenhouses that were flourishing with produce when I visited them in 2005 are now empty of produce; and fishermen that I visited at Deir El Balah sit idly on the shore, prohibited from setting out to sea.

18. Poverty is rife. Over 80 per cent of the population live below the official poverty line. 1.1 million Gazans of a population of 1.4 million receive food assistance from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East and the World Food Programme. Recipients of food aid receive flour, rice, sugar, sunflower oil, powdered milk and lentils. Few can afford meat, fish - virtually unobtainable anyway as a result of the ban on fishing - vegetables and fruit. Shopkeepers generously give credit but their capacity to do so is being overstretched. (I visited a shopkeeper in Jabaliya who had granted US$ 20,000 credit to customers.) Moreover some basic foodstuffs are in short supply, and prices are inflated due to the closure of Karni crossing.

19. Although the Gaza power plant has now been restored to 85 per cent of its former capacity (thanks to Egypt and Sweden, and not to Israel which is responsible for supplying electricity to an occupied people), it must not be forgotten that for several months following the bombing of this power plant on 27 June 2006, the people of Gaza suffered in all aspects of their life from power stoppages: lighting, refrigerators, elevators, water supply and sewage were all affected; hospitals were unable to operate properly; and so on. The bombing of the power plant has rightly been described as a war crime for which Israel and members of the IDF must accept responsibility.[1]

20. Living conditions in Gaza are bleak in a society dominated by poverty, unemployment and military assault. Although hospitals have not suffered from strike action, as they have done in the West Bank, health care has suffered from military incursions and the closure of the crossings. For months hospitals were required to use generators for operation theatres; referrals abroad of patients have been hampered by the closing of Rafah; essential drugs are in short supply; clinics have been unable to operate because of military action; and members of the Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance services have been killed in military operations. Chronic illnesses have increased. Anaemia has also increased as a result of the nutritional situation. Mental health is a serious problem, particularly among children, as a result of the trauma inflicted by military incursions and the death or injury of friends and family. Education has been affected by military assaults: schools have been closed and school buildings destroyed. Domestic violence and ordinary crime are on the increase. In 2006 nearly 200 Palestinians were killed and 1,000 injured in internal disputes and factional violence. Morale is low. The very fabric of Gazan society is threatened by the siege.

C. Legal assessment
21. Israel has violated a number of rights proclaimed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly the right to life (art. 6), freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment (art. 7), freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention (art. 9), freedom of movement (art. 12) and the right of children to protection (art. 24). It has also violated rights contained in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, notably “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing”, freedom from hunger, and the right to food (art. 11) and the right to health (art. 12).

22. Israel has, in addition, violated the most fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, which constitute war crimes in terms of article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and article 85 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflict (Protocol I). These include direct attacks against civilians and civilian objects and attacks which fail to distinguish between military targets and civilians and civilian objects (arts. 48, 51 (4) and 52 (1) of Protocol I); the excessive use of force arising from disproportionate attacks on civilians and civilian objects (arts. 51 (4) and 51 (5) of Protocol I); the spreading of terror among the civilian population (art. 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and art. 51 (2) of Protocol I) and the destruction of property not justified by military necessity (art. 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention). Above all, the Government of Israel has violated the prohibition on collective punishment of an occupied people contained in article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The indiscriminate and excessive use of force against civilians and civilian objects, the destruction of electricity and water supplies, the bombardment of public buildings, the restrictions on freedom of movement and the consequences that these actions have had upon public health, food, family life and the psychological well-being of the Palestinian people constitute a gross form of collective punishment. The capture of Corporal Shalit and the continuing firing of Qassam rockets into Israel cannot be condoned. On the other hand, they cannot justify the drastic punishment of a whole people in the way that Israel has done.

III. THE WEST BANK AND EAST JERUSALEM
23. Many of Israel’s policies and practices in the West Bank seriously impinge upon the human rights of Palestinians. The Wall presently under construction in Palestinian territory, checkpoints and roadblocks, settlements, an arbitrary permit system, the pervasive practice of house demolitions, targeted assassinations, and arrests and imprisonment violate a wide range of civil and political rights. The sharp rise in military incursions into the West Bank has further aggravated the situation. Economic and social rights have also suffered from the humanitarian crisis resulting from the occupation. It is estimated that 56 per cent of the population of the West Bank live below the official poverty line and are dependent on food aid.

A. The Wall
24. The Wall that Israel is presently building largely in Palestinian territory is clearly illegal. The International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion of 9 July 2004, asserted that it is contrary to international law and that Israel is under obligation to discontinue construction of the Wall and to dismantle those sections that have already been built forthwith. The Israeli High Court of Justice, in a judgement delivered in September 2005 in Mara’abe v. the Prime Minister of Israel case (HCJ 7957/04), dismissed the advisory opinion, arguing that the International Court of Justice had failed to have regard to the security considerations that had prompted the construction of the Wall. The basis of this judgement has now been undermined by the admission of the Government that the Wall is designed to serve a political purpose and not an exclusively security purpose. The admission that the Wall has in part been built to include West Bank settlements within the Wall and under Israel’s direct protection, has led the High Court to rebuke the Government for misleading it in the Mara’abe hearing and other challenges to the legality of the Wall.[2] That the purpose of the Wall is to acquire land surrounding West Bank settlements and to include settlements within Israel can no longer be seriously challenged. The fact that 76 per cent of the West Bank settler population is enclosed within the Wall bears this out.

25. The Wall is planned to extend for 703 km. When it is finished, an estimated 60,500 West Bank Palestinians living in 42 villages and towns will reside in the closed zone between the Wall and the Green Line. More than 500,000 Palestinians living within 1 km of the Wall live on the eastern side but need to cross it to get to their farms and jobs and to maintain family connections. Eighty per cent of the Wall is built within the Palestinian territory itself and in order to incorporate the Ariel settlement block, it extends some 22 km into the West Bank. The closed zone includes many of the West Bank’s most valuable water resources.

26. The Wall has serious humanitarian consequences for Palestinians living within the closed zone, i.e. the area between the Green Line and the Wall. They are cut off from places of employment, schools, universities and specialized medical care, and community life is seriously fragmented. Moreover they do not have 24-hour access to emergency health services. Palestinians who live on the eastern side of the Wall but whose land lies in the closed zone face serious economic hardship as a result of the fact that they are not able to reach their land to harvest crops or to graze their animals without permits. Permits are not easily granted. A host of obstacles are placed in the way of obtaining a permit. Bureaucratic procedures for obtaining permits are humiliating and obstructive. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has estimated that 60 per cent of the farming families with land to the west of the Wall could no longer access their land.[3] To aggravate matters the opening and closing of the gates leading to the closed zone are regulated in a highly arbitrary manner. In November 2006, OCHA carried out a survey in 57 communities located close to the Wall, which showed that only 26 of the 61 gates in the Wall were open to Palestinians for use all the year round and that these gates were only open for 64 per cent of the officially stated time.[4] Hardships experienced by Palestinians living within the closed zone and in the precincts of the Wall have already resulted in the displacement of some 15,000 persons, but it is feared that more will leave this area as life is made intolerable for them by the IDF and settlers.

B. Jerusalem and the Wall
27. The 75 km Wall being built in East Jerusalem is an instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem by reducing the number of Palestinians in the city. The Wall is being built through Palestinian neighbourhoods, separating Palestinians from Palestinians, in a manner that cannot conceivably be justified on security grounds. It does, however, have serious implications for the human rights of some 230,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem.

28. Palestinians living on the west side of the Wall will be allowed to retain their Jerusalem identity documents, which entitle them to certain benefits, particularly in respect of social security, but they will find it increasingly difficult to travel to cities in the West Bank such as Ramallah and Bethlehem, where many of them are employed. Moreover, if they elect to reside in the West Bank in order to be nearer to their places of work, they risk losing their Jerusalem identity documents and the right to live in Jerusalem because under Israel’s so-called centre of life policy, Palestinians must prove that they currently live in the city of East Jerusalem to maintain their Jerusalem residency rights. Those relegated to the West Bank as a result of the construction of the Wall, who number about a quarter of the city’s Palestinian population, will lose their Jerusalem identity documents and the attendant benefits. They will also require a permit to enter Jerusalem, and will be allowed to enter the city by only 4 of the 12 crossings in the Wall, which will considerably increase their commuting time and impede their access to schools, universities, hospitals, religious sites and places of employment.

29. The absurdity of the Wall in Jerusalem is illustrated by the case of ar-Ram. Some 60,000 people live in the suburb of ar-Ram just outside the municipal boundary of Jerusalem. About half of the residents are Jerusalemites who left Jerusalem because of the restrictions placed on Palestinians’ building houses in the city. They are completely dependent on Jerusalem for work, education and hospitals. Yet now they are surrounded by the Wall and cut off from Jerusalem. To get to work, school or hospital they must travel a circuitous route of several kilometres and pass through the international terminal-like checkpoint at Qalandiya, and they may only do this if they have the correct permit. A journey that previously took them minutes is now extended into hours.

30. The construction of the Wall in Jerusalem makes a mockery of Israel’s commitment to religious freedom. Because of the wall, Palestinian Muslims and Christians are prevented from praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre respectively - if they are classified as West Bankers. The Wall also bars access by East Jerusalemite Christian Palestinians to the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem.

C. The Mini-Wall of South Hebron
31. In 2005, the Government of Israel abandoned its plan to build the Wall in Palestinian territory in the South Hebron district as a result of a court ruling and instead agreed to build the Wall along the Green Line. However, it then built a secondary Wall or mini-Wall along the original route which severely impacted the lives of thousands of Palestinians who lived south of the mini-Wall or whose lands were situated south of the mini-Wall. On 14 December 2006, the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that this Wall was to be dismantled as it interfered disproportionately with the freedom of movement of Palestinian residents and their livestock.

D. Settlements: the new colonialism
32. Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal. They violate article 49, paragraph 6, of the Fourth Geneva Convention and their illegality has been confirmed by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion on the Wall. Despite the illegality of settlements and the unanimous condemnation of settlements by the international community, the Government of Israel persists in allowing settlements to grow. Sometimes settlement expansion occurs openly and with the full approval of the Government. As recently as December 2006, the Israeli Government officially approved the building of a new settlement - Maskiot - in the northern Jordan Valley. More frequently, expansion takes place stealthily under the guise of “natural growth”, which has resulted in Israeli settlements growing at an average rate of 5.5 per cent compared with the 1.7 per cent average growth rate in Israeli cities. Sometimes settlements expand unlawfully in terms of Israeli law, but no attempt is made to enforce the law. Outposts are frequently established and threats to remove them are not carried out. As a result of expansion, the settler population in the West Bank numbers some 260,000 persons and that of East Jerusalem nearly 200,000. As indicated above, the Wall is presently being built in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem to ensure that most settlements will be enclosed within the Wall. Moreover, the three major settlement blocks of Gush Etzion, Ma’aleh Adumim and Ariel will effectively divide Palestinian territory into cantons, thereby destroying the territorial integrity of Palestine.

33. In October 2006, the Israeli NGO, Peace Now, published a study[5] which showed, on the basis of government maps and figures, that nearly 40 per cent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians. The data shows, for example, that 86 per cent of the largest settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim is on Palestinian private property; that 35 per cent of Ariel is on private property; and that more than 3,400 buildings in settlements are constructed on land privately owned by Palestinians. The Israeli Government maintains that it respects Palestinian property in the West Bank and that it only, on a temporary basis, takes land there legally for security reasons. Moreover, article 46 of the Hague Regulations of 1907, which Israel acknowledges as binding upon it, provides that “private property … must be respected” and “cannot be confiscated”. Peace Now’s disclosure is an embarrassment to the Government of Israel but it is unlikely to respond positively as it has already repeatedly rejected the international community’s complaint that settlements are contrary to article 49, paragraph 6, of the Fourth Geneva Convention. This new revelation does, however, serve to further emphasize the illegality of Israel’s colonial empire - the settlements - in the West Bank.

34. The history of colonialism shows that there are “good” settlers and “bad” settlers. So it is with Israel’s colonists. Many are ordinary Israelis who have been lured to the settlements by tax incentives and a better quality of life. On the other hand, there is a fanatic minority determined to assert its superiority over the Palestinian population by violent means. Throughout the West Bank there is evidence of settler violence, which often takes the form of destroying Palestinian olive groves or obstructing the olive harvest. Undoubtedly the most aggravated settler behaviour occurs in Hebron, where Palestinian schoolchildren are assaulted and humiliated on their way to schools, shopkeepers are beaten and residents live in fear of settler terror. Despite rulings of the High Court of Justice[6] that it is the duty of the IDF to protect Palestinian farmers from settlers, there is still evidence that the IDF turns a blind eye to settler violence and, on occasion, collaborates with the settlers in harassing and humiliating Palestinians.[7] Indeed I have witnessed such conduct on the part of the IDF myself in Hebron.

E. The Jordan Valley
35. Israel has abandoned earlier plans to build the Wall along the spine of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and to formally appropriate the Jordan Valley. It has nevertheless asserted its control over this region, which constitutes 25 per cent of the West Bank, in much the same way as it has done over the closed zone between the Wall and the Green Line on Palestine’s western border. That Israel intends to remain permanently in the Jordan Valley is clear from government statements and is further manifested, first, by restrictions imposed on Palestinians and, second, by the exercise of Israeli control and the increase in the number of settlements in the Jordan Valley.

36. Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley must possess identity cards with a Jordan Valley address, and only those persons may travel within the Jordan Valley without Israeli permits. Other Palestinians, including non-resident landowners and workers, must obtain permits to enter the Jordan Valley and in practice such permits are not valid for overnight stays, necessitating daily commuting and delays at checkpoints connecting the Jordan Valley with the rest of theWest Bank. This has led to the isolation of the Jordan Valley. Travel restrictions make it difficult for farmers in the Jordan Valley to access markets in the West Bank as their produce is frequently held up at checkpoints, notably at Al Hamra, where it perishes in the process.

37. Housing in the Jordan Valley is a serious problem as most of the Valley is designated as Area C, which means that the Israeli authorities must give permission for the construction of houses and assert the power to demolish structures built without permission - a permission which is rarely forthcoming. On this mission I visited two villages in the Jordan Valley where structures were threatened with demolition by the IDF. The first was Jiftlik, where I visited a secondary school functioning in harsh conditions - with teachers mainly unpaid and no glass in the windows - where I was informed that the school had been served with a demolition order. The second was Al-Aqaba, a village located on the slope between the Jordan Valley and the northern West Bank mountain range. The village, which has no running water and electricity is supplied by generators, comprises 35 houses of which 16, including a mosque, clinic and kindergarten school, are threatened with demolition. The cheerful kindergarten, which I visited, has 85 children drawn from neighbouring communities. Since 1967, Al-Aqaba’s population has decreased by 85 per cent, from 2,000 in 1967 to 300 persons today. What cynical exercise in social engineering could motivate the demolition of nearly half the structures in the village?

F. Freedom of movement? checkpoints
38. The number of checkpoints, including roadblocks, earth mounds and trenches, increased from 376 in August 2005 to 540 in December 2006. These checkpoints divide the West Bank into four distinct areas: the north (Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem), the centre (Ramallah), the south (Hebron) and East Jerusalem. Within these areas further enclaves have been created by a system of checkpoints and roadblocks. Moreover highways for the use of Israelis only further fragment the Occupied Palestinian Territory into 10 small cantons or Bantustans. Cities are cut off from each other as a permit is required to travel from one area to another and permits are difficult to obtain. On 22 December 2006, the Government of Israel announced that it would dismantle 27 checkpoints to make life easier for Palestinians.

39. The rules governing the granting of permits and passage through the checkpoints constantly change. Generally men between the ages of 18 and 35 are not allowed to leave the northern West Bank but there is no clear rule on this subject. Military orders on checkpoints are not published and it is left to Palestinians to find out by trial and error whether they will be allowed to pass through a checkpoint on a particular day. To further complicate matters, there is a secret list with some 180,000 names of security risks who may not pass through a checkpoint, but no notice is served on such a person on this list until he arrives at a checkpoint. The conduct of soldiers at the checkpoints is often rough. A person may be refused passage through a checkpoint for arguing with a soldier or explaining his documents. The principle of legality, requiring a law to be clear, consistent and published in advance, is completely unknown and disregarded at the checkpoints. Instead an arbitrary and capricious regime prevails.

40. Checkpoints and the poor quality of secondary roads Palestinians are obliged to use, in order to leave the main roads free for settler use, result in journeys that previously took 10 to 20 minutes taking 2 to 3 hours. Israel justifies these measures, together with the behaviour of its soldiers at checkpoints, on security grounds and claims that they have succeeded in thwarting the passage of numerous would-be suicide bombers. There is, however, another security perspective. Palestinians perceive these measures to be designed, first, to serve the convenience of settlers and to facilitate their travel through the West Bank without having to make contact with Palestinians; and, secondly, to humiliate Palestinians by treating them as inferior human beings. The result is a suppressed anger that in the long term poses a greater threat to the security of Israel. In apartheid South Africa, a similar system designed to restrict the free movement of blacks - the notorious “pass laws” - created more anger and hostility to the apartheid regime than any other measure. Israel would do well to learn from this experience.

41. On 19 November the IDF Commander in the West Bank issued an order that prohibits Palestinians from travelling with Israelis in Israeli vehicles in the West Bank without a permit. Israeli human rights NGOs who travel with Palestinians in the West Bank see this as an attempt to curb their activities and have announced that they will refuse to apply for permits.

G. Military incursions
42. Since the election of the Hamas Government in January 2006, the IDF has intensified its military incursions into the West Bank. In November 2006 alone there were 656 IDF raids into the West Bank. These raids have involved the killing of some 150 Palestinians; and search and arrest action resulting in damage to property, injuries (an average of 179 per month) and arrests (an average of 500 per month). Most of these IDF operations have taken place in the northern West Bank, particularly Nablus and Jenin.

IV. PRISONERS
43. There are some 9,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails charged with or convicted of security offences, which range from violent acts against the Israeli Defense Forces to anti-Israeli political activities. This figure includes some 400 children and over 100 women. In addition there are over 700 administrative detainees, i.e. persons held without charge or trial, simply on the ground that the occupying Power regards them as security risks.

44. There are serious complaints about the treatment, trial and imprisonment of prisoners. Pretrial detention is accompanied by prolonged isolation and lengthy interrogation in painful positions. Threats, deception and sleep deprivation are essential features of this process.[8] Due process of law is undermined by trial before military courts and the obstructions placed in the way of defence counsel. Prison conditions are poor and family visits are rare. Israel holds political prisoners in jails in Israel rather than in the OPT, in violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and then refuses the families of many of the prisoners the right to visit them.[9]

45. Since 1967 over 650,000 Palestinians have been held in Israeli prisons. Hardly a family in Palestine has therefore been untouched by the Israeli prison system. Inevitably most prisoners emerge from prison embittered against the occupying Power.

V. TARGETED ASSASSINATIONS
46. Israel has a proud record on the death penalty. Since the creation of the State only two persons have been executed following a proper trial - the last being Adolf Eichmann. However, Israel’s reputation as an abolitionist society has been tarnished by the practice of extrajudicial assassinations or targeted killings, which has been widely employed by the Israeli Defense Forces since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000. According to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, approximately 500 Palestinians have been killed by targeted assassinations, including 168 innocent civilians.

47. In December 2006, the Israeli High Court of Justice at last ruled on the lawfulness of targeted assassinations in The Public Committee against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel case (HCJ 769/02). Clearly the court found itself in an awkward position as it wished to uphold justice without harming the security of the State. It failed to hold that targeted killings were unlawful. Instead, it held that under customary international law it could not be said “that this policy is always prohibited, just as it cannot be said that it is permitted in all circumstances according to the discretion of the military commander” (per President Beinisch). It rejected the argument that “terrorists” could be classified as unlawful combatants (para. 28), but held that the killing of a “terrorist” was permissible where a person took a “direct part” in hostile activity, with “direct part” defined broadly to include not only those who perpetrate terror attacks, but also those who transport the perpetrators, supervise them, collect intelligence or supply certain services (paras. 34-35). Having approved the targeted killing of “terrorists” in certain circumstances, the Court then set limits for such action: It should not be resorted to when a person could be arrested, without threatening the lives of soldiers (para. 40) or when the act would be disproportionate in that the harm done to civilians would outweigh the security advantage (paras. 44-46, 60). Measured by these standards, it is clear that many targeted assassinations would be adjudged to be unlawful. Whether the Court’s decision will restrain the IDF remains to be seen. It retains a wide discretion and there is a real fear that it will continue to act as in the past. If it does, Israel will continue to be seen as an “abolitionist society” that employs the death penalty on a wide scale through the back door of “targeted assassinations”.

VI. FAMILY SEPARATION
48. Israeli law and practice shows little respect for family life. Israeli Palestinians married to Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territory cannot live together in Israel. Palestinians from the OPT cannot live together with foreign spouses:[10] Since 2000, a total of 120,000 requests for family unification have not been considered. Jerusalemites with Jerusalem identity cards cannot live together with their spouses who hold West Bank identity cards. The construction of the Wall in Jerusalem has separated 21 per cent of Palestinian households in East Jerusalem in this way.[11] Now there is a new problem: Israel has started to refuse the renewal of visas for Palestinians with foreign passports. Israel does not permit non-Jewish foreigners to receive residency rights in the OPT, but previously it allowed foreign passport holders, many of whom were born in Palestine, to renew their tourist visas every three months. The discontinuation of this policy since the election of the Hamas Government has resulted in persons who have lived in the OPT for years being denied visas and refused re-entry to the OPT. Consequently families are separated by the exclusion from the OPT of family members with foreign passports. Businessmen, students, lecturers, health-care and humanitarian workers have also been affected. Many “illegal” spouses continue to live in the OPT, but they do so in constant fear of arrest and expulsion. Why Israel has chosen to follow this vindictive policy is a matter of speculation. Is it for reasons of security? Or demography? A punishment for the election of Hamas? Or is it a wish to remove articulate critics of Israel?

VII. RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND APARTHEID
49. Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1966 defines “racial discrimination” as meaning “any distinction, exclusion, restriction preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life”. This convention only requires States to prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination. Another convention, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973, goes further and criminalizes practices of racial segregation and discrimination that, inter alia, involve the infliction on members of a racial group of serious bodily or mental harm, inhuman or degrading treatment, arbitrary arrest or the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of a racial group by denying to such a group basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to freedom of movement, when such acts are committed “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.

50. Israel vehemently denies the application of these Conventions to its laws and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Despite this denial, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of Israel’s laws and practices violate the 1966 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Israelis are entitled to enter the closed zone between the Wall and the Green Line without permits while Palestinians require permits to enter the closed zone; house demolitions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are carried out in a manner that discriminates against Palestinians; throughout the West Bank, and particularly in Hebron, settlers are given preferential treatment over Palestinians in respect of movement (major roads are reserved exclusively for settlers), building rights and army protection; and the laws governing family reunification (para. 48 above) unashamedly discriminate against Palestinians. It is less certain that the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is violated. The IDF inflicts serious bodily and mental harm on Palestinians, both in Gaza (paras. 8-13 above) and the West Bank (para. 42 above); over 700 Palestinians are held without trial (para. 43 above); prisoners are subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment (para. 44 above); and Palestinians throughout the OPT are denied freedom of movement (paras. 38-41 above). Can it seriously be denied that the purpose of such action is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians) and systematically oppressing them? Israel denies that this is its intention or purpose. But such an intention or purpose may be inferred from the actions described in this report.

VIII. THE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS AND THE WITHHOLDINGOF FUNDS FROM THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY
51. There is a humanitarian crisis in both the West Bank and Gaza. In Gaza, over 80 per cent of the population live below the official poverty line of US$ 2.10 per day while in the West Bank 56 per cent of households fall below the poverty line. This means that two thirds of all Palestinian households fall below the income poverty line, are dependent on food aid and unable to provide for their basic needs. Health care and education in the West Bank are badly affected by a strike that continued for several months - a strike against the non-payment of salaries by the Palestinian Authority (PA) since March, but also a protest against the international community for withholding funding from the PA. In such a situation it is not surprising that domestic violence and crime is on the increase.

52. In large measure the humanitarian crisis is the result of the termination of funding of the Palestinian Authority since Hamas was elected to office. The Government of Israel is withholding from the Palestinian Authority VAT monies amounting to US$ 50 to 60 million per month which it collects on behalf of the Authority on goods imported into the OPT. In law Israel has no right to refuse to transfer this money, which belongs to the Palestinian Authority under the 1994 Protocol on Economic Relations between the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (Paris Protocol). Predictably, Israel justifies its action on security grounds, but the real reason seems to be a determination to effect a regime change. In the process, Israel is violating its obligation as occupying Power to provide for the welfare of the occupied people. By deliberately making life as difficult as possible for the Palestinian people, by withholding funds and imposing harsh measures on them, Israel has embarked upon a policy of collective punishment in violation of article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Worse still it is creating a failed state on its own border which augurs ill for both the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel itself.

53. Israel is not alone to blame for the crisis in the OPT. Since the election of Hamas in January 2006, the United States, the European Union and other States, have likewise withheld funds from the Palestinian Authority by reason of its failure to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept obligations previously assumed towards Israel. The decision of the United States Treasury to prohibit transactions with the Palestinian Authority has, moreover, resulted in banks refusing to transfer money to the PA. To aggravate matters the Quartet has gone along with this policy of political and financial isolation. In order to mitigate the crisis, the EU has set up a Temporary International Mechanism, endorsed by the Quartet, for the relief of Palestinians employed in the health sector, the uninterrupted supply of utilities, including fuel, and the provision of basic allowances to meet the needs of the poorest segment of the population. Although the EU disbursed US$ 865 million to the Palestinians in this way in 2006 - an increase of 27 per cent compared to EU funding in 2005 - it has not resulted in the payment of salaries to most Palestinians employed in the public sector. Health-care workers and teachers have received some payments, but well short of their full salaries, and pensioners and social hardship cases have also received an allowance. However, owing to the withholding of tax revenues due to the PA by Israel, most government employees remain unpaid and are experiencing difficulty in paying their basic expenses, such as rent and electricity.

54. In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions - the first time an occupied people have been so treated. This is difficult to understand. Israel is in violation of major Security Council and General Assembly resolutions dealing with unlawful territorial change and the violation of human rights and has failed to implement the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, yet it escapes the imposition of sanctions. Instead, the Palestinian people, rather than the Palestinian Authority, have been subjected to possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.

IX. CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
55. Civil society - Palestinian, Israeli and international - plays a major role in the protection of the human rights of the Palestinian people by means of public education, litigation, humanitarian aid and protective action. Non-governmental organizations collect, analyse and publicize information about human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Where possible they petition the Israeli Supreme Court for redress. All the decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court, some helpful to the cause of human rights and some positively unhelpful, referred to in this report have been initiated by NGOs, mainly from Israel itself. NGOs working in the fields of health, education and welfare perform invaluable services. On occasion members of civil society intervene to protect Palestinians against the Israeli Defense Forces or settlers or to assist in the assertion of rights. The Israeli women’s group, Machsom Watch, monitors the behaviour of members of the IDF at checkpoints and in so doing softens the conduct of some soldiers. Israeli peace activists have assisted in the harvesting of olives and protected Palestinian farmers against settler violence. Israeli and Palestinian activists regularly demonstrate against the construction of the Wall at places like in the village of Bil’in. Civil society must therefore be credited with having reduced the suffering of the Palestinian people.

X. INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITY
56. On a recent visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, the High Commissioner for Human Rights stressed the need for the accountability of Israelis and Palestinians for the violation of international humanitarian law and human rights law. Palestinians who launch Qassam rockets into Israel, killing and injuring civilians and damaging property, should be held individually accountable - that is prosecuted. But so should Israelis who have committed violations of international humanitarian law on a much greater scale. Despite the fact that Israel - unlike Palestine - has a sophisticated and advanced criminal justice system, prosecutions are very rare. Civil claims were impossible before the Israeli Supreme Court on 12 December 2006 overturned a law that prevented Palestinians from seeking compensation from Israel for damages from Israeli army activities in the OPT. Palestinians harmed in “non‑belligerent” army operations in the OPT may now sue for redress. This ruling, however, does not alter the prohibition on compensation to Palestinians harmed in combat operations or to Palestinians belonging to “terrorist organizations” - such as Hamas.

57. Individual criminal accountability is no substitute for State responsibility. A State that violates international law by destroying the property of another State used for humanitarian purposes in an occupied territory may be held responsible by the injured State in accordance with the traditional principles of State responsibility. Moreover a State that systematically violates a peremptory norm of general international law may incur responsibility to the international community as a whole for such conduct; and be subject to an international claim for reparation at the instance of any State prepared to make such a claim.[12] Many States, particularly European States, have suffered damages as a result of Israeli attacks on their humanitarian assistance projects in the OPT. Moreover Israel has systematically violated peremptory norms of international law in the OPT, ranging from the denial of self-determination to serious crimes against humanity. States may well consider bringing claims against Israel under the rules governing State responsibility in order to induce it to comply with its obligations in the fields of human rights and humanitarian law.

XI. OCCUPATION, COLONIZATION AND APARTHEID: IS THEREA NEED FOR A FURTHER ADVISORY OPINION?
58. The international community, speaking through the United Nations, has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights - colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation. Numerous resolutions of the General Assembly of the United Nations testify to this. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem contains elements of all three of these regimes, which is what makes the Occupied Palestinian Territory of special concern to the international community.

59. That the OPT is occupied by Israel and governed by the rules belonging to the special legal regime of occupation cannot be disputed. The International Court of Justice confirmed this in respect of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (see, ICJ Reports, p. 136, paragraph 78), and held that the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 1949, was applicable to this Territory (ibid., para. 101). The Security Council, General Assembly and States Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention have declared that this Convention is applicable to the entire OPT (ibid., paras. 96-99). Moreover, it is not possible to seriously argue, as Israel has attempted to do, that Israel has ceased to occupy Gaza since August 2005, when it withdrew its settlers and the Israel Defense Forces from Gaza. Even before the commencement of “Operation Summer Rains”, following the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit on 25 June 2006, Israel was able to exercise effective control over the Territory by reason of its control of Gaza’s external borders, air space and sea space. Since that date it has exercised its military authority within Gaza by military incursions and shelling, in circumstances which clearly establish occupation (see paragraphs 8-13 above).

60. Today there are over 460,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (para. 32 above). Moreover, Israel has appropriated agricultural land and water resources in the West Bank for its own use. This aspect of Israel’s exploitation of the West Bank appears to be a form of colonialism of the kind declared to be a denial of fundamental human rights and contrary to the Charter of the United Nations as recalled in the General Assembly’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960 (Resolution 1514 XV).

61. Israel’s practices and policies in the OPT are frequently likened to those of apartheid South Africa (see, for example, Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid (2006)). On the face of it, occupation and apartheid are two very different regimes. Occupation is not intended to be a long-term oppressive regime but an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement. Apartheid is a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security. Freedom of movement was restricted by the “pass system” which sought to restrict the entry of blacks into the cities. Apartheid was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role. Although the two regimes are different, Israel’s laws and practices in the OPT certainly resemble aspects of apartheid, as shown in paragraphs 49-50 above, and probably fall within the scope of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

62. Colonialism and apartheid are contrary to international law. Occupation is a lawful regime, tolerated by the international community but not approved. Indeed over the past three decades it has, in the words of the Israeli scholar Eyal Benvenisti, “acquired a pejorative connotation”.[13] What are the legal consequences of a regime of occupation that has continued for nearly 40 years? Clearly none of the obligations imposed on the occupying Power are reduced as a result of such a prolonged occupation.[14] But what are the legal consequences when such a regime has acquired some of the characteristics of colonialism and apartheid? Does it continue to be a lawful regime? Or does it cease to be a lawful regime, particularly in respect of “measures aimed at the occupants’ own interests”?[15] And if this is the position, what are the legal consequences for the occupied people, the occupying Power and third States? Should questions of this kind not be addressed to the International Court of Justice for a further advisory opinion? It is true that the 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory has not had the desired effect ofcompelling the United Nations to take firmer action against the construction of the Wall. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the United Nations requested four advisory opinions from the International Court of Justice to guide it in its approach to South Africa’s occupation of South‑West Africa/Namibia. In these circumstances a request for another advisory opinion warrants serious consideration.

XII. CONCLUSION: ISRAEL, PALESTINE ANDTHE FUTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
63. The Occupied Palestinian Territory is of special importance to the future of human rights in the world. Human rights in Palestine have been on the agenda of the United Nations for 60 years; and more particularly for the past 40 years since the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. For years the occupation of Palestine and apartheid in South Africa vied for attention from the international community. In 1994, apartheid came to an end and Palestine became the only developing country in the world under the subjugation of a Western-affiliated regime. Herein lies its significance to the future of human rights. There are other regimes, particularly in the developing world, that suppress human rights, but there is no other case of a Western-affiliated regime that denies self-determination and human rights to a developing people and that has done so for so long. This explains why the OPT has become a test for the West, a test by which its commitment to human rights is to be judged. If the West fails this test, it can hardly expect the developing world to address human rights violations seriously in its own countries, and the West appears to be failing this test. The EU pays conscience money to the Palestinian people through the Temporary International Mechanism but nevertheless joins the United States and other Western countries, such as Australia and Canada, in failing to put pressure on Israel to accept Palestinian self-determination and to discontinue its violations of human rights. The Quartet, comprising the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the Russian Federation, is a party to this failure. If the West, which has hitherto led the promotion of human rights throughout the world, cannot demonstrate a real commitment to the human rights of the Palestinian people, the international human rights movement, which can claim to be the greatest achievement of the international community of the past 60 years, will be endangered and placed in jeopardy.
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* The report was submitted after the deadline so as to include the most recent developments.

[1] See B’Tselem, Act of Vengeance: Israel’s Bombing of the Gaza Power Plant and its Effects (September 2006).
[2] Head of the Azzun Municipal Council, Abed Alatif Hassin and others v. State of Israel and the Military Commander of the West Bank (HCJ 2733/05).
[3] OCHA Special Focus, November 2006.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Breaking the Law in the West Bank - One Violation Leads to Another: Israeli Settlement Building on Private Palestinian Property.
[6] Rashad Morar v. The IDF Commander for Judea and Samaria (HCJ 9593/04).
[7] See Yesh Din, A Semblance of Law. Law Enforcement Upon Israeli Civilians in the West Bank (June 2006).
[8] Antonio Marchesi, Getting Around the International Prohibition of Torture: Responsibilities of the Israeli Government and the Palestinian National Authority (December 2006), p. 27.
[9] B’Tselem, Barred from Contact: Violation of the Right to Visit Palestinians held in Israeli Prisons (September 2006).
[10] B’Tselem and Ha Moked, Perpetual Limbo: Israel’s Freeze on Unification of Palestinian Families in the Occupied Territories (July 2006).
[11] Badil, Displaced by the Wall (September 2006).
[12] Draft articles on the Responsibility of States for Intentionally Wrongful Acts (arts. 40 and 48 (2) (b)), Official Records of the General Assembly, Fifty-sixth Session, Supplement No. 10 (A/56/10).
[13] The International Law of Occupation (1993), p. 212.
[14] See A. Roberts “Prolonged Military Occupation: The Israeli-Occupied Territories Since 1967” (1990) 84, American Journal of International Law 44, 55-57, 95.
[15] Benvenisti, op. cit (note 13), p. 216.

Hebron - IDF vs Palestinian children

2006-03-28T18:02:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Omar Barghouti for sending this Photo Essay.
in Hebron
the children starting their day going to school to be faced with a checkpoint:

the soldiers prevent them from passing and give them orders to go home

the children try to challenge the soldiers and pass the checkpoint

even younger ones try but in vain:

they end up having their classes in the street by the checkpoint

what an amazing spirit
they got shot at, and some arrested

the boys try a little bit harder
Yet in their eyes you see determination and dignity

APPROACHES TO ECONOMIC ENGAGEMENT

2006-01-05T10:17:00.000+01:00

TOWARD A JUST AND VIABLE PEACE IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE
An Ongoing Survey by the Responsible Investment Subcommittee of Ann Arbor Friends Meeting, 12-19-05

Additional information gratefully received.
734-747-9220 agr1@mac.org 12/19/05

RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS

World Council of Churches (2/05)
Advocates selective divestment from US companies like Caterpillar that profit from the Occupation, and from Israeli companies that depend on settlements for materials and labor, or that produce military equipment used to violate Palestinian human rights.

Churches with investment funds have an opportunity to use those funds responsibly in support of peaceful solutions to conflict. Economic pressure is one such means of action.
Sabeel (International Group that represents Palestinian Christians) (Summer 2005)
There is a spiritual dimension to all investment.
1. Earning money through investment in companies whose products and services are used to violate Inter- national Law and human rights is equivalent to profiting f! rom unlawful acts and the oppression of others.

2. Continuing such investments, once the facts are brought to our attention, constitutes enabling harm to innocent civilians under Occupation and condoning illegal settlement policies that lead to human rights violations.

Actions that oppose the Occupation are in fact pro-Israel because the Occupation is destroying Israeli society by increasing poverty, violence and insecurity. Sabeel cites Israeli human rights lawyer Shamai Leibovitz: “If the Jewish people are ever to become ‘a light of all nations’ and return to their core values of justice and human dignity, Israelis and Jews of conscience must call for effective measures to end the occupation of millions of Palestinians. I believe that selective economic pressure is the most effective way to end the brutal occupation.”
Sabeel founder Naim Ateek, a Palestinian-Israeli Anglican priest, states, “The churches have exhausted all other options.”

Presbyterian Church
General Assembly, 7/04, adopted a policy of ’Morally Responsible Investment,” drawing on the historical precedent of South Africa. A “phased selective divestment” procedure is initially implemented by the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI), as follows:

1.“Progressive engagement” (communication and meetings) with selected multinational corporations.
2. If no agreement, shareholder resolutions may be considered.
3. If a corporation remains uncooperative, MRTI may ask Gen’l Assembly to place it on a divestment/proscription list.
4. MRTI (8/05) selects five companies to approach: Caterpillar, Motorola, ITT, United Technologies, Citicorp.
United Church of Christ (UCC) (adopted 7/05)
Commitment to Israel’s safe and sec! ure existence within internationally recognized borders (condemns violence on both sides)
1. Urges US to play the role of honest broker
2. Significant dialogue with Jewish, Christian and Muslim partners
3. Education of congregants about the realities on the ground
4. “Economic leverage” on behalf of oppressed people:
A) Divestment from companies that sell arms or military hardware to Israel.
B) “Reallocation of US foreign aid to constrain militarization of the Middle East.”
Anglican/Episcopalian:
Anglican Consultative Council, 5/05, calls for “active engagement” with companies by Anglican communions worldwide. Divestment may be considered later.

Episcopalian Executive Council (governing body) (10/8/05) directs its Committee for Social Responsibility in Investments to undertake the following:

1.“Corporate engagement via dialogue and shareholder resolutions, as appropriate, to enc! ourage companies to adopt socially responsible practices that advance positive changes in Israeli government policy” and end the Occupation.
2. Urge the Palestinian Authority to oppose violence as a means of resistance.
3. “Positive investment” to encourage companies and join other religious organizations in investing in the economic infrastructure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: “A stable Palestinian state will make for a more secure Israel.” Seek opportunities, with others, to make loans to “support economic justice and development in support of a future Palestinian State.” Palestine, like Israel, has a right to an economy that flourishes.
4. Urge members of the Episcopal Church to visit church partners and others in Israel and the Palestinian Territories "in order to understand the complexities of the conflict."

The United Methodist Church
New England Conference
Resolution on “Divesting from Companies that are Supporting, in a Significant Way, the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territories.” 6/11/05: The settlements and Israel’s wall on Palestinian land violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, UN resolutions, and the 2003 Roadmap. Therefore a committee will determine which investments support the occupation, writing the company to request a change in its relationship to the occupation. If no change is taken or contemplated within 60 days, the company’s name will be placed on a divestment list and shared with Methodist churches and investment managers.

The Church calls on the US government, the government of Israel, and the Palestinian leadership to reject all acts of aggression and violence, to respect the equality and dignity of all the region’s people, and follow principles of international law and human rights. The Church affirms the right of Christians, Jews, and Muslims to freedom of movement in the Holy Land and the maintenance of Jerusalem as an open city for people of all three faiths.

Virginia United Methodists
6/05 affirmed Israel's right to exist within permanent, recognized, and secure borders, and Palestinians' right to self-determination and the formation of a viable state.

The Conference called upon the United Methodist Board of Pensions to review its investments and undertake a process of phased, selective divestment from any multinational corporations profiting from the illegal demolition of Palestinian homes, destruction of the Palestinian economy and confiscation of Palestinian land.

York and Hull District Methodist Synod, England. (4/05) Recommended to the UK Methodist Conference that it follow the lead of the World Council of Churches and Presbyterian Church, undertaking a review of all investments under its control, with a view to divesting! from any corporations or activities that support the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Synod urges International Law as the basis of the Conference resolution, to be well publicized. (Passed: 187 for, 0 against, 1 abstention.)

The United Church of Canada (Presbyterian, Methodist, United Church of Christ) - Toronto region: Seeking Peace Through Justice: Ethical Investment in the Middle East: The Toronto Conference calls on presbyteries, churches, mission units and members to reaffirm the UC’s commitment to the right of Israel to exist in peace and security within internationally-recognized borders and the right of Palestinians to exist in peace and freedom in an internationally recognized state. Recognizes that the path of peace is dependent on the ending of the Israeli occupation, including withdrawal of Israeli settlements. Commits to:

1) Join the World Council of Churches international boycott of goods produced in the illegal Israeli settlements.
2) Divest itself of investments in -- and boycott the products and services of -- corporations whose activities serve to encourage the continued existence of these illegal settlements. (adopted 2003)

Ann Arbor Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice (Resolution adopted 5/03}:
Recognizes the US government’s complicity in violations of human rights, and calls for suspending military aid and arms sales to Israel.

Asks the University of Michigan, the city of Ann Arbor and members’ religious organizations to exert their influence.

And, along with individuals, to divest from companies that sell arms or other military hardware to Israel. The goal is to bring about Israel’s compliance with UN resolutions and the Geneva Convention.

Philadelphia Friends Meeting (Quakers):
“Threshing Session” Topic, “Israel’s Occupation: Is It Time for Divestment? Spring 2005:
1. What are the “facts on the ground”?
2. What are our historic precedents for action?
3. What are the criteria for action?
4. How do we maintain integrity in seeking both justice and compassion?
Next step: Threshing sessions with other Philadelphia Meetings, Winter 2005.

JEWISH AND PALESTINIAN ORGANIZATIONS:

New Profile (2/05) (An Israeli peace group active with army Refusers, women’s groups, and peace groups)

“New Profile aims to transform Israel from a highly militaristic society to a civilian society dedicated to equality of gender and ethnicity and firmly based on universal human rights. One of several characteristics of militarism is the use of force to obtain political objectives. New Profile deems Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians to be a use of force to obtain the political objective of creating the ‘greater Israel.’

“New Profile opposes the Occupation on three counts:
1. Its destruction of Palestinian life, society, land, and property.
2. Its role in maintaining militarism in Israel.
3. Its erosion of Israel’s socio-economic and moral fabric.

“We therefore seek non-violent means of ending this catastrophic Occupation. One such means is using economic sanctions to pressure the government to change its policy. To this end New Profile welcomes and supports selective divestment aimed at divesting from companies that contribute to the continuation of the Occupation by supplying arms, other equipment, or staff… [E]nding the occupation is not only to the benefit of the Palestinians but also necessary for the welfare of Israel, its youth, and future generations. Over 20,000 Israeli soldiers have died in its wars since 1948. Enough.”

ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) calls for sanctions (1/05)
1.Selective divestment from companies that p! rofit from the Occupation, e.g., Caterpillar and from Israeli companies that depend on settlements for materials or labor or that produce military equipment used to violate Palestinian human rights
2. Remind churches with investment funds that they have an opportunity to use those funds responsibly in support of peaceful solutions to conflict. Economic pressure is one such means of action. Calls for churches to:

A. Exert pressure on companies to discontinue business that supports the occupation
B. When pressure fails, divest from such companies

Palestinian Civil Society (170 organizations) 7/05: “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until it complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights”

1. South Africa apartheid is a historical precedent
2. End the occupation and dismantle the wall
3. Recognize the rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel
4. Right of return re: UN resolution 194

Not in My Name (NIMN) Supports Selective Divestment as a Tool to Oppose the Israeli Occupation. on 1/16/05: “…[T]he Occupation is destroying Israeli society by increasing poverty, violence, and insecurity. Therefore actions that oppose the Occupation are, in fact, pro-Israeli. Furthermore, we believe that such actions are in keeping with our vision of a Judaism that is based on the principle of justice.

“Well designed divestment campaigns can help focus public discourse on the Occupation. They can also have a positive material impact, as has been shown by such projects as the grape boycott to support the United Farm Workers and the opposition to South African apartheid.

“NIMN supports selective divestment and/or selective boycott campaigns that target corporations that profit from the Occupation….

“We underscore our belief that the Occupation is not only destroying Palestinian society, but Israeli society, as well. Selective divestment from companies that profit from this destruction is not only appropriate, it is both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.

“Therefore, NIMN urges its members and supporters to investigate and actively support selective divestment and boycott campaigns that target corporations that profit from the Occupation.”

Jewish Voice for Peace (includes American Jews and Israeli peace activists). (12/04) Supports the Presbyterian Church’s “selective divestment from companies, including Caterpillar, that profit from Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem and from Israeli companies that use settlements as a source for materials and labor or that produce military equipment used to violate Palestinian human rights. General divestment is not advised; rather: target the Occupation and the Israeli military complex that sustains it, not Israel itself. Condemning the Israeli government’s abuse of state power is in no way attacking Jewish people.

US military aid since 1949 “represents the largest transfer of funds from one country to another in history.” Of all US military aid to Israel, 75%, by law, must go to US corporations, making corporations, not Israel or Israelis, the primary recipient of US aid. US corporations are the primary beneficiaries of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian lands!

European Jews for a Just Peace (EJJP). “No Other Way” calls for economic pressure targeted at the Occupation. The rationale for these measures highlights:
1). Their non-violent nature, and
2). The fact that the need to resort to these steps is a result of the failure of other means.

Opposing the Israeli occupation cannot be construed as anti-Semitic. On the contrary, looking to endow Israel with special rights because it is a Jewish state is an attitude which smacks of anti-Semitism (because it sees Jews as being different from the rest of humanity). Under “Divestment act! ions,” EJJP calls for pressure by boycott and information campaigns on companies, institutions, organizations, and individuals that profit from involvement in or contribution to the Occupation, such as Caterpillar, Intel, and Soda Club. It includes Israeli companies that produce military equipment used to violate Palestinian human rights, and also universities, research institutions, and individuals that contribute to the perpetuation of the Occupation. The purchase of Israeli arms and weapons should be banned, and governments are asked to stop selling Israel arms used to continue the Occupation. Settlement products should be boycotted, based on the Gush Shalom list, as well as products bearing labels that do not differentiate between settlement products and those made in Israel.

Jews Against The Occupation New York, NY 11/04, www.jatonyc.org
“We are writing as deeply committed Jews to thank! the Presbyterian Church for acting as a true friend to our people. Their decisions to condemn Israel's Wall…, and to begin selective divestment of holdings in multinational corporations doing business in Israel/Palestine represent an important step forward in the struggle for Palestinian freedom and an end to the conflict.. We believe that the day will come, be it in five years or fifty, when the Presbyterian Church’s action in this matter will be remembered with love and gratitude by Jews around the world….”

NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (NGOS)

United Nations International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Middle East Peace. (7/05)

A Call to Action: “ [W]e urge international, national and regional social movements, organizations and coalitions to support the unified call of Palestinian civil society for a global campaign of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] to pressure Israel to end the occupation and fully comply with international law and all relevant UN resolutions. We have identified the coming year to mobilize for and inaugurate this BDS campaign.”

European Coordinating Committee of NGOs on the Question of Palestine
Members of the civil society of EU member states petition their governments, the EU Council, and the UN “to take political and economical measures, including sanctions, to prevent Israel from continuing the construction of the wall and to force it to respect the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion” [which ruled that the Wall on Palestinian soil is unlawful]. NGOs urge their governments to cease all military exchanges and agreements with Israel, to provide no aid in construction of the Wall, to honor their commitment to the Fourth Geneva Convention and UN Resolutions, and to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement

Global Exchange (An international human rights organization working for social, economic, and environmental justice.) Palestinians in Israel “live as third class citizens, facing legal, economic, and social discrimination. In the occupied territories, Israel continues to subject the Palestinians there to home demolitions, closures & checkpoints, extrajudicial detentions and assassinations, immobilizing curfews, and countless other daily abuses and forms of oppression. The system of apartheid that Israel has developed closely resembles that which South Africa once had. Apartheid in South Africa was eventually abolished in large part because of an international grassroots movement to stop financial support of the apartheid regime.”

“Through divestment (stopping capital investment in companies that do business in Israel) and boycott (not buying Israeli products) we can bring justice to the Israelis and Palestinians as well.” (updated 8/23/05)

Labor for Palestine (LPF) emerged in the US in response to Palestinian workers’ exploitative conditions. Labor union pension funds are said to have about 5 billion dollars invested in State of Israel Bonds. Divestment from these bonds is a central platform of Labor for Palestine.

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation supports the nationwide municipal and state divestment initiative. The group provides divestment resources to inform, educate and mobilize the public regarding the US government’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the way funds invested by municipalities and state governments, trade unions and other US organizations help sustain the occupation. The nationwide divestment initiative is a vehicle of change, as groups pressure for an end to the investment that enables Israel to carry out its military occupation, and call on municipal, state and federal governing bodies to issue statements opposing that occupation.

The US Campaign recognizes that there is no single way to approach divestment. Given the grassroots nature o f this effort, it is up to activists on the ground to decide what practices would work best in their localities.

National Lawyers Guild. Resolution To Divest, In Principle And Practice, From Israel (Adopted by NLG National Convention 10/24/04)
WHEREAS the Israeli government with its illegal occupation and expansionist program in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip is engaged, and has been engaged in grave human rights violations including but not limited to: the use of live ammunition on unarmed civilians (including men, women, and children); massive and disproportionate use of force including the firing of missiles from Apache helicopter gunships against defenseless civilian populations; illegal mass arrests and institutionalized torture (including men, women, and children); the willful destruction of agricultural land; the deprivation of water; forced malnutrition with concomitant health consequences including stillborn deaths and irreversible developmental damage to children; the mass demolition of homes and confiscation of land; hostage taking and extra-judicial assassinations; denial of medical services to the sick and wounded; the use of human shields (including children); the targeting of schools, and hospitals; the building of illegal fortified "Jewish-only" Israeli colonies/settlements on confiscated land connected by "Jewish-only" bypass roads, and the heavily subsidized transfer of hundreds of thousands of its own civilian population into these colonies/settlements;

WHEREAS the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel's Apartheid Wall violates international humanitarian law which governs Israel's administration of the Palestinian territories it has occupied since 1967 as well as the fundamental human rights of the Palestinians;

WHEREAS by virtue of, but not limited to, the Principles of the Nuremberg C! harter and Judgment; The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights; I nternational Covenant of Civil and Political Rights; The Geneva Conventions, in particular, but not limited to the 4th Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Protocol 1, Additional to the Geneva Conventions, as well as other international covenants and the general humanitarian principles of international law, these acts constitute war crimes, and in some cases crimes against humanity.

WHEREAS, the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 22 USC sec. 2304, provides that "no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights;"

WHEREAS, the UN General Assembly on October 22, 2003, reaffirming the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, and …. reiterating its opposition to settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories almost unanimously, with the exception of the US, Israel,

BE IT RESOLVED that the NLG seeks, in principal and practice, to support national and international campaigns to divest from Israel…and (a) support divestment campaigns to make full public disclosure of any and all investments it or other institutions have in Israel and of any and all profits earned from companies invested in Israel, and (b) either immediately divest from those companies, or cause such companies to disinvest from Israel until all of the following conditions are met:
1. Withdraw armed forces;
2. Permit interested refugees to return to their homes and compensate the rest;
3.End torture;
4.Vacate all Jewish-only settlement/colonies;
5.Compensate all Palestinian victims.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK) asks consumers to boycott Israeli goods via coordinated demonstrations in major British cities, including London, Brighton, York, Oxford, Durham, and Exeter. Their 12/10/05 winter campaign focuses on avocados, oranges, and dates.

Veterans for Peace (VFP, a 20-year-old US veterans’ organization). Economic Support For Justice And Peace In Palestine (8/6/05 VFP National Conference). VFP’s resolution notes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major international flashpoint, people of the region are suffering from militarization, the US is the largest single source of governmental financial aid to Israel, and all forms of intervention have failed to achieve Israeli compliance with international law as embodied in UN resolutions and world court decisions (and supported by peace activists within Israel). Therefore, inspired by the South African struggle and the international solidarity which made it effective, and in support of the call by more than 170 Palestinian political parties, unions, and organizations for such economic actions, “Veterans For Peace calls for boycott, divestment, and other actions against economic activities that support Israel’s continued occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands and the denial of fundamental human rights to Palestinians both in Israel and in the occupied territories until the Government of Israel complies with international law and the universal principles of human rights. VFP urges members and chapters to support such economic actions which seem to them best calculated to bring about a change in Israeli government policy for the benefit of both the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

GOVERNMENTAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS:

The Norwegian Provincial Parliament of the Trondheim district, with nearly 20% of the population of Norway, voted on 12/15/05 to “completely and totally” prohibit the purchase or sale of Israeli products in all municipalities in the province. Perhaps significantly, this Parliament was the first Norwegian governmental body to boycott South African Apartheid.

US Green Party (11/21/05) “calls for divestment from and boycott of the State of Israel until such time as the full individual and collective r ights of the Palestinian people are realized. The party calls on all civil society institutions and organizations around the world to implement a comprehensive divestment and boycott program. Further, the party calls on all governments to support this program and to implement state level boycotts.”

UNIVERSITIES:

The more than fifty universities and colleges with divestment drives have tended to use approaches similar to:

University of Pennsylvania Petition for Divestment from Arms Corporations that do Business with Israel and Other Human Rights Violators 2/03

We, the undersigned are appalled by the human rights abuses against Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government, the continual military occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory by Israeli armed forces and settlers, and the forcible eviction from and demolition of Palestinian homes, towns and cities;

We are horrified by attacks against Israeli civilians, and we, like many in the Israeli peace movement, are convinced that only the end of the Israeli occupation and establishment of a geographically and economically viable Palestinian state can bring peace to the Middle East; . . .

Therefore, as members of the University of Pennsylvania community we call on the University to divest from all companies whose business promotes the Israeli occupation, especially firms that sell arms to Israel and firms based in illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, until the following conditions are met:

1. Israel complies with United Nations Resolution 242, which notes the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by w ar, and which calls for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces . . .
2. Israel complies with the United Nations Committee Against Torture 2001 Report. . . ,
3. Israel complies with the Fourth Geneva Convention ("The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies”)
4. Israel . . . begins to implement United Nations Resolution 194 with respect to the rights of refugees

We furthermore believe that the University of Pennsylvania should divest from arms manufacturers that do business with any nation that has been shown to violate human rights, including Egypt, Turkey, Colombia, or any other. This petition focuses on Israel because it is the largest recipient of US military aid, as well as one of the largest manufacturers of military software and weapons, in the world.

EU Report on East Jerusalem

2005-12-21T21:14:00.000+01:00

JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH HEADS OF MISSION

REPORT ON EAST JERUSALEM

SUMMARY

1. East Jerusalem is of central importance to the Palestinians in political, economic, social and religious terms. Several inter-linked Israeli policies are reducing the possibility of reaching a final status agreement on Jerusalem, and demonstrate a clear Israeli intention to turn the annexation of East Jerusalem into a concrete fact:

the near-completion of the barrier around east Jerusalem, far from the Green Line;
the construction and expansion of illegal settlements, by private entities and the Israeli government, in and around East Jerusalem;
the demolition of Palestinian homes built without permits (which are all but unobtainable);
stricter enforcement of rules separating Palestinians resident in East Jerusalem from those resident in the West Bank, including a reduction of working permits;
and discriminatory taxation, expenditure and building permit policy by the Jerusalem municipality.

2. The plan to expand the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim into the so-called “E1” area, east of Jerusalem, threatens to complete the encircling of the city by Jewish settlements, dividing the West Bank into two separate geographical areas. The proposed extension of the barrier from East Jerusalem to form a bubble around the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim would have the same effect. 2004 saw a near tripling of the number of Palestinian buildings demolished in East Jerusalem. We expect a similar number of demolitions in 2005. 88 homes in the Silwan neighbourhood with demolition orders outstanding against them attracted much attention in June.

3. When the barrier has been completed, Israel will control access to and from East Jerusalem, cutting off its Palestinian satellite cities of Bethlehem and Ramallah, and the rest of the West Bank beyond. This will have serious economic, social and humanitarian consequences for the Palestinians. By vigorously applying policies on residency and ID status, Israel will be able finally to complete the isolation of East Jerusalem – the political, social, commercial and infrastructural centre of Palestinian life.

4. Israel’s activities in Jerusalem are in violation of both its Roadmap obligations and international law. We and others in the international community have made our concerns clear on numerous occasions, to varying effect.

Palestinians are, without exception, deeply alarmed about East Jerusalem. They fear that Israel will “get away with it”, under the cover of disengagement. Israeli actions also risk radicalising the hitherto relatively quiescent Palestinian population in East Jerusalem. Clear statements by the European Union and the Quartet that Jerusalem remains an issue for negotiation by the two sides, and that Israel should desist from all measures designed to pre-empt such negotiations, would be timely. We should also support Palestinian cultural, political and economic activities in East Jerusalem.

RECOMMENDATIONS

On the political level

Clear statements by the European Union and the Quartet that Jerusalem remains an issue for negotiation by the two sides, and that Israel should desist from all measures designed to pre-empt such negotiations.

We might consider issuing a statement focused on the issue of Jerusalem at the GAERC in November. We could also press for a similar statement to issue from the Quartet.

Phase One of the Roadmap calls for the re-opening of Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem, and in particular the Chamber of Commerce. The re-opening of these institutions would send a signal to the Palestinians that the international community takes their concerns seriously, and is taking action. We might include a call for their re-opening in the statements referred to above, and explore with the two parties how and when their re-opening might be accomplished.

Request the Israeli Government to halt discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, especially concerning working permits, building permits, house demolitions, taxation and expenditure.

The EU might consider and assess the implications and feasibility of excluding East Jerusalem from certain EU/Israel co-operation activities.

On an operational level

Organise political meetings with the PA in East Jerusalem, including meetings at ministerial level.

Initiatives (statement letters, contacts, meetings etc.) focused on issues like access, building permits, the consequences of the barrier etc.

In view of the Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for 25 January 2006, encourage the parties to agree on the terms and substance of their co-ordination to allow for satisfactory elections to take place in East Jerusalem, referring to the parties’ obligations under the interim agreements and the Roadmap (PA to hold elections and Israel to facilitate them) and taking into account the recommendations formulated in the Rocard EUEOM report. Offer 3rd party technical assistance and monitoring capacity if required and adequate.

The Jerusalem Masterplan that is currently in the approval process should undergo a technical assessment followed by a decision as to how to evaluate the plan in terms of legal implications, public awareness etc. The plan currently exists only in Hebrew (the plan should be translated into Arabic and English).

All MS and EC to increase project activity in East Jerusalem with a balance between service provision, relief, development and political projects (taking into consideration the Multi Sector Review). Support for civil society is important. An inventory of current EC and MS activity in East Jerusalem would be a useful first step.

Regarding house demolitions for lack of building permits in East Jerusalem, the EU could pursue various options:

- support legal projects designed to support Palestinians threatened by house demolitions and those who have been victims thereof
- promote initiatives to legalise “illegal” houses (e.g. through introducing retroactively alternative town planning schemes)
- facilitate a solution for obtaining building permits
- EU projects with a Palestinian NGO on legal counselling concerning building permits and house demolitions
- EU project on the development of a master plan for urban planning and legal housing for Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.

§ Facilitate a solution of the access issue. This would comprise a range of political and operational measures, both short and long term

§ Support local and international organisations in their information efforts on East Jerusalem.

§ Enhance EU assistance to Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem, including cultural activities and community empowerment.
JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH HEADS OF MISSION

REPORT ON EAST JERUSALEM

DETAIL

1. Jerusalem is already one of the trickiest issues on the road to reaching a final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But several inter-linked Israeli policies are reducing the possibility of reaching a final status agreement on Jerusalem that any Palestinian could accept. We judge that this is a deliberate Israeli policy – the completion of the annexation of East Jerusalem. Israeli measures also risk radicalising the hitherto relatively quiescent Palestinian population of East Jerusalem.

EU POLICY ON EAST JERUSALEM

2. The EU policy on Jerusalem is based on the principles set out in UN Security Council Resolution 242, notably the impossibility of acquisition of territory by force. In consequence the EU has never recognised the annexation of East Jerusalem under the Israeli 1980 Basic Law (Basic Law Jerusalem Capital of Israel) which made Jerusalem the “complete and united” capital of Israel. EU Member States have therefore placed their accredited missions in Tel Aviv. The EU opposes measures that would prejudge the outcome of Permanent Status Negotiations, consigned to the third phase of the Road Map, such as actions aimed at changing the status of East Jerusalem.

3. In conferences held in 1999 and 2001, the High Contracting Parties reaffirmed the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and reiterated the need for full respect for the provisions of the said Convention in that territory.

4. In July 2004 the EU acknowledged the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the “legal consequences of the construction of a Wall in the occupied Palestinian territories including in and around East Jerusalem” and voted in favour of the General Assembly Resolution that recognised it. While the EU recognises Israel’s security concerns and its right to act in self-defence, the EU position on the legality of the separation barrier largely coincides with the ICJ Advisory Opinion.

SETTLEMENTS

5. Israel is increasing settlement activity in three east-facing horseshoe shaped bands in and around East Jerusalem, linked by new roads:

§ first through new settlements in the old city itself and in the Palestinian neighbourhoods immediately surrounding the old city (Silwan, Ras al Amud, At Tur, Wadi al Joz, Sheikh Jarrah);

§ then in the existing major East Jerusalem settlement blocs (running clockwise from Ramot, Rekhes Shu’afat, French Hill, through the new settlements in the first band, above, to East Talpiot, Har Homa and Gilo);

§ and finally in “Greater Jerusalem” – linking the city of Jerusalem to the settlement blocs of Givat Ze’ev to the north, Ma’aleh Adumim to the east (including the E1 area, see below), and the Etzion bloc to the south.

Settlement activity and construction is ongoing in each of these three bands, contrary to Israel’s obligations under international law and the Roadmap.

“E1” and Ma’aleh Adumim

6. E1 (derived from ‘East 1’) is the term applied by the Israeli Ministry of Housing to a planned new neighbourhood within the municipal borders of the large Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim (30,000+ residents), linking it to the municipal boundary of Jerusalem (a unilateral Israeli line well east of the Green Line). E1, along with a maximalist barrier around Ma’ale Adumim, would complete the encircling of East Jerusalem and cut the West Bank into two parts, and further restrict access into and out of Jerusalem. The economic prospects of the Wset Bank (where GDP is under $1000 a year) are highly dependent on access to East Jerusalem (where GDP is around $3500 a year). Estimates of the contribution made by East Jerusalem to the Palestinian economy as a whole vary between a quarter and a third. From an economic perspective, the viability of a Palestinian state depends to a great extent on the preservation of organic links between East Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem.

7. E1 is an old plan which was drawn up by Rabin’s government in 1994 but never implemented. The plan was revived by the housing Ministry in 2003, and preliminary construction in the E1 area began in 2004. Since his resignation from the Cabinet Netanyahu has tried to make E1 a campaign issue.

The development plans for E1 include:
§ the erection of at least 3,500 housing units (for approx. 15,000 residents);
§ an economic development zone;
§ construction of the police headquarters for the West Bank that shall be relocated from Raz el-Amud;
§ commercial areas, hotels and “special housing”, universities and “special projects”, a cemetery and a waste disposal site.
§ About 75% of the plan’s total area is earmarked for a park that will surround all these components.
§ So far only the plans for the economic development zone have received the necessary authorisations for building to commence. The plans related to residential areas and the building of the Police Headquarters have been approved by the Ma’aleh Adumim Municipality but not yet by the Civil Administration’s Planning Council.

8. The current built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim covers only 15% of the planned area. The overall plan for Ma’aleh Adumim, including E1, covers an area of at least 53 square kilometres (larger than Tel Aviv) stretching from Jerusalem to Jericho (comment: Israel’s defence of settlement expansion “within existing settlement boundaries” therefore covers a potentially huge area). In August 2005 Israel published land requisition orders for construction of the barrier around the southern edge of the Adumim bloc, following the route approved by the Israeli cabinet on 20 February 2005 (including most of the municipal area of Ma’aleh Adumim).

9. The E1 project would cut across the main central traffic route for Palestinians travelling from Bethlehem to Ramallah. This route is actually an alternative to route 60, which until 2001 was the main north-south highway connecting the major Palestinian cities (Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron) on the ridge of mountains in the West Bank. And Palestinians currently have only restricted access to route 60 (either permits are required for certain segments or roads are blocked), especially from/to the Jerusalem area.

10. Since 2003, some preparatory work has taken place. In the northern sector of E-1, where residential housing is planned, the top of a hill has been levelled in order to allow construction. In the southern section, where a police station and hotels are planned, an unpaved road has been constructed. But no further work has been carried out for over a year. On 25 August 2005 Israel announced plans to build the new police headquarters for the West Bank in E1, transferring it from its present location in East Jerusalem. Many previous settlements have started with a police station, and we are aware from Israeli NGOs that Israel has plans to convert the existing West Bank police headquarters, in Ras Al-Amud, into further settlement housing.

Settlement building inside East Jerusalem

11. Settlement building inside East Jerusalem continues at a rapid pace. There are currently around 190,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem, the majority in large settlement blocks such as Pisgat Ze’ev. The mainstream Israeli view is that the so-called Israeli “neighbourhoods” of East Jerusalem are not settlements because they are within the borders of the Jerusalem Municipality. The EU, along with the most of the rest of the international community, does not recognise Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem and regards the East Jerusalem “neighbourhoods” as illegal settlements like any others – but this does not deter Israel from expanding them. Some of these settlements are now expanding beyond even the Israeli-defined municipal boundary of Jerusalem, further into the West Bank. The Jerusalem municipality has also been active around Rachel’s Tomb, outside the municipal boundaries.

12. Smaller in number but of equal concern are settlements being implanted in the heart of existing Palestinian neighbourhoods, with covert and overt government assistance. Extremist Jewish settler groups, often with foreign funding, use a variety of means to take over Palestinian properties and land. They either prey on Palestinians suffering financial hardship or simply occupy properties by force and rely on the occasional tardiness and/or connivance of the Israeli courts. Such groups have told us that they also press the Israeli authorities to demolish Palestinian homes built without permits. Israel has previously used the “Absentee Property Law”[1] (generally applied only inside Green Line Israel) to seize property and land. The Attorney General declared that this was “legally indefensible” in the Bethlehem area earlier this year and the practise has stopped, but the law remains applicable to East Jerusalem and can be resurrected any time the Israeli Government sees fit.

13. Some of the Jewish settlements lack building permits, but not one has been demolished – in marked contrast to the situation for Palestinians. There are also plans to build a large new Jewish settlement within the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, a step that would be particularly inflammatory and could lead to the further “Hebronisation” of Jerusalem. The aim of these settlers, and settlements, is to extent the Jewish Israeli presence into new areas. As a result, President Clinton’s formula for Jerusalem (“what’s Jewish becomes Israel and what’s Palestinian becomes Palestine”) either cannot be applied – or Israel gets more.

SEPARATION BARRIER/WALL

14. Israel has largely ignored the Advisory Opinion of 9 July 2004 of the International Court of Justice regarding the barrier. On 20 February 2005, the Israeli Government approved the revised route of the separation barrier[2]. This route seals off most of East Jerusalem, with its 230,000 Palestinian residents, from the West Bank (i.e. it divides Palestinians from Palestinians, rather than Palestinians from Israelis). The Barrier is not only motivated by security considerations. On 21 June 2005, the Israeli High Court ruled that it was legal to take into account political considerations, in addition to security considerations, for the routing of the barrier in East Jerusalem because East Jerusalem had been Israeli territory since its annexation in 1967 (i.e. political considerations are not legal in the West Bank, which has not been annexed to Israel). On 10 July the Israeli Cabinet decided to route the Jerusalem barrier so as to keep around 55,000 East Jerusalemite Palestinians, mainly in the Shu’afat refugee camp, outside the barrier. The fact that the Cabinet decision not only included short-term but also long-term measures designed to accommodate the new situation created by the Barrier – e.g. constructing new educational institutions and encouraging hospitals to open branches “beyond the fence” – appears to contradict the notion of the Barrier being a temporary rather than a permanent structure. And if Israel were to provide adequate municipal services to the areas excluded (as it is promising to do) this would be in contrast to hitherto poor service provision in the rest of East Jerusalem. Israeli NGOs working on the Jerusalem issue have looked at Israeli proposals to ensure that the people affected are not “cut off” from the city, and judged them deficient.

15. The barrier extends like a cloverleaf to the northwest, southwest and east, beyond even the (Israeli defined) municipal boundary of Jerusalem, leaving 164 square kilometres of West Bank land on the “Israeli” (western) side. Combined with settlement activity in these areas this de-facto annexation of Palestinian land will be irreversible without very large scale forced evacuations of settlers and the re-routing of the barrier – which reportedly cost 800,000 euros per kilometre. It will also block the alternative Bethlehem-Ramallah route for Palestinians, forcing them to travel via tunnels or Jericho.

16. We should ensure that any support we provide to East Jerusalem is not simply an attempt to reduce the negative consequences of the construction of the separation barrier. The ICJ ruling on the barrier, accepted by the EU with limited reservations, states: “all States are under an obligation not to recognise the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction”.

RESTRICTIONS ON/DEMOLITIONS OF PALESTINIAN HOUSING

17. The Israeli authorities place severe restrictions on the building of Palestinian housing in East Jerusalem. The Israeli authorities will only issue building permits for areas that have zoned “master plans”. The municipality produces such plans for areas marked for settlement development, but not for Palestinian areas – only Palsetinians are expected to draw up their own plans, at great (generally unaffordable) expense. So each year Palestinians receive less than 100 building permits, and even these require a wait of several years. At the same time, rules requiring Palestinians with Jerusalem residency status either to reside in the city or risk forfeiting that status have forced thousands of Palestinians in this situation to move from other areas of the West Bank back to Jerusalem, adding to the severe pressure on housing. As a result, most new Palestinian housing is built without permits and is therefore considered “illegal” by the Israeli authorities (although under the 4th Geneva Convention occupying powers may not extend their jurisdiction to occupied territory). The restrictions and demolitions also leave undeveloped (but Palestinian-owned) land available for new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements.

18. In 2004, at least 152 buildings (most of them residential) were demolished in East Jerusalem, a sharp increase over previous years (66 in 2003, 36 in 2002, 32 in 2001 and 9 in 2000). In May 2005 the Jerusalem municipality’s intention to destroy 88 houses in the Silwan neighbourhood became public. Following media scrutiny and international pressure, they have put these demolitions on hold, but the future of Silwan remains uncertain, with demolition orders remaining in place. In the meantime, elsewhere in Palestinian neighbourhoods, homes continue to be demolished on a regular basis. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions 52 buildings (including a seven-storey building and eight petrol stations) have been demolished in East Jerusalem so far this year. The municipality’s budget for house demolitions (approved late, in March) stands at NIS 4m (approximately 800k euros), a figure slightly higher than last year. Our contacts estimate that this will allow the municipality to demolish 150-170 buildings. In cases where the municipality is deemed not to be carrying out its duty to demolish illegal buildings (whether through lack of will or budget constraints), the Ministry of Interior can and does demolish buildings (fourteen in 2004, six so far in 2005). House demolitions are illegal under international law (see above), serve no obvious security purpose (but rather relate to settlement expansion), have a catastrophic humanitarian effect, and fuel bitterness and extremism. Palestinians continue to build illegally because they have no alternative, and because the municipality and Interior Ministry together can only demolish a fraction of the approximately 12,000 “illegal” homes in existence. Palestinians describe it to us as “a lottery”.

ID CARDS AND RESIDENCY STATUS

19. Some Palestinians have blue Israeli ID cards, that give them the “right” to live in Israel (in practice, in East Jerusalem), but not to vote in Israeli national elections or take an Israeli passport. The renewal of these Blue ID cards is a lengthy, cumbersome and at times humiliating process to be carried out every year at the East Jerusalem office of the Israeli Ministry of Interior. The remainder have green West Bank ID cards or orange Gaza ID cards, and must apply for a permit to enter East Jerusalem. Eevn for those West Bankers and Gazans regularly employed in East Jerusalem, these entry permits have to be renewed every three months. Between 1996-1999 Israel implemented a “centre of life” policy meaning that those with blue ID found living or working outside East Jerusalem, for example in Ramallah, would lose their ID. A wave of blue ID cardholders therefore quickly moved back to East Jerusalem. The residency of hundreds of Palestinians that lived for a prolonged period outside of Israel and the OTs was revoked, a policy that continues. Renewed application of this rule and the construction of the barrier around Jerusalem has led to a second wave of “immigration” of blue ID card-holders to the city. Israel has also announced that it plans to introduce biometric, machine-readable ID cards. This is of great concern to Palestinians because it would enable Israel to check if blue ID cardholders really do live and work in the city, and if not, to expel more of them.

20. Israel’s main motivation is almost certainly demographic – to reduce the Palestinian population of Jerusalem, while exerting efforts to boost the number of Jewish Israelis living in the city – East and West. The Jerusalem master plan has an explicit goal to keep the proportion of Palestinian Jerusalemites at no more than 30% of the total. But the policy has severe humanitarian consequences – couples in which one spouse has a Blue ID and the other a Green ID will be forced to leave Jerusalem (Israel permits the transfer of blue ID status to spouses and children in theory but very rarely in practice). Palestinians with Israeli IDs already live in something of an identity limbo – neither Israeli Arabs, nor linked to the Palestinian Authority – and these measures can only worsen their situation. The separation of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank is crippling both areas economically, and the influx of returning blue ID card-holders is exacerbating the housing crisis – property prices and rents are soaring.

MUNICIPALITY POLICIES

21. The Jerusalem municipality is responsible for the majority of the house demolitions carried out in East Jerusalem (see above). It also contributes to the economic and social stagnation of East Jerusalem through other policies. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions claims that while Palestinians contribute 33% of the municipality’s taxes, in return it spends only 8% of its budget in Palestinian areas. The exact figures are hard to assess, but discrimination in expenditure is obvious. Palestinian areas of the city are characterised by poor roads, little or no street cleaning, and an absence of well-maintained public spaces, in sharp contrast to areas where Israelis live (in both West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem settlements). Even Jewish ultra-orthodox neighbourhoods (which contribute very little in taxes, for various reasons) are far better provided for by the municipality. The provision of services in what is, according to Israeli definitions, a single municipality, is therefore subject to discriminatory practices. Palestinians regard municipal taxes as a tax on their residency rights, rather than a quid pro quo for municipal services. The high level of taxation (given that Palestinian incomes are typically much lower) and discriminatory law enforcement that appears to target Palestinians for fines for a variety of offences (traffic violations, parking offences, no TV licence etc) further worsen the economic situation of Palestinians. This makes it harder for them to maintain their residency in the city, and more vulnerable to settler groups or Palestinian collaborators offering them good money for their property or land.

HUMANITARIAN AND POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

22. Cutting the link between East Jerusalem and the West Bank: Palestinian East Jerusalem has traditionally been the centre of political, commercial, religious and cultural activities for the West Bank, with Palestinians operating as one cohesive social and economic unit. Separation from the rest of the West Bank is affecting the economy and weakening the social fabric. Since Israel’s occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967, Palestinian access to Jerusalem from the West Bank has been increasingly restricted. During the Oslo Process, in 1993, the Israeli government banned entry for all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza without a permit. Settlements together with by-pass roads have further restricted access in Jerusalem. And the Barrier has further aggravated the situation.

23. Threats to Residency Status: Palestinian Blue ID holders outside the barrier are increasingly unable to access East Jerusalem, forcing them to access educational, medical and religious services in the rest of the West Bank. This jeopardises their Jerusalem residency rights, according to the Israeli “centre of life” policy.

24. Impact on the Education and Health Care Sector: West Bankers also face increasing difficulties in accessing the major Palestinian centres of health care and education in East Jerusalem. Schools in East Jerusalem that depend on West Bank staff are at urgent risk of closure. The same applies to hospitals: in addition to the dwindling numbers of patients from the West Bank due to access problems, some Israeli insurance companies are demanding that staff must have Israeli professional qualifications and registration. According to the PA Ministry for Jerusalem Affairs, approximately 68% of medical staff working at hospitals in East Jerusalem reside outside its municipal boundaries. The lack of patients and staff will cause a decline of the number and range of services, which often are not available in the West Bank.

25. Restriction of religious freedom: Christians and Muslims living east of the Barrier already have restricted access to their holy sites. West Bankers are finding it increasingly difficult to get to the Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount compound – because of the wider system of permits to enter Jerusalem, and the barrier. No males under 45 are allowed onto the compound. The Director of the Awqaf, which controls the mosques, has complained particularly about increasing Israeli measures to dominate and control the compound. Police have been regularly patrolling the compound for a year. The Israelis say this is to ensure good settler behaviour, but the effect is that it intimidates worshippers. The Israelis have also introduced new measures over the past few weeks – cameras have been placed at every gate, outside the Haram but pointing in. Thus every entrance is tightly controlled. The Israelis have also begun erecting fences on the buildings surrounding the Haram. Muslim concerns regarding access to (and threats to) the Haram al-Sharif mosques have both security and political implications. Perceived “threats” to the mosques by Jewish groups and the denial of access to Muslims regularly spark confrontations, and motivate Palestinian extremists.

26. The wider political consequences of the above measures are of even greater concern. As outlined above, prospects for a two-state solution with east Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine are receding. The greater the level of settlement activity in and around East Jerusalem the harder it will be to say what is Palestinian, and to link this up with the rest of the West Bank. Israeli activity in E1 and the fencing off of a broad area around Ma’ale Adumim are of particular concern in this regard. Israeli policies in East Jerusalem are making proposals for a resolution of the conflict along the one developed by the Geneva Initiative in 2003, a civil society initiative which was welcomed by the EU, harder to achieve.

27. Arrangements to facilitate the PA Presidential Election in East Jerusalem in January 2005 were unsatisfactory – Israel closed down voter registration centres, candidates could not campaign freely in the city, and restrictions on the number of polling stations led to chaos on election day. The report of former Prime Minister Rocard’s Elections Observation Mission sets out the problems clearly, along with recommendations for improvements ahead of the PLC elections, scheduled for 25 January 2006.
[1] Israel passed the Absentee Property Law in 1950. It states that any landowner who left her/his permanent residence at any time following November 29, 1947 to any Arab State, or to any area of the Land of Israel, which is not part of the State of Israel (i.e. West Bank and Gaza) automatically forfeited any property within the State of Israel to the Absenteed Property Custodian – a public body, which subsequently transferred title to these properties to the State. Most of these lands – primarily in the Negev and the Galilee – were used to build kibbutzim, moshavim and development towns for the Jewish population.
[2] Map available at: http://www.btselem.org/Downloads/Jerusalem_Separation_Barrier_Eng.PDF

Noah Cohen - Repression of Palestinian Activists in the US

2005-11-29T15:15:00.000+01:00

Where are the Defenders of Justice?
Thanks to Lana Habash for forwarding this from New England Committee to Defend Palestine and their site, One Palestine
April of 2002 saw some of the largest and most vocal demonstrations of solidarity for Palestine in US history. On April 5 in Boston, 2,000 people marched in the street protesting the Israeli invasion of Jenin and other Palestinian population centers; the march received prominent and unusually sympathetic coverage in the Boston Globe. On April 20 of 2002, between 50,000 and 100,000 people marched in Washington DC, protesting both the escalation toward war in Iraq, and continued US support for Israel in its military actions against Palestinians. The march was arguably the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in US history; the Washington Post gave it front-page coverage, quoting Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinian cause at length. In both of these demonstrations, Arabs and Muslims turned out in large numbers.

The significance of rallies and marches for changing US policy can be debated. The purpose of this article will not be to discuss the relative merits of public demonstrations, but rather to observe something about the recent history of repression against the Palestinian cause in the US, as yet uncommented in most of the current discussion of civil liberties. This silence is a glaring omission to anyone directly involved in pro-Palestinian organizing over the last few years.

For in fact, by the end of 2003, both of the two Palestinians who had spoken from the national stage in DC on April 20th had been detained; one was subsequently forced to leave the country, the other faces long-term imprisonment inside the US. In Boston, five of the central non-citizen Palestinian organizers had been forced from the country; two had also been detained by the INS or by its later incarnation, the Department of Homeland Security, and one had also been tortured in custody.

Why have these facts not been more generally discussed? More importantly, why has so little been done about them?

The View from Boston
Jaoudat Abouazza
Jaoudat Abouazza was part of a small community of Palestinian, non-citizen organizers who were centrally involved in building public demonstrations in Boston. His picture appeared at the front of the march in the April 6 Boston Globe. He attended regular demonstrations in front of the Israeli Consulate and brought supporters.

On May 30 of 2002, he was stopped by police in Cambridge, MA, ostensibly for an elapsed vehicle registration. The police searched his car and found a stack of flyers announcing a protest of the upcoming Israel Day of Celebration. Soon Abouazza would find himself in the Cambridge jail being interrogated by members of the FBI.

During Abouazza’s arraignment on the following day, the police had formulated a laundry list of charges against which Abouazza would never have the opportunity to defend himself.

The prosecutor cited the presence of the protest flyers along with a roll of speaker wire as a reason to deny bail (now infamous as the “flyers and wires” theory), an argument that the judge found persuasive. He was held for another three days until his first pre-trial hearing. During that time, he was repeatedly questioned by members of the FBI concerning his political beliefs and associations, in the absence of his court appointed attorney. By the time his pre-trial hearing arrived, the INS had already filed a detainer; he pleaded innocence, but the INS took him into custody on the following day. Since he was therefore unable to appear at his next hearing on June 12, the Cambridge Court issued a warrant for his arrest.

The Jaoudat Abouazza Defense Committee (JADC) was formed immediately after Abouazza’s arrest in Cambridge. Members worked on two fronts: mounting a public pressure campaign for Abouazza’s release; securing effective legal representation. After Abouazza’s detention by the INS, the JADC held a meeting with members of the local chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild who were centrally involved in the NLG Immigration Rights Project. The meeting seemed favorable. The NLG representatives surprised the committee a few days later by declining to take the case, without explanation. They provided instead a referral to an NLG affiliated immigration lawyer—Nelson Brill—who agreed to handle the case for his normal fee.

After Abouazza was transferred into INS custody, the interrogations continued, along with an escalating pattern of physical and psychological abuse. Upon his detention in Bristol County Jail, where he was moved from Cambridge, one guard punched him in the stomach; another called him “Taliban.” He was introduced to the other prisoners as a “terrorist.” He was repeatedly awakened in his cell by federal agents, who showed him flyers and pictures of political associates and asked him questions. He was placed in solitary confinement for refusing to answer questions. At no time was his lawyer present.

On Sunday, June 16, Palestinian activist Amer Jubran and another member of the defense committee visited Abouazza in Bristol. His mouth was swollen and bleeding. He told them that earlier on the same day he had been taken from his cell to a medical office inside the prison, strapped into a chair, and four of his teeth had been pulled against his will and without anesthesia. Attorney John Reinstein of the ACLU and Abouazza’s public defender, Emily Karstetter, visited Abouazza two days later. Karstetter confirmed to the press that she saw Abouazza’s wounds; Reinstein said nothing.

The JADC began a public pressure campaign to have Abouazza transferred to a medical facility both to receive treatment and to gain independent documentation of torture. Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson first denied that any teeth had been pulled; then claimed that the treatment was voluntary. He refused to grant access to an independent medical investigator, and later barred members of the defense committee and the ACLU from further visits.

On June 27, 28 days after his arrest, Abouazza was finally granted an immigration hearing. He asked for voluntary departure to Canada (where he was a citizen) in order to be released as soon as possible from the INS and from the threat of further abuse at the hands of US officials. The judge granted his request, but allowed for his continued detention by the INS pending their appeal. Amnesty International wrote a letter to Bristol on July 5, warning them that physical abuse of prisoners was a violation of international human rights, and asserting the need for independent medical review. The INS finally executed the order of voluntary departure to Canada a week later.

Partly as a result of the work of the JADC, news of Abouazza’s detention spread quickly through the local activist community. One consequence was an immediate chilling effect among local Arabs and Muslims, who recognized correctly that their own participation in political speech would not be protected. Whereas 2,000 people—disproportionately Arab and Muslim—had been on the street on April 5, less than 100 were present on June 9, for the protest for which Abouazza had been building at the time of his arrest. Abouazza’s subsequent torture in INS custody further drove home the message of intimidation.

Amer Jubran
Amer Jubran—active in Abouazza’s defense—was himself the object of political targeting and harassment. Jubran had helped to organize a protest of the Israel Day of Celebration in Brookline in June of 2001. The Brookline police arrested him and broke up the demonstration. They charged him with “assault with a dangerous weapon” (his shod foot) claiming that a local Zionist had accused Jubran of kicking him from behind.

A police video-tape gave clear evidence of the truth: Jubran had not kicked anyone. An independent eye-witness told the police that the accuser had been the aggressor, bumping into Jubran and speaking aggressively. The police at first attempted to suppress this evidence, along with dispatch tapes showing that there had been an advance order to “arrest Jubran” and “clear the demonstration.” As it turned out, the Brookline Police were also in the pay of the Israel Day of Celebration organizers, which included the Israeli Consulate; the Brookline Police had communicated information about the protest and protest organizers to the Israeli Consulate—an agent of a foreign government. After a long defense campaign, with 11 court appearances and lasting nearly a year, the Brookline court ultimately granted “pre-trial probation” and dismissed the charges.

Jubran went on to become a leading organizer of the New England Committee to Defend Palestine (NECDP), which helped to organize the June 9, 2002 protest against the Israel Day of Celebration. On November 2, 2002, the NECDP held its first fully independent event – a protest in commemoration of the disastrous Balfour Declaration of 1917—at which time it also announced publicly its principles: opposition to the existence of Israel as a colonial-settler state and support for a unified, democratic Palestine in all the historic territory of Palestine; full support for Palestinian human rights, including the right of Palestinians to resist colonization and the right of refugees to return their land; and an end of all US military, economic and political aid to Israel. Jubran led the demonstrators in a march through downtown Boston.

Two days later, on the morning of November 4, INS and FBI agents forced their way into Jubran’s home in Rhode Island and demanded that he answer some questions. INS agent David Adkins told Jubran that if he would “please the ears” of the FBI, he would be free by that afternoon. If he failed to do so, he “could rot in jail for 50 years.” Jubran said that he would only speak to them in the presence of an attorney. When he insisted on this right, the INS proceeded to arrest him.

Members of the NECDP formed a defense committee and organized a public pressure campaign to gain Jubran’s release, hiring Nelson Brill to handle his legal defense.

Initially the INS insisted that it planned to hold Jubran indefinitely, and refused to cite the statutes under which it claimed authority to do so. INS agent Mike Clifford hung up the phone on Brill when he demanded this information.

On November 21, the INS finally granted a bond hearing and did not contest bond when it was set by the judge. It nevertheless affirmed that it would move forward with deportation against Jubran, now claiming that his Green Card—granted three years earlier--had been obtained fraudulently, based on an alleged false marriage.

As the case unfolded over the following year, the INS—which became Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the Department of Homeland Security while the case was pending—systematically abused institutional power, withholding evidence and intimidating witnesses. A little more than a week before the trial scheduled for July 24, federal agents visited members of Jubran’s ex-wife’s family, interrogating one of them for nine hours and threatening to take her children away if she testified on Jubran’s behalf.

The prosecutor consistently failed to turn over documents, submissions of evidence, or witness lists. Jubran complied fully with these requirements. During the July 24 hearing, his ex-wife gave clear testimony that their marriage had been for love. The prosecutor submitted no evidence or witnesses to the contrary; instead, he used the proceedings to inquire about Jubran’s political activities and other extraneous matters. The judge over-ruled all objections to this line of inquiry. Although the judge claimed that he was prepared to rule in Jubran’s favor, he nevertheless granted the prosecutor time to prolong the case. It became clear to Jubran and the AJDC that the prosecutor was using the immigration proceedings to conduct a fishing expedition into Jubran’s political community.

The most disturbing aspect of Jubran’s trial was the tacit cooperation of his own lawyer with these proceedings. Brill made the appropriate political statements to the press: Jubran’s case was one of political silencing, an attempt to intimidate the activist community. He filed letters objecting to some of the most outrageous acts of the prosecutor—most importantly, the intimidation of Jubran’s witnesses. But he acted more as an officer of the court than as an advocate for his client’s rights. He defied specific instructions from his client not to enter into agreements with the prosecutor without consulting him, most importantly not to agree to repeated further continuances that were being used to facilitate an illegitimate investigation. As the final date of the trial drew near, this cooperation grew worse: against Jubran’s specific instructions, Brill agreed to a schedule for the trial itself that would have increased the ability of the prosecutor to use the trial as a means of conducting an illegitimate interrogation.

During his final trial on November 6, 2003, Jubran told the judge that he did not have faith in his lawyer and asked that he be granted time to obtain another. The judge told him that if he discharged his lawyer, he would be required to go on with the proceedings with no representation. The judge himself would proceed with direct questioning. Under these circumstances, Jubran requested voluntary departure. He would leave the country in January of 2004.

Further Cases
Two other members of the same Boston community of Palestinians were targeted during the same period. They will remain nameless, since they have not chosen to make their cases public. One was a very active member of the religious community who had been effective in the local mosques in building support for public demonstrations. He was visited by the FBI at his work and home. Although his immigration status was valid and he engaged in no illegal activities, he decided to leave the country after witnessing the treatment of Abouazza and Jubran.

His roommate was not so fortunate. Agents discovered that he had some irregularities in his immigration papers and detained him. They threatened him with 10 years in detention if he refused to discuss his roommate and other members of the activist community. He told them that there was nothing to discuss, since no one was engaged in anything illegal. They detained him for another ten months before deporting him.

Civil Liberties Organizations: a Pattern of Inaction
In the course of the proceedings against Jubran, the Amer Jubran Defense Committee submitted FOIA petitions to local, state, and federal police agencies. We obtained extensive evidence of police surveillance of activists: twelve video tapes from the Boston police department; evidence of the sharing of photographs between the Brookline and Boston police departments—including photographs of Jubran and his supporters inside the Brookline court; and communications between local and federal police agencies. During the July 24 hearing, an agent John Blake of the Department of Homeland Security attempted to attend the proceedings as if he were a “member of the interested public,” but was asked to leave after he was forced to reveal his true identity. The AJDC would later photograph him shadowing them at an anti-Ashcroft protest.

Jubran and members of the AJDC presented this information to civil liberties organizations, along with the record of federal abuse of institutional power in using immigration proceedings against Jubran to silence his political speech. In conversation, ACLU representatives affirmed that his case clearly showed a pattern of political harassment; they never followed-up with action on his behalf.

In August of 2003, Jubran wrote a letter to John Reinstein. Directed specifically to the ACLU, it expressed the failure of the civil liberties community in general to act in response to the unfolding repression of Palestinian activists in Boston:

“I am writing you to express my lingering dissatisfaction with the Boston Chapter of the ACLU. […]
The United States Government has targeted me because of my political beliefs and activities. The events that I have been subjected to in the last three years prove this beyond a doubt. Other Palestinian activists have been targeted as well.

The attacks on me started with Brookline case. I appreciated your involvement at the beginning of that affair. The information that we obtained from your inquiry was startling. This included the following discoveries:

• The Israel Independence Day organizers paid the city of Brookline for police protection;
• There was direct contact between the Brookline police captain and security officers at the Israeli consulate in Boston about our intention to protest on June 10;
• Surveillance of our demonstration in Brookline was done specifically to obtain mug shots of demonstrators;
• The FBI was contacted about local activists who only wished to express their political opinions.

Following this there continued to be other violations of my right to free speech and the linking of my name with September 11 by Brookline officials in the media. These events were of great significance to other activists and me. Yet, despite my numerous requests, you did not express any interest in following up with the any of above matters.

In the summer of 2002 Jaoudat Abouazza became the center of attention. His was a clear case of government targeting of Palestinian activists. On June 16, 2002, personnel at the Bristol County Jail extracted by force four teeth from Jaoudat's mouth, without using anesthesia. More disturbing was the fact that even though you saw the four wounds first hand and documented them with sketches, you did not provide any acknowledgement that this had happened. I hoped that you would at least confirm to the media, who did not think that I was a credible witness, what you saw that day. I did not then, and do not now, understand why you would not confirm what you saw.

Legal intervention was critical in the period while Jaoudat was still in custody—not only to remove him from the immediate danger of further abuse, but also to ensure that an independent medical and dental examination take place in time to document this act of torture. As it turned out, you helped us to obtain a lawyer […] who was willing to take on a lawsuit on Jaoudat’s behalf, but neither you nor [he] made any serious attempt to pursue either Jaoudat’s immediate release or immediate access to independent medical personnel. By the time Jaoudat was released from custody on ‘voluntary departure’ to Canada and we were able to re-establish contact with him, it was already too late for X-rays to show conclusively what had taken place.

The only other word I had from you last summer was your contacting us, not to inquire about Jaoudat, but to ask some questions on behalf of Nancy Geffen of the Jewish Council of Greater Boston. You asked to negotiate with us on our plans to protest the Israeli Day of Independence in Boston on June 9, 2002.

Last fall the government arrested me and put me in jail for seventeen days, without charges. After I was released, I visited with you and talked about my case in the hope that you would defend me. I was comforted by your strong statement that I was arrested because of my political actions and openly expressed opinions. In this December meeting, you explained that you could not do anything related to immigration defense. I replied that the Amer Jubran Defense Committee would take care of that. You also commented that the FBI's targeting of me based on my political actions would be hard to expose. Since then, friends of mine, with limited legal resources, managed to obtain important information through FOIA requests. This information, consisting of police reports and videotapes, provides clear evidence of an established network of surveillance and information sharing between local police departments, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. […]

My case has reached a crucial juncture. The immigration judge has expressed his unwillingness to hear testimony concerning FBI witness intimidation; he suggested that the civil courts would be a more appropriate place to bring such allegations. A civil rights suit against the Department of Homeland Security is the next step that we must take -- a step that is both logical in my case, and necessary for defending the fundamental rights of others -- but this step will require serious legal support, not merely token gestures of interest.

With the limited resources of the Amer Jubran Defense Committee we managed to get a lot done. However, the government is getting bolder in attempting to harass, silence my dissent, and punish me, as well as others. More support is needed to stop these illegalities and to prevent further abuses. The ACLU is a respected organization. I have seen how eager ACLU is in protecting the freedom of expression of others, but for some reason this eagerness stops short with me. I am left to ask why?”

The ACLU replied by inviting Jubran to a meeting. Once again, Reinstein agreed that Jubran’s case demonstrated political targeting and required action, but again no action followed. Reinstein was present during the final trial; his only intervention was to interrupt the proceedings to recommend that Jubran take the stand and submit to direct questioning by the judge-- without the protection of a lawyer.

Other organizations were no better. Bill Goodman, a civil liberties attorney and former director of the Center for Constitutional Rights looked at the case and suggested that it be the subject of a civil lawsuit. He promised to contact the Center for Constitutional Rights and ask for their support. On further follow-up calls, he insisted that nothing could be done until the immigration case was over. At an initial meeting, the local NLG representative made the outrageous claim that Jubran’s arrest had nothing to do with his political activities, but was a mere coincidence of broad sweeps of the Muslim and Arab community. She would later threaten a member of Jubran’s defense committee that other NECDP activists should not expect any help from the legal community after they had spoken publicly of their dissatisfaction with Brill—an NLG affiliated lawyer. Although the AJDC had hired Brill privately and paid him more than $5,000, she spoke as though the NLG had provided Brill’s services pro bono.

Response from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), both local and national, was minimal. The local ADC took its cue primarily from the ACLU.

After the conclusion of the November 6 trial, members of the AJDC began to speak publicly about ACLU inaction. The Massachusetts ACLU Executive Director Carol Rose invited us to discuss our concerns in person. On December 3, 2003 we met with her, John Reinstein and Nancy Murray, and spoke of two things primarily:

1) The ACLU encouraged people to stand up for their rights—e.g. to insist on their right not to be questioned without an attorney. It then failed to act legally in their defense when they did so—this meant that the ACLU’s campaign of community legal education tended only to put people in danger, since it gave them the false impression that they could expect a vigorous legal defense of their rights.

2) When the ACLU failed to take any legal action, it also undercut the credibility of the people targeted when they turned to the public for support.

Members of the AJDC had also been active in immigrant and detainee response networks in New England. One member had given the ACLU lists of names of individuals who reported abuse in detention.

ACLU representatives asked that detainees be encouraged to document these abuses in writing—an action that placed their testimony in the hands of prison guards, often the same ones who had subjected them to the abuse. In only one case did the ACLU send a lawyer to investigate further, after a delay of more than two weeks; by then the inmate had been transferred to another facility, and the lawyer did not attempt to investigate allegations of abuse by other prisoners at the same facility. The ACLU undertook no further follow-up action that might have protected the prisoners from reprisal.

Rose admitted that the ACLU had not won the faith of the Arab and Muslim community, and she looked to us for help providing some guidance for improvement. She asked us to put our concerns in a letter to her, and invited us to meet again in order to initiate a plan of further action. We sent a five-page letter reiterating what we had said in conversation; she replied by breaking off all correspondence.

In our meeting, ACLU attorney John Reinstein claimed that he had never been asked to take any legal action on Jubran’s behalf, neglecting to mention Jubran’s letter. He also insisted that no legal action—such as a suit for a violation of Jubran’s constitutional rights—could be taken under the circumstances. The Supreme Court had already decided in the case of the LA8 that the federal government could selectively prosecute immigrants for deportation because of their political views. It was thus futile to litigate the matter further.

The View Nationally
Amer Jubran and Sami al-Arian had shared the stage as Palestinian activists in DC on April 20, 2001. In February of 2003, Al-Arian would be arrested and imprisoned on charges of “supporting terrorism.” For the next eight months he was forced to rely on court-appointed attorneys who did little to help him. Much of his time was spent in solitary confinement under 23 hour lockdown. Serious defense did not begin until his defense campaign was able to raise enough money to hire private attorneys in October of 2003.

His trial is finally coming to a conclusion. It has clearly been a case of targeting for political speech and other legal activities in support of Palestinian organizations.

The targeting of Palestinian political activists has taken place within a broader context of attacks on Arabs and Muslims. This has allowed the government to conceal the political nature of its campaign: specific attacks against activists can be hidden under sweeping policies. The overall purpose has nevertheless been to silence a community living within the US that has intimate knowledge of US imperial crimes in Palestine, Iraq and the surrounding region.

On the whole, the civil liberties community has protested against these sweeping attacks on Arab and Muslim men; it has—perhaps for this very reason—tended to distance itself from more overtly political cases. Few rallied around Ali Al-Timimi—a religious leader sentenced to life in prison for preaching in his mosque against US imperialism. Imprisonment specifically of politically oriented Muslims who support armed liberation of their countries has been normalized in the full range of US discourse, even in cases where “support” consists entirely of speech.

On April 9 of 2002 Lynne Stewart was arrested for vigorously defending Muslim cleric Shiek Omar Abdel Rahman. Many progressive lawyers expressed outrage, above all because the action targeted a member of their own community. Equal support has not been extended to her two assistants, Mohammed Yousry and Ahmed Sattar, arrested at the same time. Though Stewart herself has said that she, her client, and her two assistants have all been subject to the violation of the same basic right to freedom of speech, leading civil libertarian David Cole would write instead:

“So how did the prosecution meet its burden [against Stewart]? With classic McCarthy-era tactics: fearmongering and guilt by association. First, it tried Stewart together with Ahmed Sattar, an Egyptian-born US citizen against whom it had thousands of hours of wiretaps of communications with a terrorist group. Among other things, Sattar had issued a fake fatwa urging followers to "kill [Jews] wherever they are." By trying Stewart and Sattar together, the government could taint Stewart with Sattar's sins, even though, as was the case with the fatwa, she had nothing to do with them and no knowledge of them.” (“The Lynne Stewart Trial,” The Nation, February 17, 2005)

Notice that Cole takes Sattar’s “sins” at face value; he describes telephone conversations as “communication with a terrorist group,” adopting the government’s language. He objects not so much to trying all three defendants for their speech, but rather to Ashcroft’s “tainting” of Lynne Stewart by association.

Legal Action as Part of a Strategy for Change
Reinstein’s comments about the futility of litigating the rights of immigrants to freedom of speech and equal protection of the law after the 1999 Supreme Court decision in the case of the LA8 must be understood in its full ideological context. In fact, progressive lawyers have a long history of litigating cases on principle as part of a larger strategy of political change.

At an NLG forum in San Francisco in November of 2003, David Cole and Jules Lobel gave a talk entitled “Fighting (for) Justice after September 11: the Threat to Civil Liberties and What We Can Do About It.” Lobel’s talk centered around the issues raised by his book, Success Without Victory: Lost Legal Battles and the Long Road to Justice in America. He affirmed that it was not only necessary to fight “winning cases” that establish precedent. Where poor legal precedents have already been established, it was still necessary to fight “losing cases” in order to build political movements—in some cases political movements that will help to change the law.

Thus it was necessary to continue to challenge slavery in the courts after Dred Scott, since this was a part of building the movement to abolish slavery. It was equally useful to litigate against US military intervention in Central America—though bound to lose—because this would contribute to public education and the building of a movement to stop US military intervention.

This analysis leads to an important corollary: although a civil liberties attorney might take a “winning case” on principle in defense of freedom of speech for a cause he does not support, he will not take a “losing case” if the only consequence will be to build support for that cause. A “progressive” attorney might defend the free-speech rights of a Nazi or pedophile if he believes that it will set a valuable precedent in defense of the free-speech rights of all. He might take a “losing case” if he supports the political cause it represents.

Based on the official position of the National Lawyer’s Guild in support of the Palestinian Right of Return and other similar positions, one would expect strong support in NLG chapters across the nation for the rights of Palestinian activists in the US. The NLG has historically helped in the defense of Palestinians; David Cole continues to represent the LA8 in their ongoing appeals.

In Boston, this support has not been forthcoming from any of the existing organizations. In addition, active members of the civil liberties community who have taken public stands on the Palestinian cause have clearly been on the side of “left Zionism.” Our experience suggests that “left-Zionists” in particular may have an interest in silencing Palestinian activists, since this allows them to dominate what passes for “pro-Palestinian” politics in the US. Palestinians who call for strong positions in support of their full historic rights to land and their right to defend themselves from colonial settlers “by any means necessary” are frequently repudiated and shut out of public venues by these same nominal “pro-Palestinians.”

Will ideologically committed “left-Zionists” be likely to continue mounting challenges to the rules of “ideological exclusion” if they are not likely to win cases in the current ideological climate? Will they do so if one consequence will be to give Palestinian radicals a larger voice in the political movement?

There are individual lawyers in the existing civil liberties organizations who genuinely fight for the rights of Palestinians. There are young legal activists who support the full range of Palestinian rights. But these individuals are buried under the larger organizations and have no coherent voice.

Locally, in our attempts to fight repression, we have found that we cannot in good conscience provide Arabs and Muslims asking for legal aid with NLG, ACLU or ADC contact information, since we cannot rely on their genuine help. This is especially true in cases of activists targeted for their political views. Local immigrant rights and civil liberties organizations have largely confined their challenges to post-9/11 government action to defending what they call “innocent immigrants”—this means primarily non-political people who have been arrested as a result of racial profiling or other sweeping institutional and legislative actions. Even here their record has been shoddy.

We need an organization of radical lawyers who truly believe in the right of Palestinians to self-determination, including their right to speak out on behalf of their struggle here inside the US. Only such an organization will be willing to defend those rights zealously.

Remarks at the Saban Forum Closing Session - Deconstructing Condi

2005-11-20T00:51:00.000+01:00

Secretary Condoleezza Rice (my comments in bold)
Jerusalem November 13, 2005

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you, Haim, for that generous introduction and thank you to you and to Cheryl for what you do through this organization and through this forum to support and promote Israeli-American dialogue. I'd like to recognize Ambassador Indyk for his role in this. And to all of you who have participated in this dialogue, I only wish that I could have been to hear the fine panels that have taken place. But it is this kind of vision and leadership and generosity that are helping to make the Saban Center and this annual forum such a critical contribution to peace and understanding. The United States and Israel, of course, share history and share interests but most of all we share values and because we share values, our friendship will always be strong and deep and broad. (Applause.)

---They share history? Hmm. I would say that every nation that has had anything to do with Israel shares its history. What is this special historical role? They share interest$, yes, no argument there. Share values, agreed, and that is why neither of them value true democracy and are racist to the core. It takes no effort at all to see the ways the minority groups live in these countries to be the first barometer of the value (expressed in Dollars).

As I look out tonight at this audience, I see many businessmen and academics and statesmen and even a few journalists who are -- somehow made it on to the guest list -- (laughter) -- and I see that there's a depth of historic partnership that really does bridge -- as Prime Minister Sharon said, not just our governments but our people and that is what is represented here.
I am honored, too, by the many distinguished members of the Israeli Government who are here, including former Prime Minister Barak, Vice Premier Peres -- thank you very much for being here -- and of course, Prime Minister Sharon. Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, for your wonderful address but also for your leadership of this great country and for your friendship for America.

---Ok, Condi. You are enthusiastic about Arik, why not just immediately state that he is the candidate that the United States is endorsing and get it over with.

I would like to thank former Secretary of State James Baker who on behalf of President Bush -- 43, not President Bush 41 -- is leading our delegation here and it's a delegation to the events attending the 10th Anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. It's a delegation that reflects every branch of the government. There are members of our Congress here, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is here. And I want to thank all of you and the many private citizens from the United States who have come as well.
I want to recognize one person, however, and his wife and that's Jim Wolfensohn and Elaine. Jim was planning was on a very nice retirement in Jackson Hole after his work at the World Bank and we said, well, we have another small task for you and he has been thoroughly and completely involved since then. Thank you very much, Jim. (Applause.)

When I first came to Israel, I said that it was like coming home to a place I had never been. And, indeed, I am always happy to return here to Jerusalem, which is an especially powerful place to be for someone like me who holds deep religious beliefs.

---Boy, coming home to a place you had never been. Just think how it must feel for the Palestinians, who HAD been to their homes and aren’t permitted to come back. Can you relate to that? Or is it just a religious thing?

This visit, of course, to Jerusalem is also marked by the memory of sorrow because tomorrow, along with many of you, I will attend the memorial service honoring Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was tragically assassinated a decade ago.
Yitzhak Rabin represented the pioneer spirit of the Israeli heartland -- the impatient optimism and rugged determination that helped Israel to turn its barren soil green and to build a new home in its native land and indeed to take up arms when it was necessary against all who denied this nation’s right to exist.

---A propaganda speech straight from the Zionist myth. Barren soil, native land, take up arms against all who deny its right to exist (and the right to exist of the Palestinians doesn’t seem to phase her).

And when Israel needed to secure its independence and repel attackers along many fronts, Yitzhak Rabin distinguished himself on the field of battle.

---A war criminal, the mind behind Operation Dani, where 500,000 civilians were deported from Lydda and Ramleh. 5,000 more were expelled from three other villages during the Six Day War. Is this distinguishing oneself on the battlefield? If I were him I would be ashamed to look at my children in the eye.

And when Israel needed leadership, they summoned him to serve democracy and he distinguished himself in the halls of government. And when Israel needed a vision of peace, Yitzhak Rabin distinguished himself at the negotiating table.
He was a man who was a pioneer and a warrior and a statesman and a peacemaker. And he approached all of his callings, especially that of peace, with tenacity, and aplomb and a gritty realism -- but also with hope and trust and an abiding idealism.

---Warrior, yes. Leading Israel into the aggression against Lebanon. Any repentance he ever felt was not for “peace”, but for something else.

After risking death so many times in war, it was for the cause of peace that he ultimately gave his life. And despite the heroic efforts of many individuals since that time, the past decade has seen much pain and disappointment. Terrorists have claimed the lives of over one thousand innocent Israelis and injured thousands of others -- men and women and children who simply wanted to enjoy a pizza or catch a bus or celebrate Passover.

---Isn’t that a picturesque image? These nice families just wanting to be normal, and all those nasty terrorists coming around.

And the Palestinian people have suffered, too. They too have mourned the loss of innocent life. They too have been deprived of days that are normal, filled with peace and opportunity. And now, and for many years to come, they must work to overcome a legacy of corruption and violence and misrule by leaders who promised to fulfill their people’s dreams, but instead preferred arbitrary power over democratic progress.

---Condi doesn’t stop for a moment to reflect upon WHY they have suffered. She lists corruption, violence and misrule by their leaders who denied them democracy. She had better come down from her cloud soon, the air up there is very thin. As you will see in the rest of this discourse, NONE of the Palestinian suffering is due to anything the Israelis have done! It is self inflicted suffering, and if America starts to invest, now that there is a new president, all will turn nice for them. But, I jump too far ahead, those readers who are courageous enough to still follow me.

In the face of so much suffering, it is at times difficult to remain hopeful. But, ladies and gentlemen, I believe deeply when future observers are in a position to know the full history of this conflict, they may point back to this present moment as a time when peace became more likely, not less likely; when peace began to seem inevitable, not impossible -- for the last several years have seen deep changes in this region, changes conducive to real progress.

---Does Condi know the full history of this conflict? It doesn’t sound like it. And, as a matter of fact, peace seems to be less possible than before. The Wall, which is NEVER mentioned in this paper is disrupting Palestinian life like nothing before, the Jews Only Roads are being built, the checkpoints are being mechanised and if possible, even further militarised and Jerusalem and large areas of the West Bank are being taken away from Palestinians day after day in an irreversible way. Israel has picked off most of the leaders of Palestinian society, and there have been more killings of Palestinian civilians in the past few years than in recent memory. The Third Intifada seems to be far from a remote possibility.

Today, we have hope for peace because the international community is united in its historic struggle against terrorism. People in the Middle East are also speaking more clearly against terrorism. And they are rejecting the bankrupt belief that national struggles or religious teachings legitimize the intentional killing of innocents.

---Why blame national struggles only now? When Israel did it, you seem to hail it as nation building. Why equate religious teaching with terrorism, when Israel engages in State Terrorism under the name of a Jewish State by dropping bombs into crowded streets to assassinate a Palestinian leader.

As we have seen in the aftermath of the vicious attacks in Jordan -- and let me join the Prime Minister in extending our condolences to the people of Jordan -- an attack in which dozens of people were killed and wounded and many more harmed because their personal lives were turned upside down by this attack. Fortunately, now, leaders and clerics and private citizens are stepping forward and taking to the streets and calling this evil by its name. This is a profound change and there are others.
We have hope for peace today because people no longer accept that despotism is the eternal political condition of the Middle East. More and more individuals are demanding their freedom and their dignity. Mothers and fathers are saying that they want their children to be engineers, not suicide bombers; that they want their children, daughters as well as sons, to be voting citizens, not docile subjects. There is now growing agreement that democracy is the only path to stability, to real legitimacy and to lasting peace.

---Individuals have wanted the best for their children since time began. Why do you think that American style democracy is something that they want? They have values that predate this, and are more profound and relevant to them. Why not learn to respect that? Why call it despotism if many times, that is not what it is?

Of course, many skeptics still question whether freedom will truly lead to more peace in this region. I believe that it will. We have seen that when authoritarian governments cannot ensure justice and security and prosperity for their people, they look for false legitimacy and they blame their failures on modernity or on America or on the Jews.

---America and the Jews of Israel and those who support Israel have brought no end of suffering to the Arabs of the Middle East and to any area of the world that does not accept this brand of Western hegemony. Did America or Israel bring prosperity, justice or security to the Palestinians, to the Afghanis, to the Iraqis? Is it a question then, of just not being as GOOD as America or Israel, to whom they must model themselves? I would say, being an invaded and militarily occupied nation does kind of put a damper on progress and prosperity.

We have also seen that when people are denied freedom to express themselves, when they cannot advance their interests and redress their grievances through an open political process, they retreat into shadows of alienation to be preyed upon by fanatical men with violent designs. We are not naïve about the pace or the difficulty of democratic change. But we know that the longing for democratic change is deep and urgently felt.

---She sees the solution as a purple finger vote? When Palestinians and their supporters demonstrate non-violently in Bi’lin, they are shot at or arrested. What else are they supposed to do? How can people have the freedom to express themselves if it is expressing against the violent and racist regime that is Israel?

And when we look at a nation like Iran, we see an educated and sophisticated people who are the bearers of a great civilization. And we also see that as Iran's Government has grown more divorced from the will of its citizens, it has become more threatening, not less threatening. No civilized nation should have a leader who wishes, or hopes, or desires, or considers it a matter of policy to express that another country should be pushed into the sea. It is simply unacceptable in the international system. (Applause.)

---That America constantly destroys and creates countries at will, this comment is almost more than vulgar. America has overthrown, arrested or assassinated more than one foreign leader and invaded more than one country, never achieving victory. There might be something to reflect upon behind this. Sometimes the people do know better than the invaders. Sometimes the will of the citizens isn’t what Condi thinks it is. And, the question begs, how does she know what the Iranian people think? I believe that the majority is absolutely against Zionism, as was expressed by their president. I shall not comment on the non-application of Resolution 181, where Israel unilaterally declared itself a State, without recognising the Palestinian one. This is making Palestine fall off into the sea, and so far, no nation, or no international body had lifted a finger in seeing that this Resolution is applied either in spirit or in deed.

Now, it's given real freedom to hold their government accountable. It is doubtful that the majority of Iranian people would choose to deepen their country's international isolation through these incendiary statements and threatening policies. But more than anything, ladies and gentlemen, we have hope for peace because these moral and philosophical changes in the Middle East are leading to democratic progress in the region itself. Men and women are standing up for their fundamental freedoms. They are pressuring states with long habits of authoritarian rule to open their political systems.
One decade after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, it is clear that the strategic context of the Middle East has changed dramatically and this is a hopeful development that can make Israel more secure, peace more possible, and America more secure.

---How does it make America more secure? By assuring that the leaders “elected” are those who are America-friendly regardless of any other issues they may have? Whether or not they are democracies, theocratic monarchies, or puppet regimes? It doesn’t matter, as long as they march to the tune you whistle.

During this time, really only in the last two years -- the blink of an eyelash in history -- the Government of Libya has made a fundamental choice to give up its weapons of mass destruction and to rejoin the community of nations.

---When will America and Israel give up their weapons of mass destruction and join the community of nations. In my eyes, any nation that has ever dropped an atomic bomb or two on any cities or groups of human beings should be excluded from the community of nations and should be making reparations from here to judgment day. Get off your high moral horse, because you don’t belong there. Look at what you are doing to the people of Iraq with your WMD’s. How do you sleep at night?

Egypt has had a presidential election and parliamentary elections under new constitutional rules. Saudi Arabia has taken initial steps toward political openness. And Kuwait has granted its women citizens the right to vote. The people of Lebanon have reclaimed their country after three decades of Syrian military occupation. They have held free elections. They are pursuing democratic reforms. And the international community is united in our defense of Lebanon’s rights as an independent, sovereign nation.

----Not a word about Israeli occupation of the Golan. Lebanon, actually, enjoyed defence against Israel by the so-called Syrian occupation, which was basically a military presence, and not a rule from the outside, which is what an occupation really is. This is pure propaganda that Condi utters. Not to mention, her thrill at Kuwait and Saudi Arabia starting to become modern, like Iraq was before the invasion.

The Government of Syria has increasingly isolated itself from the international community through its support for terrorism, its interference in the affairs of its neighbors, its destabilizing behavior in the region, and its possible role in the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. And the recent speech by President Asad only reflects and reinforces the Syrian Government’s current isolation. And the United Nations is now holding Syria to account for its disturbing behavior.

----Blaming Syria for what precisely? If there is a destabilising force, it is the United States, which has brought around war to the region and destroyed a country in the process, without rebuilding it in any way, except to establish the pipeline routes and secure the oilwells.

And we have hope for peace because Saddam Hussein is no longer terrorizing his people, threatening his region and paying the families of suicide bombers. (Applause.)

----There were no suicide bombers before this war. The Iraqi insurgency, resistance and civil war was an American contribution to peace and love in the region.

Instead, Saddam Hussein is sitting in an Iraqi prison, awaiting trial for his many crimes.

---Why isn’t he being tried in an international court of law? When will the US be tried for its many war crimes?

The Iraqi people, after decades of tyranny, are now attempting to govern themselves through compromise, not conflict. They have freely voted twice. They have written and ratified a constitution. And the vast majority of Iraqis are now working through the democratic process to avert the very civil war that terrorists like Zarqawi wish to ignite.

----In case you haven’t noticed, the civil war is in full swing. Things have never been worse in Iraq than they currently are. Condi, you can find all of this stuff on Internet. No need to leave your office.

But perhaps the most extraordinary and hopeful change of recent years has been the growing consensus, led by the United States, that we must support the chorus of reform now resounding throughout the Middle East.
On Saturday, I was in Bahrain for the second meeting of the Forum for the Future, a partnership for political, economic, and social reform between the G-8 nations and members of government and civil society in the broader Middle East.
We had a conversation about political participation and women’s rights and the rule of law -- a conversation unthinkable just a few years ago -- and a conversation that must soon include Israel.

----It is clear that the United States and Israel are seen as negative forces in that they persist in engaging in a sort of “clash of cultures” and disregard the lives and values of Arabs. There is no lack of evidence that they do not support in any way real Arab independence, freedom or progress. If Israel wants to be accepted by their neighbours, they must first respect them, and this means, liberating them from the oppression that they are imposing on them.

The changes of the past decade are quite remarkable, then, in the strategic context of the Middle East. And those changes are also transforming the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. In 2002, President Bush recognized that the Palestinian leadership at the time was an obstacle to peace, not a force for peace; and he encouraged the Palestinian people to begin opening their political system.

-----Arafat was elected by his people. Democratically. Isn’t this what you have been asking for? Why then, does the American president decide who is the appropriate leader and who can obtain peace? Why did he not have anything to say about the Israeli leader, who has more blood on his hands and is the immediate responsible for the occupation of an entire people and the restrictions placed upon their freedoms?

The President laid out an historic vision of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security and he made it the policy of the United States.
Now, the Palestinian people are finally undertaking the democratic and economic reforms that have long been denied to them. They have elected a president, Mahmoud Abbas, who openly calls for peace with Israel.

---Arafat also called for peace and had recognised Israel. What more could he do? The only choice left was to surrender, and that hadn’t been done. Any attempts made to establish dialogue were thwarted by Israel. At Aqaba, ceasefire was not enough, the Palestinian side had to disarm its groups as well, without being able to receive any guarantees from Israel. A demand of the sort is reminiscent of the prelude to the Iraq war. Iraq was completely stripped of its defences, and then invaded. Why should any group accept to be disarmed if there is no one preventing further disaster to come to them, including military invasion?

And for our part, we are helping them, providing $350 million to help them build the institutions of a democratic future. This movement toward democracy in the Palestinian territories and across the Middle East has also changed the debate here, in Israel, about the sources of security.
Because this nation no longer lives in fear of enemy tanks attacking from the east, we now hear it said, among most Israelis, that a peaceful and democratic Palestinian state is essential to Israel’s security.

---Ah, so that was what the Iraq war and the pressure on Syria and Iran are all about. And, she speaks as if the Palestinian State already exists. Why is this so common? Israel has done nothing to make any viable State exist, as it has been concentrating all of its efforts at getting as much as it can into the Jewish State.

And this new thinking led to new action in August when Israel chose to disengage from Gaza and the northern West Bank. Prime Minister Sharon: President Bush and I admire your personal courage, your leadership and the crucial contribution to peace that you are making. (Applause.)

Disengagement was a testament to the character and the strength of Israeli society, especially to the men and women of the Israeli Defense Forces and the police service, whose noble conduct during this painful event set a standard to which all democratic nations should aspire. And the effective cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians was both impressive and inspiring.
Disengagement can be a great step forward on the path to a different Middle East. It creates an opportunity for the Palestinians to secure their liberty and build a democratic state. At the same time, the changing nature of the Middle East can reinforce the democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people and deny the enemies of reform their favorite excuse for coercive rule and unconscionable violence. These positive developments will not jeopardize Israel’s security; they will enhance it. After all, true peace is that which exists between peoples, not just between leaders.

---She talks about disengagement, and will not utter the word OCCUPATION. Nor does she talk about the Wall. For her, it is so simple, it almost would be charming if it weren’t so naïve. Just what is the “favorite excuse” of the Palestinian people? To them, the occupation is real. The refugee camps are real. The lack of freedom of movement and political status are real.

Now, if Palestinians fight terrorism and lawless violence and advance democratic reforms -- and if Israel takes no actions that prejudge a final settlement and works to improve the daily lives of the Palestinian people -- the possibility of peace is both hopeful and realistic. Greater freedom of movement is a key for Palestinians, from shopkeepers to farmers to restaurant owners and for all seeking early easier access to their economic livelihood.

---Say it, Ms Rice. The Palestinians are being treated like dirt, and not only those who are trying to get to their workplaces, although the checkpoints are a terrible violation of their rights. Why do you refuse to criticise Israel, if you are such good friends, they should be able to accept this advice.

And let us be very clear about one other matter: Dismantling the infrastructure of terrorism is essential for peace because in the final analysis, no democratic government can tolerate armed parties with one foot in the realm of politics and one foot in the camp of terrorism. (Applause.)

---Yes, pull out the magical word and applause rains down. It is the easy catchall for anything too ugly to call by its real name. I would classify it as one of your “favorite excuses”.

This is the vision before us in the roadmap. And I look forward to our engagement to move it forward. But there are other responsibilities, too. Israel’s neighbors must demonstrate their concern for peace not only with rhetoric but with action. We encourage them -- Egypt to enhance its cooperation with Israel on basic security issues. And we call on all Arab states to end incitement in their media, cut off all funding for terrorism, stop their support for extremist education, and establish normal relations with Israel. (Applause.)

---In other words, capitulate without receiving anything in exchange. And, never, ever ask for Israel to reform its behaviour or be more forthcoming towards the Arab nations in any way.

We look to Arab states also to help revitalize the Palestinian economy because the Palestinians are a talented and well-educated people with great potential for prosperity. They cite greater economic opportunity as their most urgent desire. They deserve a chance to have it.
And so the responsibilities of peace, like the benefits of peace, will be shared among all parties. And peace must be more than a mere process if it is to summon our strength and demand our sacrifice. Peace must be a calling that stirs our very souls, a vision that is not only local but regional as well; a vision in which the sons and daughters of Israel are secure in their homeland and at peace with their neighbors.

---Can the Palestinians be secure in their homeland? This question will always be avoided, because it means recognition of the Right of Return.

The world saw a passing glimpse of this vision ten years ago when unprecedented numbers of Arab leaders journeyed here to see Yitzhak Rabin laid to rest in the land of the prophets. And today, we want to continue advancing that vision.
It should be a Middle East where democracy flourishes and the non-negotiable demands of human dignity form the foundations of citizenship. We envision a Middle East where all men and women are secure in their persons and in their property, with equal opportunities for prosperity and justice. And we will continue to envision and work toward a future when all the people of the Middle East may gather in this great ancient city, not to mourn a fallen hero, but to build a common future.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)

---and in real words, blah blah blah….

Tomdispatch Interview: Ann Wright on Service to Country

2005-11-15T00:40:00.000+01:00

Tom Engelhardt
November 13, 2005
[Note to Tomdispatch readers: This is the fifth in an ongoing series of interviews at the site. The most recent of these were: Cindy Sheehan and Juan Cole (parts 1 and 2). This interview also represents the first follow-up at the site to Nick Turse's The Fallen Legion: Casualties of the Bush Administration.]

"A Felon for Peace"

A Tomdispatch Interview with Ann Wright

She's just off the plane from Tulsa, Oklahoma, the cheapest route back from a reunion in the little Arkansas town where she grew up in the 1950s. For thirty years, she and her childhood friends have climbed to the top of Penitentiary Mountain, where the local persimmon trees grow, for a persimmon-spitting contest. ("All in the great spirit of just having fun and being crazy.") She holds out her hands and says, "I probably still have persimmon goop on me!"

We seat ourselves at a table in my dining room, two small tape recorders between us. She's dressed all in black with a bright green over-shirt, a middle-aged blond woman wearing gold earrings and a thin gold necklace. As she settles in, her sleeves pull back, revealing the jewelry she'd rather talk about. On her right wrist is a pink, plastic band. "This one was to be a volunteer in the Astrodome for Hurricane Katrina. I did two days work there, then three days in Covington, Louisiana, the first week after." On her left wrist, next to a watch from another age, are two blue plastic bands: "And this one," she says with growing animation, fingering the nearest of them, "was my very first arrest of my whole life on September 26th in front of the White House with 400 of my closest friends. This is the bus number I was on and this is the arrest number they gave me and then, later on, I had to date it because now I have two." She fingers the second band. "Last week 26 of us were arrested after a die-in right in front of the White House in commemoration of the two thousandth American and maybe one hundred thousandth Iraqi who died in this war. So now," she announces, chuckling heartily, "I'm a felon for peace."

When she speaks -- and in the final g's she drops from words ("It's freezin' in Mongolia!") -- you can catch just a hint of the drawl of that long-gone child from Bentonville, Arkansas. In her blunt, straightforward manner, you can catch something of her 29 years in the Army; and in her ease perhaps, the 16 years she spent as a State Department diplomat. Animated, amused by her foibles (and those of her interviewer), articulate and thoughtful, she's just the sort of person you would want to defend -- and then represent -- your country, a task she continues to perform, after her own fashion, as one of the more out-of-the-ordinary antiwar activists of our moment.

Last August, she had a large hand in running Camp Casey for Cindy Sheehan at the President's doorstep in Crawford, Texas; then again, that wasn't such a feat, given that in 1997 she had overseen the evacuation of 2,500 foreigners from the war zone that was then Sierra Leone, a harrowing experience for which she was given the State Department's Award for Heroism. "That's why I joined the foreign service," she comments, her voice still filled with some residual excitement from those years. "I wanted to go to places you wouldn't visit on vacation." In fact, the retired colonel opened and closed embassies from Africa to Uzbekistan and took some of the roughest diplomatic assignments on Earth, including the reopening of the American embassy in Kabul in December 2001.

On March 19, 2003, the day before the first Cruise missiles were launched against Baghdad, she resigned from the Foreign Service in an open letter sent from the U.S. embassy in Mongolia (where she was then Deputy Chief of Mission) to Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it she wrote, in part:

"This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an Administration of the United States. I disagree with the Administration's policies on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korea and curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S. itself. I believe the Administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place. I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them."

Once used to delivering official U.S. statements to other governments, she now says things like: "Everyone should have to be handcuffed with the flexi-cuffs they use now and feel just how unflexible they are, just how they cut, and then imagine Iraqis, Afghans, and other people we pick up in them 24 hours a day." She relaxes, sits back, awaits the first question, and responds with gusto.

Tomdispatch: I thought we'd start by talking about two important but quite different moments in your life. The first was not so long ago. Let me quote from a New York Times article on a recent Condoleezza Rice appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "It was a day that echoed the anguish, anger and skepticism that opinion polls show have begun to dominate the thinking of Americans. The hearing was punctuated by a heckler who called for an end to the war, only to be hustled out." Now, I believe this was you.

Ann Wright: [She chuckles.] Yes! Not a heckler, I was a protester.

TD: Tell me about it.

AW: It was as much a protest against the Senators as against Condoleezza Rice, because they were not holding our Secretary of State responsible. I picked up the Washington Post that morning and noticed that Condoleezza was going to testify on Iraq, and I thought, well, I'm free until noon. When I walked in, I was not planning on doing anything.

But I sat there for two hours and Senators were saying: We've heard the administration is discussing a military option in Syria and perhaps Iran. The committee needs to be brought in on this, because we've only given you authorization for military action in Iraq. In an almost rude, dismissive tone, the Secretary of State essentially replied: We'll talk to you when we want to; all options are on the table; and thank you very much. Then the senators just kind of sat there. It was like: Come on, guys talk! Pin that woman down! We, the people, want to know. I want to know. And then they just started off on something else. It was like: No! Come back to this question. We don't want to go to war in Syria or Iran...

TD: And did you stand up?

AW: So I stood up. I was back in the peanut gallery. I've never done anything like it before in my whole life. I took a deep breath and went, "Stop the killing! Stop the war! Hold this woman accountable! You, the Senate, were bamboozled by the administration on Iraq and you cannot be bamboozled again! Stop this woman from killing!"

At that point, I ran out of things to say because I hadn't really planned it. [She laughs.] I was looking around. There was only one police officer and he was just ambling toward me. It was like he enjoyed what I was saying. I thought, until he gets here I've got to say something more, so I went: "You failed us in Iraq, you can't fail us on Syria!" The police office finally said, "Uh, ma'am, you've got to come with me." This is the first time -- somebody told me later -- anyone's ever seen a protester put her arm around a police officer. [She laughs.]

TD: So you weren't "hustled" out?

AW: Noooooo. It was a slow walk and there was silence in the room, so I thought: Well, I can't let this go by and I started another little rant on the way out. That part wasn't mentioned in the news reports.

TD: At least some papers like the Washington Post mentioned you by name. The Times merely called you a heckler.

AW: Well, how rude! I wasn't heckling anyway. I was speaking on behalf of the people of America.

TD: This obviously takes you a long way from your professional life, because you were in the Foreign Service for...

AW: Sixteen years...

TD: ... and in all those years this would have been rather inconceivable.

AW: Having testified at congressional hearings as a Foreign Service officer, particularly on Somalia issues back in '93 and '94, I was always humbled to go into those rooms as a government employee. I always found it interesting when people in the audience stood up to say something. You know, I learned later that most protestors do it in the first ten minutes because that's when the cameras and all the reporters are sure to be there.

As it happened, the chairman of the committee declined to have me arrested. The police officer said, "Well, if you're disappointed, I can arrest you." I replied, "If you don't mind, I'll just run on over to my lunch appointment." I was actually on my way to a presentation by Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, where he would describe the secrecy of the administration and the way the State Department was isolated by the White House and the National Security Council.

TD: Another moment of protest, one I'm sure you thought about very carefully, took place the day before the shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq began. That day you sent a letter of public resignation to Colin Powell which began -- and not many people could have written such a sentence -- "When I last saw you in Kabul in 2002..."

AW: Indeed I had volunteered to go to Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001 to be part of a small team that reopened the U.S. embassy. It had been closed for twelve years. I have a background in opening and closing embassies. I helped open an embassy in Uzbekistan, closed and reopened an embassy in Sierra Leone. I've been evacuated from Somalia and Sierra Leone. And with my military background, I've worked in a lot in combat environments.

I volunteered because I felt the United States needed to respond to the events of 9/11, and the logical place to go after al-Qaeda was where they trained, knowing full well that you probably weren't going to get a lot of people. The al-Qaeda group is very smart and few of them, in my estimation, would have been hanging out where we were most likely to go after them in Afghanistan. Actually, I was amazed the administration went in physically. I thought, like the Clinton administration, they would send in cruise missiles. Considering the severity of September 11, I guess the military finally said: Well, it looks like we're going into that hell-hole where the Russians got their butts whipped. Everybody knew it was going to be tough.

TD: You've commented elsewhere that a crucial moment for you was watching the President's Axis of Evil State of the Union address from a bunker in Kabul.

AW: A bunker outside the chancellery building meant to protect against the rockets the mujahedeen were sending against each other after they defeated the Soviets. We had taken [then interim leader] Hamid Karzai, who had been invited to the State of the Union, to Bagram Air Base and sent him off three days before. We told him, "You've got to start getting together some detailed plans for economic development funds because the attention of the United States doesn't stay on any country for long; so, get your little fledgling cabinet moving fast." Well, the President started talking about other interests that the United States had after 9/11 and these interests were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Just as he said that, the cameras focused on Karzai and you could almost see him going: Hmmmm [she mugs a wince], now I know what they were telling me at the embassy. And we were sitting there thinking, Oh my God!

TD: You had a functioning TV?

AW: Barely. We had a satellite dish made of pounded-out coke cans -- these were being sold down in Kabul -- and a computer chip sent in from Islamabad, because we wanted to hear from Washington what was going to happen with Afghanistan. When, instead of talking much about Afghanistan, the President started in on this axis-of-evil stuff we were stunned. We were thinking: Hell's bells, we're here in a very dangerous place without enough military. So for the President to start talking about this axis of evil! everyone in the bunker just went: Oh Christ, here we go! No wonder we're not getting the economic development specialists in here yet. If the American government was going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and clearing out the Taliban and preparing to help the people of Afghanistan, why the hell was it taking so long? Well, that statement said it all.

TD: Did you at that moment suspect a future invasion of Iraq?

AW: I'm a little naive sometimes. I really never, ever suspected we would go to war in Iraq. There was no attempt at that moment to tie 9/11 to Iraq, so it didn't even dawn on me.

Anyway, that was the preface to my letter of resignation. I wanted to emphasize that I had seen Colin Powell on his first trip to Kabul. I wanted to show that this was a person who had lots of experience.

TD: In the whole Vietnam era, few, if any, government officials offered public resignations of protest, but before the invasion of Iraq even began, three diplomats -- Brady Kiesling, John Brown, and yourself -- resigned in a most public fashion. It must have been a wrenching decision.

AW: I had been concerned since September 2002 when I read in the papers that we had something like 100,000 troops already in the Middle East, many left behind after the Bright Star [military] exercise we have every two years in Egypt. I thought: Uh-oh, the administration is doing some sneaky-Pete stuff on us. They were claiming they wanted UN inspectors to go back into Iraq, when a military build-up was already underway. It's one thing to put troops in the region for pressure, but if you're leaving that many behind, you're going to be using them. Then, as the mushroom-cloud rhetoric started getting stronger, it was like: Good God! These guys mean to go to war, no matter what the evidence is.

By November, I was having trouble sleeping. I would wake up at three, four in the morning -- this was in Mongolia where it was freezing cold -- wrap up in blankets, go to the kitchen table, and just start pouring my soul out. By the time I finally sent that resignation letter in, I had a stack of drafts like this. [She lifts her hand a couple of feet off the table.] I did know two others had resigned, but quite honestly I hadn't read their letters and I didn't know them.

TD: You were ending your life in a way, life as you had known it?

AW: Thirty-five years in the government between my military service and the State Department, under seven administrations. It was hard. I liked representing America.

TD: Was there a moment when you knew you couldn't represent this government anymore?

AW: I kept hoping the administration would go back to the Security Council for its authorization to go to war. That's why I held off until virtually the bombs were being dropped. I was hoping against hope that our government would not go into what really is an illegal war of aggression that meets no criteria of international law. When it was finally evident we were going to do so, I said to myself: It ain't going to be on my watch.

TD: Was it like crossing a border into a different world?

AW: It was a great relief. During the lead-up to war, I had begun showing symptoms of an impending heart attack. The State Department put me on a medivac flight to Singapore for heart tests. The doctors said, "Lady, you're as strong as a horse. Are you just under some kind of stress?" "Yes, I am!" The moment I sent in that letter, it was like a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At least I had made my stand and joined the other two who had resigned.

TD: And what of those you left behind?

AW: In the first couple of days, while I was still in Mongolia, I received over 400 emails from colleagues in the State Department saying: We're so sad you're not going to be with us, but we're so proud of the three of you who resigned because we think this going-to-war is just so horrible; then each one would describe how anti-American feeling was growing in the country where they were serving. It was so poignant, all those emails.

TD: Why don't you think more people in the government -- and in the military where there's clearly been opposition to Iraq at a very high level -- quit and speak out?

AW: There were a few. [General] Eric Shinseki talked about the shortchanging of the [Iraq] operations plan by a couple of hundred thousand people. He was forced out. But see, in the military, in the Foreign Service, you're not supposed to be speaking your own mind. Your job is to implement the policies of an administration elected by the people of America. If you don't want to, your only option is to resign. I understood that and that's one of the reasons I resigned -- to give myself the freedom to talk out.
There are a lot of people still in government service speaking out, but you've got to read between the lines. The senior military leaders in Iraq, what they've been saying is very different from what Donald Rumsfeld and the gang in Washington say. These guys are being honest and truthful about the lack of Iraqi battalions really ready for military work, the dangers the troops are under, the days when the military doesn't go out on the streets. They're signaling to America: We're up a creek on this one, guys, and you, the people of America, are going to have to help us out.

TD: ...Let's talk about [Colin Powell's chief of staff] Larry Wilkerson as an example. He assumedly left after the election when Colin Powell did, so almost a year has passed. He saw what he believed was a secret cabal running the government and it took him that long after he was gone to tell us about it. I'm glad he spoke out. But I wonder why there isn't a more urgent impulse to do so?

AW: If you look at Dick Clarke [the President's former chief adviser on terrorism on the National Security Council], he had all the secrets from the very beginning and he retired in January 2003. Yet he didn't say anything for over a year and a half, until he published that book [Against All Enemies] in 2004. If he had gone public before the war started, that man could have told us those same secrets right then. So could [the National Security Council's senior director for combating terrorism] Randy Beers. I worked with both of them on Somalia, on Sierra Leone. I know these guys personally and it's like: Guys, why didn't you come forward then?

As you probably know, on the key issues of the first four years of the Bush administration, the State Department was essentially iced out. I mean, look at the Iraq War. Colin Powell and the State Department were just shoved aside and all State's functions put into the Department of Defense. Tragically, Colin Powell, who was trying to counsel Donald Rumsfeld behind the scenes that there weren't enough troops in Iraq, never stood up to say, "Hold it, guys, I'll resign if we don't get this under control so that logical functions go in logical organizations and you, the Defense Department, don't do post-combat civil reconstruction stuff. That's ours." He just didn't do it. To me, he was more loyal to the Bush family than he was to the country. His resignation was possibly the one thing that could have deterred the war. Then the people of America would really have looked closely at what was going on. But tragically he decided loyalty to the administration was more valuable than loyalty to the country. I mean, it breaks my heart to say that, but it's what really happened.

TD: So what is it that actually holds people back?

AW: I think the higher up you go, the more common it is for people to retire, or maybe even resign, and not say what the reasons are, because they may hope to get back into government in a different administration. Dick Clarke had served every administration since George Washington and maybe he was looking toward being called back as a political appointee again. Sometimes such people don't speak out because they feel loyalty to the person who appointed them. Nobody appointed me to nothin', except the American people. I'm a career foreign service officer and I serve the American people. When an administration wasn't serving the best interests of the American people, I felt I had to stand up.

TD: And are you now pretty much a full-time antiwar activist?

AW: [She laughs.] That's the way it's turned out.

TD: What, if anything, do you think your military career, your State Department career, and this... well, I can't call it a career, have in common?

AW: Service to America. It's all just a continuation of a real concern I have about my country.

TD: And what would you say to your former compatriots still in the military and the State Department?

AW: Many of the emails I received from Foreign Service officers said, I wish I could resign right now, but I've got kids in college, I've got mortgages, and I'm going to try really hard, by staying, to ameliorate the intensity of these policies. All I can say is that they must be in agony about not being able to affect policy. There have been plenty of early retirements by people who finally realized they couldn't moderate the policies of the Bush administration.

TD: What message would you send to the person you once were from the person you are now?

AW: You trained me well.

TD: If in this room you had the thirty-five year-old woman about to go into Grenada, as you did back in 1983, what would you want her to mull over.

AW: I would say: You were a good Army officer and Foreign Service officer. You weren't blind to the faults of America. In many jobs, you tried to rectify things that were going badly and you succeeded a couple of times. My resignation wasn't the first time I spoke out. For instance, I was loaned, or seconded, from the State Department to the staff of the United Nations operation in Somalia and ended up writing a memo concerning the military operations the UN was conducting to kill a warlord named Addid. They started taking helicopters, standing off, and just blowing up buildings where they had intelligence indicating perhaps he was there. Well, tragically he never was, and here we were blowing up all these Somali families. Of course the Somalis were outraged and that outrage ultimately led to Blackhawk Down.

I wrote a legal opinion to the special representative of the Secretary General, saying the UN operations were illegal and had to stop. It was leaked to the Washington Post and I got in a bit of hot water initially, but ultimately my analysis proved correct. I was also a bit of a rabble-rouser on the utilization of women in the military back in the eighties, part of a small group of women who took on the Army when it was trying to reduce the career potentials of women. I ended up getting right in the thick of some major problems which ultimately cost the Army millions of dollars in the reassessment of units that had been given incorrect direct-combat probability codings. I was also part of a team which discovered that some of our troops had been looting private homes in Grenada. The Army court-martialed a lot of our soldiers for this violation of the law of land warfare. We used their example in rewriting how you teach the code of conduct and, actually, the Geneva Convention on the responsibility of occupiers.

TD: You know a good deal about the obligations of an occupying power to protect public and private property, partially because in the 1980s you were doing planning on the Middle East, right?

AW: Yes, from 1982 to 1984, I was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina when the Army was planning for potential operations using the Rapid Deployment Force -- what ultimately became the Central Command. One of the first forces used in rapid deployment operations was the 82 Airborne at Fort Bragg. I was in the special operations end of it with civil affairs. Those are the people who write up the annexes to operations plans about how you interact with the civilian population, how you protect the facilities --sewage, water, electrical grids, libraries. We were doing it for the whole Middle East. I mean, we have operations plans on the shelf for every country in the world, or virtually. So we did one on Iraq; we did one on Syria; on Jordan, Egypt. All of them.

We would, for instance, take the UNESCO list of treasures of the world and go through it. Okay, any in Iraq? Yep. Okay, mark 'em, circle 'em on a map, put 'em in the op-plan. Whatever you do, don't bomb this. Make sure we've got enough troops to protect this. It's our obligation under the law of land warfare. We'd be circling all the electrical grids, all the oil grids, all the museums. So for us to go into Iraq and let all that looting happen. Well, Rumsfeld wanted a light, mobile force, and screw the obligations of treaties. Typical of this administration on any treaty thing. Forget 'em.

So everything was Katy-bar-the-door. Anybody could go in and rip up anything. Many of the explosives now being used to kill our troops come from the ammo dumps we did not secure. It was a total violation of every principle we had for planning military operations and their aftermath. People in the civil affairs units, they were just shaking their heads, wondering how in the hell this could have happened. We've been doing these operations plans forever, so I can only imagine the bitchin' and moanin' about -- how come we don't have this civilian/military annex? It's in every other op-plan. And where are the troops, where are the MPs?

TD: If back in the early eighties you were planning to save the antiquities of every country in the Middle East, then obviously the Pentagon was also planning for a range of possible invasions in the region. Do you look back now and ask: What kind of a country has contingency plans to invade any country you can imagine?

AW: One of the things you are likely to do at a certain point in your military career is operations plans. It did not then seem abnormal to me at all that we had contingency plans for the Middle East, or for countries in the Caribbean or South America. At that stage, I was not looking at the imperialism of the United States. I just didn't equate those contingency plans with empire-building goals. However, depending on how those plans are used, they certainly can be just that. Remember as well that this was in the days of the Cold War and, by God, that camouflaged a lot of stuff. You could always say: You never can tell what those Soviets are going to do, so you better be prepared anywhere in the world to defeat them.

TD: And we're still prepared anywhere in the world...

AW: Well, we are and now, let's see, where are the Russians? [She laughs heartily.]

TD: Tell me briefly the story of your life.

AW: I grew up in Arkansas, just a normal childhood. I think the Girl Scouts was a formative organization for me. It had a plan to it, opportunity to travel outside Arkansas, good goals -- working on those little badges. Early State Department. Early military too. It's kind of interesting, the militarization of our society, how we don't really think of some things, and yet when I look back, there I was a little Girl Scout in my green uniform, and so putting on an Army uniform after college wasn't that big a deal. I'd been in a uniform before and I knew how to salute, three fingers. [She demonstrates.]

If you look, we now have junior ROTC in the high schools. We have child soldiers in America. We're good at getting kids used to those uniforms. And then there's the militarization of industries and corporations, the necessity every ten years to have a war because we need a new generation of weaponry. Corporations in the military-industrial complex are making lots of money off of new types of weaponry and vehicles.

TD: While you were in the military, did you have any sense that these wars were actually living weapons labs?

AW: Particularly seeing the privatization after Gulf War I, going into Somalia. All of a sudden, as fast as military troops were arriving, you had Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown, and Root in Somalia. They started saying, You need mess halls, oh, we'll do the mess halls for you. And it turned out they had staged a lot of their equipment in the Middle East after the Gulf War. So it was in Somalia lickety-split. The privatization of military functions is now so pervasive that the military can no longer function by itself, without the contractors and corporations. These contractors, these mercenaries really, are now fundamentally critical to the operations of the U.S. military.

TD: So a Girl Scout and...

AW: In my junior year at the University of Arkansas, a recruiter came through town with the film, "Join the Army, See the World." I had been an education major for three years. Nurse, teacher, those were the careers for women. I didn't want any of it. So, in the middle of the Vietnam War, I signed up to go to a three-week Army training program, just to see if I liked it. And I found it challenging. Even though there were protests going on all over America, I divorced myself from what the military actually did versus what opportunities it offered me. I hated all these people getting killed in Vietnam, but I said to myself: I'm not going to kill anyone and I'm taking the place of somebody who will be able to go do something else. All these arguments that now you look at it and go: Oh my God, what did you do?

TD: Don't you think this happens now?

AW: Absolutely! I sympathize with the people in the military right now. The majority didn't sign up to kill anybody. You always prayed that, whatever administration it was, it didn't go off on some wild goose chase that got you into a war you personally thought was really stupid.

TD: Would you counsel a young woman now to go into the military?

AW: I think we will always have a military and I think the military is honorable service as long as the civilian leadership uses it in appropriate ways and is very cautious about sending us to war. And yes, I would encourage people to look at a military career, but I would also tell them that, if they're sent to do something they think is wrong, they don't have to stay in, though they may have to take some consequences for saying, "Thank you very much but I'm not going to kill anybody."

In fact, if I were recalled to active duty, which is possible,I put myself purposely at the Retired Ready Reserve so that, if there was ever an emergency and my country needed me, I could be recalled, and in fact there are people my age, 59, who are agreeing to be recalled. The ultimate irony would be resigning from my career in the diplomatic corps and then having the Bush administration recall me, because my specialty, civil affairs, reconstruction, is in really short supply. I'm a colonel. I know how to run battalions and brigades. I can do this stuff. But I would have to tell them, sorry, I refuse to be placed on active duty. And if they push hard enough, then I'd just have to be court-martialed and I'd go to Leavenworth. I will not serve this administration in the Iraq war which I firmly believe is an illegal war of aggression.

TD: You know, if someone had said to me back in the 1960s that a Vice President of the United States might go to Congress to lobby for a torture exemption for the CIA the way Dick Cheney has done, I would have said: This couldn't happen. Never in American history. I'm staggered by this.

AW: Me, too. The other thing that's quite interesting is the number of women who are involved in it. There were something like eighty women I've identified, ranging from high officers to CIA contractors being used as interrogators in Guantanamo. Talking about things that will come back to bite us big time, this is it. And we are complicit, all of us, because, quite honestly, we're not standing out in front of the White House every single day, and every time that Vice President leaves throwing our bodies in front of his car, throwing blood on it. We need to get tough with these guys. They're not listening to us. They think we're a bunch of wimps. We've got to get tougher and tougher with them to show them we're not going to put up with this stuff.

TD: You've quoted Teddy Roosevelt as saying: "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." I was particularly struck by that word "servile." Do you want to talk about dissent for a moment?

AW: Well, we shouldn't be hesitant about voicing our opinions, even in the most difficult of times which generally is when your nation is going to war and you're standing up to say, this isn't right. That's tough and, in fact, the first couple of months after I resigned, oh man, all that TV and nothing on but the war, and very few people wanted to hear me. It probably was a good four months before anybody even asked me to come speak about why I had dissented, and that was a little lonely. [She chuckles.]

TD: Any final thoughts?

AW: We now have a two-and-a-half-year track record of being a very brutal country. We are the cause of the violence in Iraq. That violence will continue as long as we're there, and the administration maintains that we will be there until we win. That means to me that this administration is planning for a long-term siege in Iraq. It means that young men and women in America should be prepared for the draft because the military right now cannot support what this administration wants. In fact, yesterday I was talking to about ninety high school seniors in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a very Republican part of the United States. I said: Your parents may support this war, but how strongly do you feel about it? If it drags on for years and there's a draft, how many of you will willingly go? Only three put up their hands.

We are continuing down a very dangerous road. The United States and its citizenry are held in disdain in world opinion for not being able to stop this war machine. So one of the things I'm doing is ratcheting up my own level of response. A dear friend, Joe Palambo, a Vietnam veteran in Veterans for Peace who went to hear the President in Norfolk when he talked about terrorism, was recently cited in the newspapers this way: There was one protestor in the second row of the audience who stood up and railed against the President, saying: "You're the terrorist! This war is a war of terrorism!" Joe called me right after that happened and said, "Hey, Ann, I heard what you did in the Senate and I thought, I'm going to go do the same thing to the President."
I mean, we're going to dog these guys all over the country. Our Secretary of State, our Secretary of Defense, our Vice President, our President, our National Security Adviser, the head of the CIA, any of these people who are the warmongers, who are the murderers in the name of our country, wherever they go, the people of America need to stand up to them to say, "No! Stop! Stop this war. Stop this killing. Get us out of this mess."
Because that's the only time they hear it, when we stand up in these venues. They don't come out to the street in front of the White House to see the hundreds of thousands of people who are protesting. They ignore that. But for those fifteen seconds, if you can stand up so that everybody in that audience sees that there's one person, or maybe even two or three... Who knows?

Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch :: Article nr. 17802 sent on 14-nov-2005 01:45 ECT

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Palestine should be “wiped off the map.” Did anyone react?

2005-11-01T22:15:00.000+01:00

The indomitable Haitham Sabbah posted this most excellent article up on his blog. Quite interesting are the quotes, and even better still the Ariel Sharon Interview. A must read.

You will read a lot in the next few days and weeks in the Zionist press about how Iran should be “wiped off the map” by the west for President Ahmadinejad comments. Now two wrongs don’t make a right but there is massive hypocrisy in the indignation shown by the world toward Iran.

Please read below what leaders of Israel have said in the past about Palestinians and Arabs. There is also an interview below with Ariel Sharon, the current Israeli leader which vividly shows the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Not surprisingly you won’t find Bush, Blair, The Times, Telegraph or any British Newspaper printing this stuff! Now why would that be?

“We must expel Arabs and take their places.”— David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”— David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

“There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”— David Ben Gurion Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp. 121-122.

“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”— David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99.

“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.”— David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”— David Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth’s Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation).

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”— Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”— Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

“Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.”— Golda Meir, 1961, in a speech to the Knesset, reported in Ner, October 1961

“This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.”— Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971

“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!”— Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

“[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.”— Yitzhak Rabin (a “Prince of Peace” by Clinton’s standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen’s remarks to the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

“[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.”— Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the ‘Beasts,”‘ New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

“The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized …. Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.”— Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

“The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya (=Jewish immigration), and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country.”— Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.

“The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It’s that simple.”— Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.

“(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.”— Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”— Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

“The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”….— Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

“If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force….”— Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000.

“I would have joined a terrorist organization.”— Ehud Barak’s response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha’aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.

“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”— Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours…Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”— Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

“Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.”— Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 25 March, 2001 quoted in BBC News Online

Interview with The war criminal, Ariel Sharon (Profile of A Terrorist):
by Amos Oz, an Israeli writer, help us to discover through an interview published by the Israeli daily Davar in December 17, 1982.

[Sharon]: “You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a murderer. Just note that I don’t hate Arabs. On the contrary. Personally, I am much more at ease with them, and especially with the Bedouin, than with Jews. Those Arabs we haven’t yet spoilt are proud people, they are irrational, cruel and generous. It’s the Yids that are all twisted. In order to straighten them out you have to first bend them sharply the other way. That, in brief, is my whole ideology”.

“Call Israel by any name you like, call it a Judeo-Nazi state as does Leibowitz. Why not? Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint. I don’t care whether I am like Ghadafi. I am not after the admiration of the gentiles. I don’t need their love. I don’t need to be loved by Jews like you either. I have to live, and I intend to ensure that my children will live as well. With or without the blessing of the Pope and the other religious leaders from the New York Times. I will destroy anyone who will raise a hand against my children, I will destroy him and his children, with or without our famous purity of arms. I don’t care if he is Christian, Muslim, Jewish or pagan. History teaches us that he who won’t kill will be killed by others. That is an iron law”.

“Even if you’ll prove to me by mathematical means that the present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don’t care. Moreover, even if you will prove to me that we have not achieved and will not achieve any of our aims in Lebanon, that we will neither create a friendly regime in Lebanon nor destroy the Syrians or even the PLO, even then I don’t care. It was still worth it. Even if Galilee is shelled again by Katyushas in a year’s time, I don’t really care. We shall start another war, kill and destroy more and more, until they will have had enough. And do you know why it is all worth it? Because it seems that this war has made us more unpopular among the so-called civilised world”.

“We’ll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality, the moral lessons of the holocaust or about the Jews who were supposed to have emerged from the gas chambers pure and virtuous. No more of that. The destruction of Eyn Hilwe (and it’s a pity we did not wipe out that hornet’s nest completely!), the healthy bombardment of Beirut and that tiny massacre (can you call 500 Arabs a massacre?) in their camps which we should have committed with our own delicate hands rather than let the Phalangists do it, all these good deeds finally killed the bullshit talk about a unique people and of being a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance.”

“I personally don’t want to be any better than Khomeini or Brezhnev or Ghadafi or Assad or Mrs. Thatcher, or even Harry Truman who killed half a million Japanese with two fine bombs. I only want to be smarter than they are, quicker and more efficient, not better or more beautiful than they are. Tell me, do the baddies of this world have a bad time? If anyone tries to touch them, the evil men cut his hands and legs off. They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don’t suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear me instead of feeling sorry for me.
Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear my madness instead of admiring my nobility. Thank God for that. Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy if one of our children is murdered - just one! That we might go wild and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East! If anything would happen to your child, God forbid, you would talk like I do. Let them be aware in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and China that if one of our ambassadors is shot, or even a consul or the most junior embassy official, we might start World War Three just like that!”

……We are talking while sitting on the balcony of the pretty country house belonging to C. which is situated in a prosperous Moshav. To the west we see a burning sunset and there is a scent of fruit trees in the air. We are being served iced coffee in tall glasses. C. is about fifty years old. He is a man well known for his (military) actions. He is a strong, heavy figure wearing shorts but no shirt. His body is tanned a metallic bronze shade, the colour of a blond man living in the sun. He puts his hairy legs on the table and his hands on the chair. There is a scar on his neck. His eyes wander over his plantations. He spells out his ideology in a voice made hoarse by too much smoking:

“Let me tell me [sic] what is the most important thing, the sweetest fruit of the war in Lebanon: It is that now they don’t just hate Israel. Thanks to us, they now also hate all those Feinschmecker Jews in Paris, London, New York, Frankfurt and Montreal, in all their holes. At last they hate all these nice Yids, who say they are different from us, that they are not Israeli thugs, that they are different Jews, clean and decent.

Just like the assimilated Jew in Vienna and Berlin begged the anti-Semite not to confuse him with the screaming, stinking Ostjude, who had smuggled himself into that cultural environment out of the dirty ghettos of Ukraine and Poland. It won’t help them, those clean Yids, just as it did not help them in Vienna and Berlin. Let them shout that they condemn Israel, that they are all right, that they did not want and don’t want to hurt a fly, that they always prefer being slaughtered to fighting, that they have taken it upon themselves to teach the gentiles how to be good Christians by always turning the other cheek. It won’t do them any good. Now they are getting it there because of us, and I am telling you, it is a pleasure to watch.”

“They are the same Yids who persuaded the gentiles to capitulate to the bastards in Vietnam, to give it in to Khomeini, to Brezhnev, to feel sorry for Sheikh Yamani because of his tough childhood, to make love not war. Or rather, to do neither, and instead write a thesis on love and war. We are through with all that. The Yid has been rejected, not only did he crucify Jesus, but he also crucified Arafat in Sabra and Shatila. They are being identified with us and that’s a good thing! Their cemeteries are being desecrated, their synagogues are set on fire, all their old nicknames are being revived, they are being expelled from the best clubs, people shoot into their ethnic restaurants murdering small children, forcing them to remove any sign showing them to be Jews, forcing them to move and change their profession.

“Soon their palaces will be smeared with the slogan: Yids, go to Palestine! And you know what? They will go to Palestine because they will have no other choice! All this is a bonus we received from the Lebanese war. Tell me, wasn’t it worth it? Soon we will hit on good times. The Jews will start arriving, the Israelis will stop emigrating and those who already emigrated will return. Those who had chosen assimilation will finally understand that it won’t help them to try and be the conscience of the world. The ‘conscience of the world’ will have to understand through its arse what it could not get into its head. The gentiles have always felt sick of the Yids and their conscience, and now the Yids will have only one option: to come home, all of them, fast, to install thick steel doors, to build a strong fence, to have submachine guns positioned at every corner of their fence here and to fight like devils against anyone who dares to make a sound in this region. And if anyone even raises his hand against us we’ll take away half his land and burn the other half, including the oil. We might use nuclear arms. We’ll go on until he no longer feels like it…”

“…You probably want to know whether I am not afraid of the masses of Yids coming here to escape anti-Semitism smearing us with their olive oil until we go all soft like them. Listen, history is funny in that way, there is a dialectic here, irony. Who was it who expanded the state of Israel almost up the boundaries of the kingdom of King David? Who expanded the state until it covered the area from Mount Hermon to Raz Muhammad? Levi Eshkol. Of all people, it was that follower of Gordon, that softie, that old woman. Who, on the other hand, is about to push us back into the walls of the ghetto? Who gave up all of Sinai in order to retain a civilised image?

Beitar’s governor in Poland, that proud man Menahem Begin. So you can never tell. I only know one thing for sure: as long as you are fighting for your life all is permitted, even to drive out all the Arabs from the West Bank, everything.”

“Leibowitz is right, we are Judeo-Nazis, and why not? Listen, a people that gave itself up to be slaughtered, a people that let soap to be made of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women is a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis … If your nice civilised parents had come here in time instead of writing books about the love for humanity and singing ‘Hear O Israel’ on the way to the gas chambers, now don’t be shocked, if they instead had killed six million Arabs here or even one million, what would have happened?

Sure, two or three nasty pages would have been written in the history books, we would have been called all sorts of names, but we could be here today as a people of 25 million!”

“Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there, I don’t care. And I don’t mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal. Then you can spruce up your Jewish conscience and enter the respectable club of civilised nations, nations that are large and healthy. What you lot don’t understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it.

True, it could have been finished in 1948, but you interfered, you stopped it. And all this because of the Jewishness in your souls, because of your Diaspora mentality. For the Jews don’t grasp things quickly. If you open your eyes and look around the world you will see that darkness is falling again. And we know what happens to a Jew who stays out in the dark. So I am glad that this small war in Lebanon frightened the Yids. Let them be afraid, let them suffer. They should hurry home before it gets really dark. So I am an anti-Semite? Fine. So don’t quote me, quote Lilienblum instead [an early Russian Zionist - ed.]. There is no need to quote an anti-Semite. Quote Lilienblum, and he is definitely not an anti-Semite, there is even a street in Tel Aviv named after him”. (C. quotes from a small notebook that was lying on his table when I arrived:)
‘Is all that is happening not a clear sign that our forefathers and ourselves … wanted and still want to be disgraced? That we enjoy living like gypsies.’ That’s Lilienblum. Not me. Believe me. I went through the Zionist literature, I can prove what I say”.

“And you can write that I am disgrace to humanity, I don’t mind, on the contrary. Let’s make a deal: I will do all I can to expel the Arabs from here, I will do all I can to increase anti-Semitism, and you will write poems and essays about the misery of the Arabs and be prepared to absorb the Yids I will force to flee to this country and teach them to be a light unto the gentiles. How about it?”

It was there that I stopped C.’s monologue for a moment and expressed the thought passing through my mind, perhaps more for myself than for my host. Was it possible that Hitler had not only hurt the Jews but also poisoned their minds? Had that poison sunk in and was still active? But not even that idea could cause C. to protest or raise his voice. After all, he said to have never shouted under stress, even during the famous operations his name is associated with. [Hat Tip: MPACUK]

Kurt Vonnegut: Transcript of Radio Interview

2005-10-21T21:55:00.000+02:00

PBS

DAVID BRANCACCIO: NOW on PBS.

His is a chaotic universe…remember SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE and CAT'S CRADLE? Kurt Vonnegut is back.

KURT VONNEGUT: We've killed the planet, the life support system. And it's so damaged that there's no recovery from that. We're very soon going to run out of petroleum which powers everything's that modern-Razzmatazz about America."

DAVID BRANCACCIO: He's on the bestseller list this week with powerful words about the state of the world and the failure of politics.

KURT VONNEGUT: It's the winners. And then everybody else is the losers. And, the winners divided into two parties. The Republicans and the Democrats.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Vonnegut on life, democracy, and the importance of being funny.

BRANCACCIO: Welcome to a special edition of NOW.

This country has been through a lot in the last month and we've been out there covering it.

But I'm thinking its time to pause for the big picture and when the brilliant and irascible Kurt Vonnegut said he was up for an interview, we jumped at the chance.

It's rare to get to sit across the table from a giant. Do yourself a favor and read SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE again …like now, this weekend.

Before it's too late.

Mr. Vonnegut has a new book challenging us to think about how life works or doesn't work. He's 82, but I'll tell you what, he's still a total riot.

And this icon of American literature has got some choice words for our political parties, our president, and our planet.

Mr. Vonnegut, thanks for coming by.

KURT VONNEGUT: My pleasure.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: How's life?

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, it's practically over, thank God.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: For Heaven's sake.

KURT VONNEGUT: I'm 80-- I'm practically 83. It won't be that much more of-- for me to put up with. I don't think.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, you were writing about maybe you want to sue your cigarette companies? You smoked all those years and there's a warning on the package saying that this will --

KURT VONNEGUT: Brown and Williams, on their package, promise to kill me. And they haven't done it. I mean, here I am 83.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: False advertisers on the cigarettes?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You know as I grabbed every Kurt Vonnegut I could find to re-read--

KURT VONNEGUT: Uh-huh.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: --knowing you were coming. I was looking at the beginning of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE.

KURT VONNEGUT: Uh-huh.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: The good uncle in that novel complains that people tend not to notice when they're happy.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Maybe the character's right. You don't notice when the good stuff that's around us.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah. Well, this was my uncle Alex. And I had a good uncle and a bad uncle. The bad uncle was Dan. But the good uncle was Alex. And what he found objectionable about human beings was they never noticed it when they were really happy.

So, whenever he was really happy, you know he could be sitting around in the shade in the summertime in the shade of an apple tree, and drinking lemonade and talking. Just sort of this back-and-forth buzzing like honey bees. And Uncle Alex would all of a sudden say; If this isn't nice what is? And then we'd realize how happy we were and we might have missed it.

And the bad Uncle Dan was when I came home from the war which I was quite painful. He clapped me on the back and said; You're a man now. I wanted to kill kill 'em.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: So you weren't just in the war.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You actually were a POW.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: In Dresden during the fire bombing.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Famously. So that's what it took to make you a man?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: In this uncle's view.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Well, he'd been made a man during the first World War in the trenches.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You didn't actually kill 'em though.

KURT VONNEGUT: No. He would have been the first German I killed.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Your experience as a soldier must give you great empathy for what our soldiers are going through right now. Because whether or not a person agrees with the logic behind this war in Iraq. Or vehemently thinks it's a bad idea. Everybody agrees that it's hell for those guys and those women.

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, not only that, it's a-- they're being sent on fools errands, and there aren't enough of them. And I've read that they go on patrols and they're in awful danger. And the patrols accomplish almost nothing. And so sure, that's a nonsensical war. That isn't how you fight.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: It strikes me that maybe you are not the biggest fan of the president of the United States at this juncture?

KURT VONNEGUT: Well he is what it in my grade school, we would've called a twit. And in my high school, we would've called a twit. And and so I'm sorry we have such a person as president.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But just short of that, there must be things that you think the current administration has done wrong that has so upset you.

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, yes, it doesn't know anything about military science. Doesn't know anything about science. You know, global warming, they just don't believe it. And my lord, to send 143,000 soldiers, or whatever it is to occupy a country of what? Several million? Is I-- what, it's seven million, you think?

It's preposterous. I knew better than that. Although the highest rank I ever held was corporal. And so these people don't know anything about anything. They're incompetent. And, so, yes, they are getting a lot of our guys killed. But, also, they've emptied our treasuries. You know, we can't fix our roads. We can't fix the schools.

It's my dream of America with great public schools. I thought we should be the envy of the world with our public schools. And I went to such a public school. So I knew that such a school was possible. Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. Produced not only me, but the head writer on the I LOVE LUCY show.

And, my God, we had a daily paper. We had a debating team. Had a fencing team. We had a chorus, a jazz band, a serious orchestra. And all this with a Great Depression going on. And I wanted everybody to have such a school. And, yeah, we could afford it if we didn't spend all the money on weaponry.

But I brought something.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Oh.

KURT VONNEGUT: It's a message for the president. Is it alright if I read it?

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Yeah, for the President of the United States?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. I want to get it right.

I am now an elder in this, the greatest democracy in the history of the world. I will be 83 in November. I am a member of what has been called "the Greatest Generation." I am a combat infantry veteran with a Purple Heart and a Battle Star. And I now want to put my president on notice. And I am talking about impeachment.

Enough is enough. If he commits oral sex in the Oval Office and I don't care with whom-- that will be the straw that broke the camel's back. Out he goes.

There. I've thrown down the gauntlet. That be treason, make the most of it.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But impeachment, that's strong words. What do you want to impeach him for?

KURT VONNEGUT: For oral sex in the Oval Office. I said that--

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Wasn't that the other guy?

KURT VONNEGUT: Well-- I don't know. That's the standard now. That's the precedent. Is-- is the one unforgivable thing a president could do.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Why has the president angered you so?

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, because he shouldn't be president. Is-- we ought to have a stronger person. And he's obviously an actor in a made for TV movie. And other people are, in fact, telling him what to say.

Of course, we have only a one party government. It's the winners. And then everybody else is the losers. And, the winners divided into two parties. The Republicans and the Democrats.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, you write in the book you say that the last election, the two leading candidates were two C students from Yale, as you put it.

KURT VONNEGUT: Two members of Skull and Bones at Yale, for God's sake. If I mean, that's what a charade the combat between the Republicans and the Democrats is. It's rich kids. Winners on both sides. So the winners can't lose. And, of course, the losers have no representation in Congress or whatever.

But look, yeah. We had to choose between two members of Skull and Bones? What about if we had to choose between two members of Sigma Chi at Purdue? Wouldn't somebody have said what a minute. What the hell happened here?

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But you're saying you don't see senior political figures really, anybody representing the interests of people who are struggling?

KURT VONNEGUT: No, are not representing the American people. And, so there are people who made a hell of a lot of money one way or another. Making it during the war, incidentally. As you know, maybe the war is a bad idea. But some people are making a ton of money off of it. And they want to hang on to whatever they've got. And so they bank roll political campaigns for both Republicans and Democrats. Look, we're awful animals. We can start with that. You know, it's a whole human experiment, if that's what we are.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: That heart-- at heart, we're awful?

KURT VONNEGUT: Look, we after two World Wars and the holocaust and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after the Roman games and after the Spanish Inquisition and after burning witches, the public-- shouldn't we call it off? I mean, we are a disease and should be ashamed of ourselves.

And so, yeah, I think we ought to stop reproducing. But since we're not going to do that, I think the planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: The planet is sort of trying to shed us as if we are some sort of toxin.

KURT VONNEGUT: Look, I'll tell you. It's one thing that no cabinet had ever had, is a Secretary Of The Future. And there are no plans at all for my grandchildren and my great grandchildren.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: That's a great idea. In other words a Cabinet post--

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, it's too late! Look, the game is over! The game is over. We've killed the planet, the life support system. And, and it's so damaged that there's no recovery from that. And we're very soon going to run out of petroleum which powered everything that's modern. Razzmatazz about America. And, and it was very shallow people who imagined that we could keep this up indefinitely. But when I tell others, they say; Well, look there's-- you said hydrogen fuel. Nobody's working on it.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: No one is working seriously on it is what you're saying.

KURT VONNEGUT: That's right. And, and what, our energy people, presidents of our companies, energy companies never think. All they wanna do is make a lot of money right now.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: If you accept your idea that it is a horrible world out there. And people are tribal, people are greedy, people are cruel, then you can also conclude that, well, Americans didn't invent that.

And I remember-- I know someone wrote you in the book-- and you mention someone wrote you this letter. Saying we need to be armed against all the badness that you see. You know, with Iraq. The threat is on a bigger scale than Al Qaeda, the guy wrote to you. And he-- and he writes, "Should we sit back, be little children, and sit in fear and just wait?" We need to take military action, is the implication.

KURT VONNEGUT: No we don't. No we don't. Is we should be-- somebody else has to declare war first. If we're in the-- of course, Iraq never attacked us.

KURT VONNEGUT: I have one more thing I wanted to read. It has something different.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Something in the other pocket, too?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Alright.

KURT VONNEGUT: You know, Christianity is very big now in particular-- and our president, of course, is a Christian. These are words I never hear.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. For theirs is kingdom of heaven. This isn't original.

Blessed are they that mourn. For they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall be called the children of God.

Not exactly a Republican platform.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: These, of course, are called the Beatitudes.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: From the Holy Bible.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: It's interesting. It tends to be Ten Commandments, not the Beatitudes in modern day America.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Well, not only that, it's an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth justifies a lot of violence. On the part of many different societies. But actually, that's from the Code of Hammurabi. And what he was trying to do was cut down in violence in his society. In Babylonia.

And saying, look, okay you're a real man. You got to get revenge, I guess. But this much and no more. Otherwise, Babylon is going to-- we're just going to be people getting revenge. Revenge is going to become the chief business.

And I-- about Moses-- I wish he had come down off the mountain and — with word from God that hey, we've got to cut down on revenge, too. Because revenge is bad news. It's a very bad emotion. And again, we have Jesus. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Imagine that on a wall in the White House?

No, it's we must get revenge. And, of course, the armaments manufacturers — what we used to call merchants of death are — making a lot of money out of this.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: It's interesting. You normally describe yourself as, I think, a humanist.

KURT VONNEGUT: Absolutely. It's my ancestral religion. It's my ancestors who came over here from the north of Germany during the Civil War. One of 'em lost a leg and went back to Germany. But anyway, they were free thinkers. They had been Catholics. And, but science had impressed them that the priest didn't know what he was talking about, often, and so they were free thinkers.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: What does it mean to you to be a humanist in this day and age?

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, to admire the hell out of Jesus Christ or of everyone who speaks well. And, well my grandfather said is-- if-- what Jesus said was marvelous. What does it matter whether he was God or not? And it doesn't matter. So this is a human being who spoke extremely well, and we humanists listened.

Not only am I the honorary president of the American Humanist Association, preaching the sermon on the mount. I'm also announcing that the world is about to end. And, that is the world as we know it, surely. One, we're destroying it as a life-support system.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Destroying the environment.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. And I wrote a poem about that-- which was published, incidentally, by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation on their cover. But the poem goes, "The crucified planet earth. Should it find a voice? And the sense of irony might now well say of our abuse of it. Forgive them father, they know not what they do. The irony would be that we know what we're doing. And when the last living thing has died on account of us, how shapely it would be, how poetical if the Earth could say in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon; It is done.

People did not like it here. And they don't and they shouldn't.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: If we're despoiling our surroundings, it must mean that we don't respect it.

KURT VONNEGUT: No. We don't. And I think most people have an awful time here. And, I have said on behalf of all animals, is life is no way to treat an animal. It hurts too much.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Mr. Vonnegut, how does a man stay funny when he thinks the world stinks like this?

KURT VONNEGUT: He smokes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Is that the secret to humor?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Yeah, it helps a lot.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, I want to ask you about this. You ask in the book a question that actually you don't answer so I want to -

KURT VONNEGUT: I'm old.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But I want to-- think about answering this one. You write "what can be said to our young people now that psychopathic personalities — which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame — have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it their own?" What can we say to younger people who have their whole lives ahead of them?

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, you are human beings. Resourceful. Form a little society of your own. And, hang out with them. Get a gang.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You're preaching getting into gangs?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Well, look, it's--

DAVID BRANCACCIO: A good gang.

KURT VONNEGUT: Look, I don't mean to intimidate you, but I have a master's degree in anthropology.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: I'm intimidated.

KURT VONNEGUT: From the University of Chicago-- as did Saul Bellow, incidentally. But anyway, one thing I found out was that we need extended families. We need gangs. And, of course, if they're tribes and clans and so forth have been dispersed by the industrial revolution by people looking for work wherever they can find it. And a nuclear family, a man, a woman and kids and a dog and cat is no survival scheme at all. Horribly vulnerable.

So yes, I tell people to formulate a little gang. And, you know, you love each other.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You know, I think I have found, at least, some evidence that at heart you're a bit of an optimist and here's, here's my proof here. In the new book, there is a picture of yourself that you drew here.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Some of your artwork. And that's definitely you. Iconic image of Kurt Vonnegut. But I looked that you-- drew it on some old stationary, it looks like. It says Saab Cape Cod. Kurt Vonnegut, manager?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes, I was in the Saab business. As I think I was one among the very first Saab dealers in the United States.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: That's an act of optimism-- selling one of those things back then. Those are weird cars.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes, they certainly were. And, and-- it's why I never got a Swedish car. That's why I never got a Nobel Prize. Of course, a lot of people ask me how come you never got a Nobel Prize?

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, why not?

KURT VONNEGUT: Huh? Because I spoke so ill of the Swedish car Saab which was a stinker back then. And now, of course, it's-- there's a convertible. I guess is the ultimate yuppie canoe.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You know, here we are talking about technology. Cars--

KURT VONNEGUT: Uh-huh.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You're a bit of a Luddite?

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Absolutely. I — all the new technology seems redundant to me. I was quite happy with the United States mail service. And, I don't even have an answering machine, for God's sake.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Sounds un-American to me.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah, well, certainly, for a science fiction writer. But Ray Bradbury can't even drive.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: So you have one up on him if you were selling Saabs.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book-- your latest-- in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say-- I'm getting-- I'm going to buy an envelope.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?

KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well you wrote in the book about this. You write; What makes being a live almost worthwhile--

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: --for me besides music, was all the Saints I met who could be anywhere. By 'Saints' I meant people who behaved decently, in a strikingly indecent society.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yes. Their acts of kindness and reason. On a very-- on a face-to-face. On a very local.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: On a human level.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah. On a human level. And, oh, I've also spoken about you, know you've heard of 'original sin.' Well, I also, I call attention to original virtue. Some people are born to be nice, and they're gonna be nice all their lives, no matter what.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, I think it's easy to notice that some moments with you Mr. Vonnegut add up to I think a magic moment. Thank you very much.

KURT VONNEGUT: Well, I had a hell of a good time I must say. If this isn't nice I don't know what is.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: The legendary man of American letters, Kurt Vonnegut. His latest book is called; A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

Ilan Pappe Interview by Don Atapattu

2005-09-19T22:33:00.000+02:00

Discussion with leading Israeli Scholar
Articles / Religion and Politics
Posted by Evan Hays on Jul 13, 2005 - 11:42 AM

Dr. Ilan Pappe, professor of political science at Haifa University and part of the “new history” movement in Israeli Universities, sat down recently for an interview with Don Atapattu to discuss his views on the state of affairs in Israel-Palestine. A strong proponent of the Palestinian cause, Pappe has recently been the subject of controversy as he refused to back down in support of a graduate student studying the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). Haifa University’s treatment of Pappe in response to this controversy was one of the main reasons that the AUT chose to boycott the university in the spring of 2005.

Within the interview, Pappe discusses many of the current issues in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Enemy of the State – A conversation with Professor Ilan Pappe

You are of German/Jewish descent, how did your parents actually come to be in Israel?

They came separately in the early 1930’s. It was Hitler’s Reich that pushed them out of Germany. My father more for Zionist reasons chose Palestine; but my mother looked at it as the only practical possibility because it was the cheapest to go there. It was an escape from Nazism.

You would think you would be an ardent supporter of Zionism with that kind of background; but you have an ambivalent attitude at best. I assume you haven’t always held the views you have now.

No, no. definitely no. I cannot blame my family so to speak, and they definitely did not educate me in that way. I think it is a long process in which people challenge the indoctrinations from above. The fact that I grew up in an Arab-Jewish city like Haifa and had several Arab kids in my class opened my eyes at an early age that there is another group of people which are a bit different from the majority. Also, events like the 1973 conflict in which I participated and I saw some of the evils of war. Later on, witnessing events like the initiative Sadat took to Israel; the Lebanon invasion; and the first intifada or ‘uprising’; are all formative events that contributed to a change of mind. That’s one trajectory so to speak. The other was to become a student outside of Israel and to choose 1948 as my doctorate subject, and realising through (studying) the archives what really happened in 1948. So I think that it is the political developments to which I was a witness on the one hand; and the very specific nature of my research on the other; that contributed to having such a different point of view I think from most Jews in Israel.

Speaking about your research, you have written about how the main allure to East European Jewry was the wave of Russian and Polish anti-Semitism, and obviously, the rise of Nazism. What do you think of Edward Said’s view that the Palestinians are ‘the victims of the victims’ and the conflict is a case of the abused becoming the abuser?

Definitely - I share it. I think that Zionism is a movement seeking a solution to the problems of the Jews in Europe; especially a proper salvation to the constant and systematic persecution of the Jews. Zionism, before it chose Palestine, was a national movement with which I could empathise. But the moment it opted for Palestine; it persecuted the indigenous population, and created as Edward Said says a ‘chain of victimisation’. Which I think he meant that there is a kind of shared destiny here; which affects the nature of the best solution for the problem, and explains the dialectical relationship between the Jews and Palestinians in the land. As a general definition of the relationship between what happened to the Jews in Europe and what happened to the Palestinians in Palestine, I think it is an apt description.

Do you accept the idea common among pro-Zionist quarters that anti-Semitism has effectively reversed itself? Where Jews previously fled persecution from Christians to Arab and Islamic nations, but now the bulk of anti-Semitism in the world is found amongst Muslims against Jews in both Israel and the West.

Not entirely. I mean I accept the first half which describes what was anti-Semitism before the creation of Israel; but I think after the creation of Israel there was still what one can call the classical movements of anti-Semitism. Also, I am not sure that a Semitic group of people like the Muslims can be that easily called anti-Semitic. Secondly, unlike anti-Semitism in Europe I think that the animosity and hatred directed towards the Jews and especially the Jews in Israel, has a lot to do with what the Jews are doing rather than with who the Jews are, which I think is a very important difference. It is not that I condone every attack on a synagogue in Europe, or any other attack on Jewish symbols or people; but I think it comes from a very different place, and I fail to see the kind of ideology and theology that accompanied Christian anti-Semitism for centuries. In the case of the Islamic movement in Europe there, there is a very direct target and the target is oppressive Israeli policies. The second point is that the fact that so many Jews in Europe, especially in France and Britain are willing to be ambassadors of Israel, means that when an angry Muslim youth throws a stone at a synagogue which has an Israeli flag, this is the closest symbol or the closest institution he knows of which represents Israel. So I think it is far more difficult in my mind, to attach the adjective anti-Semite to the attacks on Jewish targets which are directly associated with Israel. Anti-Israeli, yes, but I don’t think that anti- Israeli attitudes, policies or actions are equivalent to anti-Semitism. I think the old anti-Semitic groups may be fellow travellers to this new trend. The new trend itself has much more to do with the complex relations between Islam, the Arab world and the Middle East, and that very alien political entity that settled itself by force in the midst of the Arab world in the late nineteenth centaury.

Out of interest, what happened to the indigenous Palestinian Jews? I heard that most of them were anti -Zionist.

That’s true.

Did they get absorbed?

They did. In the 1920’s and 1930’s they became a very small portion of the overall Jewish community in Palestine, so numerically they could not have any influence. Very few of them dared to actually oppose the Zionist interpretation of the reality. Although they knew much better who the Palestinians were, what Arab culture was all about; they disappeared as an elite. By the time the state of Israel came into being in 1948, you can see a small aristocracy of people who were originally there. But the next generation had a very different perspective. One such person is the father of A.B. Yehoshua. He comes from such a family and there is a distinct difference between the position of his father, who was much more empathetic to the indigenous population of Palestine as a whole, than his son. He certainly adopted a very clear outspoken Zionist point of view.

Did they consider themselves Palestinians?

Absolutely. But you have to understand at the moment, one can say the moment is roughly 1929-1930. When the leadership of the Jewish community regards an anti-Zionist position as tantamount to treason; they had to change or pay a very high price. The same would happen later on even to the ultra orthodox Jews who basically had to be anti-Zionist. According to the ultra orthodox point of view you cannot tamper with the divine plan (which allows the Jews to return to Palestine only with God’s intervention); if you tamper with it, and bring back false Jews you are not doing the word of God. Therefore at the beginning; most of the ultra orthodox Jews said they cannot be Zionists and opposed the idea of Jewish statehood as sacrilegious. But with time they were Zionised. A very small group which is called Neturei Karta has remained loyal to this idea to this day.

Do you have any faith yourself?

No, I am an agnostic. Basically, I am a secular person. But I do regard myself as Jewish definitely. I have no problem with my Judaism or my Jewishness, but I am not a religious person. As you probably know, the majority of Jews in Israel are not religious. My guess is that only 15-20 % of the Jews in Israel are observing their religion. It is a very small portion of the society, and it became smaller because of immigration from the ex Soviet Union. 31% of the Jews today in Israel today are people who came from Russia and its satellites, and the vast majority of these people are very secular. In fact, for me it’s nice because the delicatessen shops which sell non kosher meat or ham disappeared for a while, until the Soviet Jews -and some of them are not Jews- came.

In your last book you attribute much of the friction between Jewish settlers in mandate Palestine and the Palestinians to the Zionist leadership being dominated by racist East Europeans. It has been noted before, that the most accommodating segment of the Ashkenazi community have mostly come from Central Europe; while the most chauvinistic elements have been East European. Can you expand on this?

Let me put it this way. The East European Jews were the majority in the Jewish community between 1918 to 1948. But is not only the numbers, they also occupied almost exclusively the centres of power where decisions were made. Therefore they are responsible for shaping the kind of policy I described towards the indigenous population. Jews came from Central Europe in greater numbers after the rise of Nazism in the 1930’s, and were kind of a bourgeoisie. They also bought capital which was very important for the Jewish community because the Eastern Europeans came without anything. They needed them to energise the economy of the Jewish community and so on; but politically, they totally excluded them and they did not integrate them into the political elite. I also have to say, that East European Zionism in and before 1882 started as a movement of a national revival, especially the revival of the Hebrew language. They insisted on Hebrew being the dominant language and you had to be quiet fluent both in writing and talking in Hebrew. The Central European Jews came with no Hebrew at all, and were very disadvantaged in this respect. Thirdly, there was accompanying ideology that most of the Eastern Europeans were socialists. It had to with the collective settlement in the form of Kibbutzim, and putting forward the ideas of the working people or the peasants in those agricultural settlements. Obviously you did not fit the ethos if you had a lawyer’s office in Haifa or Jerusalem.

So, do you think it mainly a class issue to why the attitudes of the Central Europeans differed to the East Europeans towards their Arab neighbours?

Class was one thing. But more importantly, the kind of nationalism that Eastern European Jews brought with them was a very romantic, Polish variety of nationalism. It is a nationalism which is very strong on ethnicity and race or culture or religion. The Central European Jews had a more civic or liberal kind of nationalism, that maybe had the room to accommodate even non Jews in it. However, the fact remains that it was the East Europeans that built the colonialist project. This kind of reality informed their attitude. There came an interesting transformation of the definition of a Jew. Because when they were in Europe they defined Jews as someone who is not a Christian; and when Zionism transferred Jewish people into Palestine, a Jew became someone who is not an Arab. As I write in my book it has created a lot of problems when they finally decided to bring all the one million Arab Jews, they had to decide if they are Arabs or Jews, because they couldn’t have been both. I think that also explains the kind of attitude that developed towards the native population. But above all, if you take romantic nationalism and you take colonialism, it means that any part of Palestine that has been defined as the ancient land of Israel is a force that cannot tolerate the existence of anyone else but the Jewish people. Then comes the question about the means of how you achieve it, but the strategy was to my mind very clear form the beginning….

In your book you illustrated the racial hierarchy in Zionism through the agricultural labour hiring practices of the mandate era Jewish settlements. The bosses wanted to hire Arabs who worked cheaper than Jewish immigrants, but Zionist leaders wanted Jews to only hire Jews. They resolved this by using Arab-Jews who were politically acceptable as Jews, but worked at Arab wages! One thing interesting about the racial fault lines within modern Israel is that while Oriental Jews complain of discrimination, ironically they are now the most belligerent towards the Palestinians - with whom genetically and culturally they share more in common with then the secular Ashkenazi elite. Even the extreme right-wing murderer of Yitzak Rabin was a Jew of Arab descent, and Shas leader Ovadia Yosef (who demanded that Arabs be ‘annihilated’) is an ethnic Iraqi. Why do you think this is?

Romantic nationalism mixed with colonialism, is what fed the attitudes of the Jewish community. You create this idea that a Jew is very different from an Arab. He is different from an Arab because he is also European, he is the West, the Arabs are the East, he is the orient he is the primitive side of the story. It works well until 1948; but because of the fact that so many survivors of the Holocaust did not opt to come to Israel but preferred to come to the United States or to remain in France; it meant that there was a demographic need to increase the number of Jews. I studied the problematic period in which the Jewish leadership made the transformation, i.e. after the years of deciding that they do not want the Jews of the Arab world to come to Israel; they changed their mind and opted for this alternative. The whole Zionist project until 1948 was based on the principle of getting as much of Palestine as possible with as few of the Palestinian Arabs as possible and in 1948 they drove almost one million Arabs out of Palestine. Later, as someone in the Israeli government lamented ‘we drove out one million Arabs and now we are bringing in one million Arabs’. To cut a long story short what they decided to do is to de-Arabise these people. One of the means of de-Arabising people is conveying a very clear message to these people who were in parenthesis, pushed into the economic and social margins of society; was that you have to show us that you are not an Arab. And, what is the best way of showing that you are not an Arab? By being venomously anti-Arab.

The other day I read a book about the Irish community in the United States, which when they came over, poor and enslaved in many ways; they were worried that they would be treated like blacks. They adopted a very strong anti-black attitude in order to prove that they were White. I think the same happened here, that this was the ticket of being integrated into society that despised everything which was Arabic; despite that this was actually the culture and the language of those people who came from the Arab world.

Presumably the desire to dilute the numbers of Arabs in Israel today is behind what you have written about the Israeli government importing many hundreds of thousands of Russians - many of them who are not in fact actually Jewish?

Yes. Definitely. You see as long as you are not an Arab you are welcome, especially after you exhaust the resource of Jewish immigration from the Arab world. You are even willing to do something which was very different from the Israelis, which was to allow African Jews to come over. They later regretted it as you can see from the way they treated the Jewish Ethiopians in Israel, but they were invited because they were not Arabs. Bringing white people from the ex Soviet Union, Jewish or non-Jewish, as far as the political elite was concerned was important; due to their obsession with maintaining a demographic majority.

Would you agree that the distortion of scholarship is due to the extremely emotional and partisan baggage people have on this subject, and fails to provide outsiders with accurate and objective information? It is only recently that mainstream academia has accepted that the Palestinian narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict is closer than to the truth than the traditional Zionist mythology (no Palestinian expulsion, ‘settlements not conquest’, ‘purity of arms’ etc.). I am thinking in particular of Israel’s leading historian Benny Morris, who justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 by saying ‘the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians …. (there) are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.’ Israel was created in the aftermath of the Nazi holocaust, but yet here he is expropriating the Nazi ideology of lebensraum against ‘inferior’ peoples! ¹

I think I would agree with this. I was thinking myself about Morris’ so called transformation. I know the man well and I know these ideas were hidden. After October 2000 he felt it was right to voice them more clearly because the whole political and cultural system in Israel moved to the Right and it became acceptable. I am bewildered by the fact that very intelligent people, whom I have known for many years, can articulate very clear moral and logical positions almost on every issue in the world except on Zionism; where they leave behind any moral or ethical consideration. They are totally blinded, but I am not sure it is only emotion. The important thing is not just the facts, which we are very thankful to Morris for exposing (war crimes in 1948), but of course what you do with these things. What he did was return them into the ideological presence of Zionism; he did not become an anti-Zionist because of it; and what you realise when you read him, is that even if the story was worse, let's say there was a genocide not just ethnic cleansing, he would remain a Zionist. The nature of the crime admitted, the crime does not really become a crime. Suddenly what started as a crime in the first book became an existential struggle of survival. That’s my point of view; I think that if you are very emotional about killing people, raping women and so on; you should have strong, serious problems with the ideology that it’s all about.

Also, I think the most interesting point about people who write in the name of the nation; are usually those who claim most vociferously that they are doing it objectively and scientifically -the more you are committed to a national ideology, the more you claim you write objectively. So, as I say, it’s more than just an extreme emotional attachment. It’s being programmed - in a terrible way to my mind.

Some might argue that you require deprogramming as a member of the Israeli communist party, which is somewhat way out of the mainstream discourse in Israel and also the West.

Well, that’s a very interesting way of putting history: One, I am not a member of a communist party; I am a member of a front which includes the communists. In fact, I angered my communist comrades when in an interview with ‘Le Monde’ I said I cannot be a communist as I love life too much, and I was nearly was chucked out the party for saying this! Secondly, I joined political life after being de-programmed. It’s not that I joined a party then I was de-programmed. I was first de-Zionised so to speak and then I decided to do something. In fact, I blame Britain for my views, and the four years that I did in Oxford as a doctorate student.

The simultaneous work on the Israeli archives on one hand, and the fact that I had an Arab tutor and Palestinian friends, very much enabled me to see the alternative narrative; and then I think I developed a third narrative. I am also not a Palestinian nationalist.

I was going to mention that despite your left wing views, you accept, that there wasn’t really a nation of Palestine prior of Zionism; and that the inhabitants of mandate Palestine identified primarily with towns and villages rather than the ‘country’. This is a very prickly area as Palestinians think this negates their claim to Palestine; which Israelis are very keen to do as demonstrated by the ‘memoricide’ of 1951 ²

I totally agree. Basically, as long as the ruling Turkish Empire was Muslim and Islamic in civilisation and nature, most of the Arabs saw themselves as part of it. I think the moment in 1908 when the Young Turks took over and said that you are all Turkish citizens, or the French took over Algeria already in 1930 and said to the locals you are a colony of Britain or a colony of France, there a different kind of attitude developed which could be called Arab nationalism.

Until 1908, if you look at what most of the Arab nationalist intellectuals talk about, they talk about the Austro-Hungarian model of sharing the empire with the Turks. So, this will mean in that respect there was no Palestine, no Syria or Iraq. The moment when the young Turks want to Turkify everyone, suddenly they don’t want the Hungarian model they want an independent Arab kingdom. The moment the colonialist powers carve the Levant between into administrative areas, these administrative areas become national entities including Palestine. I think that there are many Palestine historians today who would agree with this description.

The traditional Chomskyite Leftist view of Israel’s role in the Middle East is as a surrogate army for the United States. A newer and highly controversial theory is that Israel and its American lobby are actually the tail wagging the dog. According to this analysis the cause of the Iraq war was an alliance between non-Jewish ex cold warriors and oil industry insiders (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice etc.), and the Jewish ‘neo-cons’ (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams etc.) who had previously worked for think tanks promoting the ‘Eretz Israel’ agenda. Which more closely reflects your opinion?

I think it is really somewhere in the middle. I don’t really buy this idea the Jews of Israel are so powerful as to totally control American policy, even to the point of causing the American president to send troops into Iraq. I am an historian, and as a historian I know that the America support for Israel developed in a very bizarre and unpredictable way. Namely, it was not there to begin with, so I lean more towards the Chomsky view. Also, I would like to believe this; as if Israeli and Jewish influence is so dramatic, then we are in for a very long winter. There was a kind of ad-hoc American policy in the Middle East to begin with in the 1950’s and 1960’s, not a very clear cut American policy some people say. As it develops the Israelis very cleverly pushed themselves into becoming a centre pillar of that policy. I think they had the ability to say, oh this is your policy, and so what you need is a bastion like ours. Now, I think that new conservatives developed independently of Israel during the Cold War. It’s a strategy that believes that America needs a constant enemy and a constant war between the good and the bad.

However, there is the new development of the Christian Zionists, and it’s too premature to say whether it’s so fundamental that they would stay there forever. Together with AIPAC, there was definitely an attempt by the tail, to wag the dog, but the dog has other tails and they are not all coming from Israel and Jewish people. Interestingly, if you read carefully the ideology of the Christian Zionists it’s very anti-Semitic. For the time being it is pro Israel, but the idea is to basically get rid of the Jews, once their divine plan materialises. If you look at the complex relationship between the industrial and the military complexes on both sides, I do think the centre is America not Israel. In other words I don’t think the Israeli military industry is the one that dictates the strategic American policies. I think it became almost an integral part of that military industrial complex that needed new markets after the end of the cold war. Definitely there is a kind of mutual reciprocity of interest, but I think that it is mainly Israel as a proxy and America as the empire and not the empire that fights the war of the proxy.

I am very open and wouldn’t fall from my chair if people would show me the fact that neo-conservatives were pushed by Israeli ideas to change the nature of the Middle East. You have the well oiled AIPAC, but you cannot blame Israel for the 90 million members of the Christian fundamentalism movement in America. So, it’s an alliance. It’s a terrible alliance, but don’t misunderstand me, Israel would suffer from it in the end. I think the empire can change the policy; and it can also collapse as we know. Empires do collapse, and then the Jews in Israel will be in dire straits. Secondly, it is destructive to the interests and welfare of the locals to the area.

Speaking of the ‘Neo-Cons’, they and their supporters are similarly keen for global Jewry to be considered solely Western rather than as a people of Oriental origin. They speak of ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization, and are dismissive of the Judeo-Islamic civilizations that once existed in the Middle East and Spain. It strikes me as a means of emphasising solidarity between Jews and the Christian West, and correspondingly distancing the Islamic enemy in the ‘War on Terror’. Would you agree?

Yes, with this I would agree. I think the Huntington kind of idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ puts Israel at the frontline. It’s the last line of defence against Islamic barbarism, and therefore, they phrase their support for Israel as such. But you know equally if you read the neo-cons, they may one day say ‘alright, let's see the cost-benefit ideas not just the ideological terms’. They are also very conservative as you know; and are very concerned about the overall costs. This goes back to Henry Kissinger’s point of view in the 1970’s which says you take from the Middle East what you need, but you do not have to be there. Mainly if you need your oil field, take your oil field. If you need to make sure that Muslims don’t get out of the walls of the Middle East, then you make sure. It doesn’t necessarily mean you go the Bush way in that sense that you democratise the Middle East by force. So in this sense Israel can be a liability rather than an asset.

Then we have a different kind of development around Wolfowitz and the others, and they say Israel can be a vehicle to democratise the Arab world. There you can say it fits into this kind of ideology which says that you have a clash of civilisations, and luckily you have the brave Israelis at the heart of the enemy, and with their help we can conquer. But I think that it is not typical to every neo-conservative thinker that I know of, and I have talked to some of them. I think that some of them can see a scenario, where it would be better to have allies in the Arab world, without democracy and development; than to have the complication of Israel that breaks any lines between America and Arab leaders.

George Bush and the Neo-Cons have apparently been hugely influenced by ex Minister Natan Sharanky’s book ‘The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror’. Can Sharansky really be serious in his stated desire for democracy and liberation while supporting the occupation and expropriation of Palestinian land, or is this cynical political window dressing?

It’s a fantastic question. I don’t know, but after a while people take themselves seriously. In other words I think it is a mixture of very clear ideological perceptions that developed out of necessity. Sharansky is a very different case by the way, to ex Prime Minister Netanyahu who wrote a similar book. Netanyahu was educated in the United States and has the mixtures you see in America between naivety and the cynical brutal ideology of imperialism, and the same comes out in his book ‘A Place Under the Sun’. Sharansky is a different case, who worked for the CIA in the Soviet Union, but also was, I can say, bravely resisting the regime the same time. He came here as a hero, and expected to be a much more important figure in Israeli politics than he was, so he re-invented himself as an intellectual. You have to remember he was a scientist actually, he never wrote about social or political sciences.

Maybe what is missing in the question is the kind of relationship that Netanyahu and Sharansky have with the academia in Israel. You have all these shallow popular books that say in very simple terms that only until democracy emerges in the Arab world, there is no point with reconciling with the Arab world, and until that point we should rely on the United States to fight against the sources of evil. Now, this is reflected in the supposedly more complex way in the works of American and Israeli academics (that Sharansky’s and Netanyahu’s books quote extensively) who say they have all these theories and case studies and hypothesis which prove their so called academic research. Sharansky’s main argument is an old argument, which says that democracies will never fight each other. Actually, I wish actually that these stated beliefs were just ‘window dressing’, and then I would be more optimistic about the ability to confront these people…...

I remember Netanyahu’s brazen testimony to the American Congressional hearing onto the 9/11 disaster; where he actually claimed that Israel was unpopular in the Middle East because of its association with the United States!

Right! He thought that he was winning a lot of support in the United States for that because the whole Middle East became the enemy after 9/11. As I say, he is a cynical person, a charlatan. But I think that I am not convinced there was this sharp dichotomy between what one can call an ideological conviction and a cynical political opinion. With time the two are intertwined in such a way that it doesn’t matter anymore. Mainly if someone goes on for very manipulative reasons adopting an ideological position, eventually he ends up believing that this is his ideological position and he is already captivated by it and informed by it. I think it is the ideology which you can find in modernisation theories and scholarly justifications for imperialism and later on for neo-imperialism.

Speaking about one more politician, former Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid has openly stated the view shared by both Labour and Likud that Israel should become a European country ‘otherwise we will blend into the Semitic region and be lost in a terrible Levantine dunghill.’ Is there not a dichotomy with the government’s desire for Israel to be a country in the Middle East without being a Middle Eastern (or indeed’ Semitic’) country?

Yes. Well, I think as far as he is concerned, anything is justified in excluding Israel from the Middle East as long as it is physically impossible to take Israel out of the Levant and attach it to Europe. The second best means is building walls and adopting political and cultural systems that challenge and fight anyone who does not adapt to the same kind of perception of Israel as a European country. The dichotomy that he himself does not want to admit, is the occupation and the colonisation of Palestine; and the fact that the Palestinians are there; and the fact that so many Jews came from Arab countries. I mean these are all nagging realities that defeat his idea of a European state. In fact he is very funny; he founded the political party that calls for something that the founding fathers of the state thought that would be the reality itself. There should have been no need for an Israeli party that would fight for keeping Israel as a secular democratic Jewish Western country. He has a party which calls for these ideas, and gets only 15 members in the Knesset out of 120, which shows you how multicultural and bi-national the state became in reality, if not ideologically.

The contradiction is between the ideology of the country of being a Jewish and Western State; and the realities of the ground, where in every direction you would look the whole idea is defeated. The sad story about it is that what the Israelis were brought up to believe is (and Lapid is one of them); is that if you cease to be a Western country (though Israel never was a Western country) it’s like a Holocaust. It is a matter of time I think, before the gap and the tension between the overall ideology and the reality would not be able to be sustained anymore.

In February you were a key note speaker at the University of Toronto at a week long event exposing what was described as Israeli apartheid. There are two views on this, I am sure I don’t need to tell you. Israel supporters say it is ‘a light unto nations’ and a beacon of democracy, human rights and freedom of expression; which is obviously diametrically opposed to any idea of Israel being what Edward Said called ‘a Jewish supremacist state’. Can you explain the rationale behind these two? Why there are wildly opposing outlooks, and can you cite some illustrative evidence to support your own point of view?

Well, the point of view of the ‘light unto nations’ is an interesting appropriation of a religious Jewish point of view taken by the secular Zionist movement in order to convince a lot of European powers, to support a colonialist project in the midst of the Arab world. So you needed this image, I think first of all in order to win international legitimacy. If you remember that since 1917, the Zionist movement was fighting for international legitimacy which became easier to win after the Holocaust. It was also needed for domestic consumption to explain to people why they should be living a in a place where they are so hated by the neighbourhood in which they chose to settle. So, I think it is a mixture of the religious ideology of the chosen people, and a very functional ideology in order to explain the unique place of the Zionist project in an Arab world, where other European projects such as the ones in Algeria and Egypt were forced to end and the colonisers were forced to go back to Europe.

Now, the rationale for my point of view is exactly that. In order to maintain the kind of enclave that the Jews wanted to keep in the post colonialist Arab world, they needed to use a lot of coercion and policies of ethnic supremacy, which is actually the essence of Zionism today to my mind. I will give you a few examples: one is that we don’t have a constitution in Israel, but we have a constitutional law which is almost like a constitution and many of them are just apartheid laws. For example, the law of the land, which says that 94% of the land in Israel belongs to the Jewish people alone, not to the state of Israel, and therefore 20% of the population -the Arabs- are barred from this land. Although the Arab population in Israel tripled compared to the Jewish population, there has not been one new Arab settlement or village built, while there are hundreds of new Jewish, towns, villages and settlements. So this is discrimination on the basis of ethnicity on land rights. You cannot exist in an agricultural society like the Arab one, if you are not allowed to expand according to your demographic group. That’s one law.

Then there is the law of citizenship, which says that Palestinians who may have brothers and sisters and relatives all over the Arab world are not allowed to reunite with their families, but Jews all around the world have all the rights to come and become full citizens from the moment they where born.

The third one is the law of social welfare, which says that only people who have served in the army are entitled to the full welfare social system. Now, the Arabs are not allowed to serve in the army, and therefore they are not allowed full social services. And these are just the formal laws. There are many de facto manifestations of apartheid in the way towards the Arab population in the way that the budget is distributed; in the basic treatment by the authorities; the police; and so on.So definitely, I think, my definition of Israel comes closer in my mind to the reality.

A peace treaty, in my view, will not be accepted by the Palestinians without the end of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (and certainly not via the ‘Bantustan’ option offered previously by Ehud Barak). The three past cases of Israel ending occupation were not voluntary, but due to military considerations in the case of South Lebanon and the Egyptian Sinai; and by the American government pulling the plug during the Suez war of 1956. The Palestinians are no match for the Israelis in an armed conflict, and no American President has had a head-on collision with Israel since Eisenhower. Do you see any positive developments for peace?

Basically I agree with this scenario and I will put it in the following way. The end of the occupation is a pre-condition for any genuine peace talks. In fact what the mainly American masters of the peace process have done until now, was to say that the end of occupation equates with the end of peace. I think this was dispelled. Unfortunately, they will try to attempt it again and again in the near future through the ‘road map’, and they will fail again. Whenever it fails, it drains the hopes again; and frustration comes up in the form of an uprising or a cycle of violence. The second point is that I agree that only pressure on Israel will force Israel to end the occupation. It is interesting how the Israeli gradual withdrawal from the Sinai preceded the total Sinai withdrawal. You can on the one hand attribute it to the war of 1973, but in that war Israel was not defeated. There was an American pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Sinai as it was an American interest.

Was it not due to Israeli alarm at the Egyptian army performing much better than expected?

Exactly. So my point is this, as someone who tries to be a pacifist, I find it hard to say that I would like (or that I think that there is a chance for) a military defeat of the Israelis that would cause them to leave the territories - although I was very impressed by Hezbollah in Lebanon forcing the Israelis to get out. My point is that I don’t think that the Palestinians have the ability to accomplish what happened in Lebanon; and secondly, I am a supporter of something else which I think hasn’t been tried in the case of Israel and the West. These are sanctions and boycotts, but this may be related to your formal question about Israel being an apartheid state. I have no idea whether it would work or not, but I know it hasn’t been tried. There are two ideas to end the occupation which are not going to work to my mind. One is the diplomatic route, namely negotiations. The second one is an armed struggle, which I don’t think is going to succeed. Therefore, we have only one other option left, which may not succeed, and then we are all doomed here to a horrible future; but, we have to try, and that is to pressure the Israelis though economic sanctions. The problem with this is that the governments of the day in the West that have the leverage will not do it. However, there is a civil society that may have the ability to pressure these governments. The anti-apartheid movement did not begin from the government. It started from the civil society in Ireland with some very brave sales women on the floor who refused to the bidding of the South Africans and handle their goods. We have to start somewhere and I am not sure whether it will work or not, but I can’t see any other consideration. Of course in time, after the third, fourth or fifth uprising, maybe the Arab world will reunite briefly or partly in such a way that will defeat Israel, but I don’t even want to be part of it. I don’t want to be part of the military destruction of the place I live.

Do you think the death of Yasser Arafat increases the chances for a peaceful settlement? Many regarded Yasser Arafat (along with his cronies in the PLO) as a disaster for the Palestinian people. Undoubtedly he was extremely unattractive to the West too and absolutely hated by Israel.

No. Not at all. I don’t think his death has contributed to the chance of peace at all. I think that his death contributed to a closing of a chapter of the Palestinian national history, and this always happens. And you know people like Arafat that take such a central role in reviving Palestinian national identity. We will leave history to judge. It will be a complex judgement I think. It will not be black and white. But it was a chapter that was important to the closing for the Palestinian people because he became weaker physically and mentally and therefore you needed a new leadership at the time when the community needed great steps as the crisis required a great leader. My analysis has always been, ever since 1957 there is no chance for peace if the Israeli mentality and Zionist ideology continues. Israel’s adhering to Zionist ideology is the reason we do not have peace with the Palestinians. As long as the ideology of ethnic supremacy exists, I think that whoever the Palestinians choose as a leader (and however corrupt they may be), is a very minor element in explaining the failure of peace. The main explanation comes from the fact that the Israeli society as a whole does not want to reconcile with the people it ethnically cleansed in 1948. It doesn’t want to be part of the area which it penetrated by force in the late nineteenth centaury. As long as these are the fundamental positions of the Jewish society and its leadership, there will be no peace.

¹ The destruction of the American Indian societies by White settlers was the primary influence on Hitler’s views on the racial destiny of ‘Aryan’ peoples.

² ‘A History of Modern Palestine, One Land Two Peoples’ by Ilan Pappe, 2004. Page 147: “The tragedy of the loss of more villages (to Israel) was further highlighted by the hasty erection of new Jewish settlements on top of the 370 Palestinian villages destroyed in the 1948 war and on the land of those evicted after the war. In July 1949, Ben-Gurion personally supervised a large project to give ‘Hebrew names to all the places, mountains, valleys, springs and roads, etc’. in the country. This act of ‘memoricide’ was completed in 1951.”Israeli academic Ilan Pappe first came to prominence in the 1980s as a member of the Israel ‘New Historian’ movement that chronicled the war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948. The author of several books critical of ‘heroic’ myths of the Zionist history; he teaches Political Science at Haifa University, and is the Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. A committed advocate of Palestinian rights; he has called for Israel to be internationally ostracised in the same way pressure was applied to apartheid era South Africa, and has been reviled by right-wing Zionist periodical FrontPage magazine as ‘the most hated Israeli in Israel’. In 2002 he was put on investigation by his own university for his support of a post graduate student who uncovered the Tantura massacre of Palestinians in 1948; but refused to co-operate denouncing it as a ‘show trial’ and a ‘Mcarythist charade’. The charges were later dropped. His latest book is 2003’s ‘A History of Modern Palestine’, of which he is currently writing a second edition.

This article is from CNI Foundation http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=114

Text of Sharon's UN talk

2005-09-16T00:30:00.000+02:00

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=625562
Text of Ariel Sharon's speech to the UN General Assembly, September 15, 2005

My friends and colleagues, heads and representatives of the UN member states, I arrived here from Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for over 3,000 years, and the undivided and eternal capital of the State of Israel.

At the outset, I would like to express the profound feelings of empathy of the people of Israel for the American nation, and our sincere condolences to the families who lost their loved ones. I wish to encourage my friend, President George Bush, and the American people, in their determined efforts to assist the victims of the hurricane and rebuild the ruins after the destruction. The State of Israel, which the United States stood beside at times of trial, is ready to extend any assistance at its disposal in this immense humanitarian mission.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I stand before you at the gate of nations as a Jew and as a citizen of the democratic, free and sovereign State of Israel, a proud representative of an ancient people, whose numbers are few, but whose contribution to civilization and to the values of ethics, justice and faith, surrounds the world and encompasses history. The Jewish people have a long memory, the memory which united the exiles of Israel for thousands of years: a memory which has its origin in G-d's commandment to our forefather Abraham: "Go forth!" and continued with the receiving of the Torah at the foot of Mount Sinai and the wanderings of the children of Israel in the desert, led by Moses on their journey to the promised land, the land of Israel.

I was born in the Land of Israel, the son of pioneers - people who tilled the land and sought no fights - who did not come to Israel to dispossess its residents. If the circumstances had not demanded it, I would not have become a soldier, but rather a farmer and agriculturist. My first love was, and remains, manual labor; sowing and harvesting, the pastures, the flock and the cattle.

I, as someone whose path of life led him to be a fighter and commander in all Israel's wars, reaches out today to our Palestinian neighbors in a call for reconciliation and compromise to end the bloody conflict, and embark on the path which leads to peace and understanding between our peoples. I view this as my calling and my primary mission for the coming years.

The land of Israel is precious to me, precious to us, the Jewish people, more than anything. Relinquishing any part of our forefathers' legacy is heartbreaking, as difficult as the parting of the Red Sea. Every inch of land, every hill and valley, every stream and rock, is saturated with Jewish history, replete with memories. The continuity of Jewish presence in the Land of Israel never ceased. Even those of us who were exiled from our land, against their will, to the ends of the earth - their souls, for all generations, remained connected to their homeland, by thousands of hidden threads of yearning and love, expressed three times a day in prayer and songs of longing.

The Land of Israel is the open Bible, the written testimony, the identity and right of the Jewish people. Under its skies, the prophets of Israel expressed their claims for social justice, and their eternal vision for alliances between peoples, in a world which would know no more war. Its cities, villages, vistas, ridges, deserts and plains preserve as loyal witnesses its ancient Hebrew names. Page after page, our unique land is unfurled, and at its heart is united Jerusalem, the city of the Temple upon Mount Moriah, the axis of the life of the Jewish people throughout all generations, and the seat of its yearnings and prayers for 3,000 years. The city to which we pledged an eternal vow of faithfulness, which forever beats in every Jewish heart: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning!"

I say these things to you because they are the essence of my Jewish consciousness, and of my belief in the eternal and unimpeachable right of the people of Israel to the Land of Israel. However, I say this here also to emphasize the immensity of the pain I feel deep in my heart at the recognition that we have to make concessions for the sake of peace between us and our Palestinian neighbors.

The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel does not mean disregarding the rights of others in the land. The Palestinians will always be our neighbors. We respect them, and have no aspirations to rule over them. They are also entitled to freedom and to a national, sovereign existence in a state of their own.

This week, the last Israeli soldier left the Gaza Strip, and military law there was ended. The State of Israel proved that it is ready to make painful concessions in order to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. The decision to disengage was very difficult for me, and involves a heavy personal price. However, it is the absolute recognition that it is the right path for the future of Israel that guided me. Israeli society is undergoing a difficult crisis as a result of the Disengagement, and now needs to heal the rifts.

Now it is the Palestinians? turn to prove their desire for peace. The end of Israeli control over and responsibility for the Gaza Strip allows the Palestinians, if they so wish, to develop their economy and build a peace-seeking society, which is developed, free, law-abiding, transparent, and which adheres to democratic principles. The most important test the Palestinian leadership will face is in fulfilling their commitment to put an end to terror and its infrastructures, eliminate the anarchic regime of armed gangs, and cease the incitement and indoctrination of hatred towards Israel and the Jews.

Until they do so - Israel will know how to defend itself from the horrors of terrorism. This is why we built the security fence, and we will continue to build it until it is completed, as would any other country defending its citizens. The security fence prevents terrorists and murderers from arriving in city centers on a daily basis and targeting citizens on their way to work, children on their way to school and families sitting together in restaurants. This fence is vitally indispensable. This fence saves lives!

The successful implementation of the Disengagement Plan opens up a window of opportunity for advancing towards peace, in accordance with the sequence of the Roadmap. The State of Israel is committed to the Roadmap and to the implementation of the Sharm El-Sheikh understandings. And I hope that it will be possible, through them, to renew the political process.

I am among those who believe that it is possible to reach a fair compromise and coexistence in good neighborly relations between Jews and Arabs. However, I must emphasize one fact: there will be no compromise on the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, with defensible borders, in full security and without threats and terror.

I call on the Palestinian leadership to show determination and leadership, and to eliminate terror, violence and the culture of hatred from our relations. I am certain that it is in our power to present our peoples with a new and promising horizon, a horizon of hope.

Distinguished representatives,

As I mentioned, the Jewish people have a long memory. We remember events which took place thousands of years ago, and certainly remember events which took place in this hall during the last 60 years. The Jewish people remember the dramatic vote in the UN Assembly on November 29, 1947, when representatives of the nations recognized our right to national revival in our historic homeland. However, we also remember dozens of harsh and unjust decisions made by United Nations over the years. And we know that, even today, there are those who sit here as representatives of a country whose leadership calls to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and no one speaks out.

The attempts of that country to arm itself with nuclear weapons must disturb the sleep of anyone who desires peace and stability in the Middle East and the entire world. The combination of murky fundamentalism and support of terrorist organizations creates a serious threat that every member nation in the UN must stand against.

I hope that the comprehensive reforms which the United Nations is undergoing in its 60th anniversary year will include a fundamental change and improvement in the approach of the United Nations, its organizations and institutions, towards the State of Israel.

My fellow colleagues and representatives,

Peace is a supreme value in the Jewish legacy, and is the desired goal of our policy. After the long journey of wanderings and the hardships of the Jewish people; after the Holocaust which obliterated one third of our people; after the long and arduous struggle for revival; after more than 57 consecutive years of war and terror which did not stop the development of the State of Israel; after all this - our heart's desire was and remains to achieve peace with our neighbors. Our desire for peace is strong enough to ensure that we will achieve it, only if our neighbors are genuine partners in this longed-for goal. If we succeed in working together, we can transform our plot of land, which is dear to both peoples, from a land of contention to a land of peace - for our children and grandchildren.

In a few days time on the Hebrew calendar, the New Year will begin, the 5,766th year since the Creation. According to Jewish belief, the fates of people and nations are determined at the New Year by the Creator - to be spared or to be doomed. May the Holy One, blessed be He, determine that this year, our fate and the fate of our neighbors is peace, mutual respect and good neighborly relations.

From this distinguished podium, on behalf of the people of Israel, I wish all the people of the world a happy New Year.

Shana Tova!

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