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Excuse Me, But Israel Has No Right To Exist

By Sharmine Narwani

The phrase “right to exist” entered my consciousness in the 1990s just as the concept of the two-state solution became part of our collective lexicon. In any debate at university, when a Zionist was out of arguments, those three magic words were invoked to shut down the conversation with an outraged, “are you saying Israel doesn’t have the right to exist??”

Of course you couldn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist – that was like saying you were negating a fundamental Jewish right to have…rights, with all manner of Holocaust guilt thrown in for effect.

Except of course the Holocaust is not my fault – or that of Palestinians. The cold-blooded program of ethnically cleansing Europe of its Jewish population has been so callously and opportunistically utilized to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab nation, that it leaves me utterly unmoved. I have even caught myself – shock – rolling my eyes when I hear Holocaust and Israel in the same sentence.

What moves me instead in this post-two-state era, is the sheer audacity of Israel even existing.

What a fantastical idea, this notion that a bunch of rank outsiders from another continent could appropriate an existing, populated nation for themselves – and convince the “global community” that it was the moral thing to do. I’d laugh at the chutzpah if this wasn’t so serious.

Even more brazen is the mass ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population by persecuted Jews, newly arrived from their own experience of being ethnically cleansed.

But what is truly frightening is the psychological manipulation of the masses into believing that Palestinians are somehow dangerous – “terrorists” intent on “driving Jews into the sea.” As someone who makes a living through words, I find the use of language in creating perceptions to be intriguing. This practice – often termed “public diplomacy” has become an essential tool in the world of geopolitics. Words, after all, are the building blocks of our psychology.

Take, for example, the way we have come to view the Palestinian-Israeli “dispute” and any resolution of this enduring conflict. And here I borrow liberally from a previous article of mine…

The United States and Israel have created the global discourse on this issue, setting stringent parameters that grow increasingly narrow regarding the content and direction of this debate. Anything discussed outside the set parameters has, until recently, widely been viewed as unrealistic, unproductive and even subversive.

Participation in the debate is limited only to those who prescribe to its main tenets: the acceptance of Israel, its regional hegemony and its qualitative military edge; acceptance of the shaky logic upon which the Jewish state’s claim to Palestine is based; and acceptance of the inclusion and exclusion of certain regional parties, movements and governments in any solution to the conflict.

Words like dove, hawk, militant, extremist, moderates, terrorists, Islamo-fascists, rejectionists, existential threat, holocaust-denier, mad mullah determine the participation of solution partners — and are capable of instantly excluding others.

Then there is the language that preserves “Israel’s Right To Exist” unquestioningly: anything that invokes the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the myths about historic Jewish rights to the land bequeathed to them by the Almighty – as though God was in the real-estate business. This language seeks not only to ensure that a Jewish connection to Palestine remains unquestioned, but importantly, seeks to punish and marginalize those who tackle the legitimacy of this modern colonial-settler experiment.

But this group-think has led us nowhere. It has obfuscated, distracted, deflected, ducked, and diminished, and we are no closer to a satisfactory conclusion…because the premise is wrong.

There is no fixing this problem. This is the kind of crisis in which you cut your losses, realize the error of your ways and reverse course. Israel is the problem. It is the last modern-day colonial-settler experiment, conducted at a time when these projects were being unraveled globally.

There is no “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” – that suggests some sort of equality in power, suffering, and negotiable tangibles, and there is no symmetry whatsoever in this equation. Israel is the Occupier and Oppressor; Palestinians are the Occupied and Oppressed. What is there to negotiate? Israel holds all the chips. They can give back some land, property, rights, but even that is an absurdity – what about everything else? What about ALL the land, property and rights? Why do they get to keep anything – how is the appropriation of land and property prior to 1948 fundamentally different from the appropriation of land and property on this arbitrary 1967 date?

Why are the colonial-settlers prior to 1948 any different from those who colonized and settled after 1967?

Let me correct myself. Palestinians do hold one chip that Israel salivates over – the one big demand at the negotiating table that seems to hold up everything else. Israel craves recognition of its “right to exist.”

But you do exist – don’t you, Israel?

Israel fears “delegitimization” more than anything else. Behind the velvet curtain lies a state built on myths and narratives, protected only by a military behemoth, billions of dollars in US assistance and a lone UN Security Council veto. Nothing else stands between the state and its dismantlement. Without these three things, Israelis would not live in an entity that has come to be known as the “least safe place for Jews in the world.”

Strip away the spin and the gloss, and you quickly realize that Israel doesn’t even have the basics of a normal state. After 64 years, it doesn’t have borders. After six decades, it has never been more isolated. Over half a century later, and it needs a gargantuan military just to stop Palestinians from walking home.

Israel is a failed experiment. It is on life-support – pull those three plugs and it is a cadaver, living only in the minds of some seriously deluded foreigners who thought they could pull off the heist of the century.

The most important thing we can do as we hover on the horizon of One State is to shed the old language rapidly. None of it was real anyway – it was just the parlance of that particular “game.” Grow a new vocabulary of possibilities – the new state will be the dawn of humanity’s great reconciliation. Muslims, Christians and Jews living together in Palestine as they once did.

Naysayers can take a hike. Our patience is wearing thinner than the walls of the hovels that Palestinian refugees have called “home” for three generations in their purgatory camps.

These universally exploited refugees are entitled to the nice apartments – the ones that have pools downstairs and a grove of palm trees outside the lobby. Because the kind of compensation owed for this failed western experiment will never be enough.

And no, nobody hates Jews. That is the fallback argument screeched in our ears – the one “firewall” remaining to protect this Israeli Frankenstein. I don’t even care enough to insert the caveats that are supposed to prove I don’t hate Jews. It is not a provable point, and frankly, it is a straw man of an argument. If Jews who didn’t live through the Holocaust still feel the pain of it, then take that up with the Germans. Demand a sizeable plot of land in Germany – and good luck to you.

For anti-Semites salivating over an article that slams Israel, ply your trade elsewhere – you are part of the reason this problem exists.

Israelis who don’t want to share Palestine as equal citizens with the indigenous Palestinian population – the ones who don’t want to relinquish that which they demanded Palestinians relinquish 64 years ago – can take their second passports and go back home. Those remaining had better find a positive attitude – Palestinians have shown themselves to be a forgiving lot. The amount of carnage they have experienced at the hands of their oppressors – without proportional response – shows remarkable restraint and faith.

This is less the death of a Jewish state than it is the demise of the last remnants of modern-day colonialism. It is a rite of passage – we will get through it just fine. At this particular precipice in the 21st century, we are all, universally, Palestinian – undoing this wrong is a test of our collective humanity, and nobody has the right to sit this one out.

Israel has no right to exist. Break that mental barrier and just say it: “Israel has no right to exist.” Roll it around your tongue, tweet it, post it as your Facebook status update – do it before you think twice. Delegitimization is here – have no fear. Palestine will be less painful than Israel ever was.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Germany, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Israel, Media & Culture, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Talk Radio, TV, World History, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Mass graves of Palestinians discovered

28 May

The remains indicate that they were of Palestinians of varied ages ‘killed by Zionist gangs’ in Jaffa

Mass graves have been discovered in the historical cemetery of Al-Kazakhana in Jaffa, Al-Aqsa Foundation for Islamic Endowments and Heritage announced on Monday.

The graves contain the remains of Palestinians killed by Jewish militias in 1948 during the Nakba (Catastrophe). According to the Foundation, they were discovered during routine maintenance and rehabilitation of the cemetery in one of the cities occupied by Israel since 1948.

The Head of the cemetery rehabilitation project, Mohammed al-Ashqar, said that the remains indicate that they were of Palestinians of varied ages “killed by Zionist gangs” in Jaffa. Some of the graves also date back to the Palestinian Uprising of 1936 against British Mandate rule.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Israel, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Statements, U.S. News, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Obama to increase aid to Israel: $4 billion per year beginning 2017

27 May

U.S. President Barack Obama chats with military personnel while viewing an Iron Dome missile battery on March 20 at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport.

Written by Justin Raimondo

The President, on his trip to Israel, presented Netanyahu with a new ten-year aid “package” totaling some $40 billion – a $10 billion increase over the last such agreement.

AntiWar.com - Given the kind of society we have become – a country of whining spoiled brats who have been living above our means for years – every special interest group is up in arms over the alleged tragedy known as Sequestration. While these automatic across-the-board spending cuts are portrayed as nothing less than draconian by various lobbyists and their congressional sock puppets, in reality these are not even real cuts as you and I understand them, but merely cuts in projected spending increases. Like the temperature in Hell, the imperative in Washington is that spending must always increase: “austerity” means the tempo has momentarily slackened.

From military contractors to the academic establishment, all the lobbyists are crying bloody murder: we are told air traffic controllers will be taken off duty, and hospitals are warning of cuts to vital services. Some of these cuts will hit hardest those who can afford it least: the very poorest of the poor. In this atmosphere, one would think a foreign lobby would be more discreet about calling for an exemption in the foreign aid category. However, in the case of AIPAC, the biggest pro-Israel lobby in Washington, subtlety is not at the top of their agenda.

At the beginning of this month, AIPAC’s annual conference featured a Capitol Hill blitz, in which thousands of pro-Israel activists descended on Washington to pressure Congress to exempt Israel from the cuts. This was coupled with a demand that Congress vote to designate the Jewish state a “major strategic ally,” a characterization meant to divorce aid to Israel from the general foreign aid budget and put it in a special category of its own. After all, that’s what the “special relationship” is all about – right?

As Tim Carney points out, the corporate bunch affectionately known as the Military-Industrial Complex have a big stake in all this: two-thirds of the $3.1 billion in annual aid to Israel must be spent in the United States. US arms manufacturers reap the profits, and the Israelis get free stuff. Yet Carney is wrong about whose lobbying efforts make the difference in this case: I don’t think Lockheed-Martin could mobilize thousands of people to descend on Capitol Hill the way AIPAC, or Christians United for Israel, can.

According to Israel Hayom, the most widely read Israeli newspaper, Tel Aviv has already been granted special treatment: instead of the expected 8 percent across the board cut all other federal programs will suffer under sequestration, the Israelis were recently assured by the White House that their share will amount to only 5 percent.

Yet these “cuts” have already been circumvented by the President himself, who, on his trip to Israel, presented Netanyahu with a new ten-year aid “package” totaling some $40 billion– a $10 billion increase over the last such agreement. And since our special alliance with Israel is “eternal,” as the President rhapsodized, this amount will presumably increase unto eternity. Or until the American people put a stop to it – whichever comes first.

It isn’t as if Israel is a poor, struggling, Third World country: its GDP puts it in the top forty richest countries on the world. Israeli propagandists are always boasting about how they’ve made the desert bloom: the endless parading of Israel’s technical achievements, particularly in the booming high tech sector, is a major hasbara theme. Yet somehow a minuscule “cut” in aid – in reality, a cut in the rate of increase – is going to bring about the downfall of the Jewish state? The days when the Israeli settler colony depended on outside assistance for its very survival are well over.

At a time when domestic programs are on the chopping block, why should the Israelis expect – nay, demand – an exemption? Why can’t they suffer the sequestration in silence, and be happy it wasn’t worse for them?

Apparently some in the pro-Israel community have been thinking the same heretical thought, because AIPAC’s aggressive “Israel first” strategy reportedly caused a bit of a stir, prompting fears of a backlash from some. As the Forward reports:

“J Street, the dovish pro-Israel group, immediately understood the implications of AIPAC’s rhetorical shift after getting word of the pitch made by AIPAC members on Capitol Hill. Dylan Williams, J Street’s director of government affairs, told the Forward that ‘it seems a little tone deaf. We have a unique public perception issue.’ He added that congressional aides had told him they were ‘surprised that some groups – that people from AIPAC – were asking for this.’”

Seen in the larger context of the administration’s ongoing feud with Tel Aviv – from Netanyahu’s informal endorsement of Mitt Romney to the fight over Chuck Hagel – AIPAC’s chutzpah shouldn’t be at all surprising. In the world of Washington lobbyists, it’s all about power – having it, keeping it, and using it. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

It is vitally necessary for the Israel Lobby to tamp down dangerous talk that they’re losing it, because fear is their greatest weapon. The fear they strike in the hearts of politicians who don’t want to wind up like many of the other legislators who thought they could escape the Lobby’s wrath – and soon learned otherwise. It’s much easier to give in to the Lobby’s demands than go the way of Senators Chuck Percy, William Fulbright, and Roger Jepsen, all three felled by Lobby-coordinated campaigns. Congressmen Paul Findley, Earl F. Hilliard, and Pete McCloskey are among the scalps the Lobby can rightfully claim. And while their smear campaign against Hagel didn’t succeed in stopping his confirmation as Secretary of Defense, it was a useful exercise in that it serves as a warning to others who might be thinking of straying off the reservation: Don’t go there!

J Street issued a statement soon after AIPAC’s assault on Capitol Hill, denouncing any effort to separate out aid to Israel from the requirements of sequestration as appearing to put Israel’s demands “above those of the millions of ordinary Americans who are being hurt, or the vital domestic programs that are taking a hit.” While this may be true, J Street is rather missing the point. To wrest an exemption granted to no others is precisely the demonstrative way in which AIPAC needs to flex its lobbying muscles. Isn’t this what the “special relationship” is all about? As Ayn Rand put it, “Love is exception-making,” and the romantic relationship between the US and Israel, whatever its ups and downs, continues unabated in Washington.

Out in the sticks, however – i.e. outside the Beltway – this exception-making for Israel is not all that popular, as J Street rightly worries. The problem, however, is that the American people have very little to say about it – and don’t know about it, in any case. As long as the political class lives in fear of the Lobby, our annual tribute to Israel will be paid in full – yes, even before we feed our own people. Because that’s what love is all about.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Economy, Government, Health Care, Imperialism, International, Israel, Labor, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Statements, U.S. Military, U.S. News, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Red lines and other double standards

20 May

By Stephen Gowans

According to the White House, Israel has the right to defend itself (1). I would argue that it doesn’t. Based on the theft of another people’s land and denial of their right to return to the homes from which they fled or were driven, Israel no more than any other thief has the right to defend itself.

Judging by its indulgent attitude to Israeli aggressions, Washington claims that Israel has the right to defend itself in any way it pleases: by unprovoked airstrikes across international borders; by meting out collective punishment; by carrying out extrajudicial assassinations; by invasions and occupations; and through other outrages against international law, sovereignty and humanity. In fact, by doing what the United States, itself, regularly does.

The White House says that the most recent Israeli aggression, airstrikes carried out over the last few days against Syrian military facilities, were intended to stop a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran to the Lebanese resistance organization, Hezbollah. Striking a dissenting note, The New York Times reported that, “Some American officials are unsure whether the new shipment was intended for use by Hezbollah or by the Assad government.” (2) Which means the airstrikes may have nothing to do with Israel “defending itself” and everything to do with Tel Aviv helping Syria’s Sunni rebels in what is, in large measure, a sectarian war, inflamed by outside interference, against an Alawi-dominated state that has (from Washington’s perspective) the wrong attitude to US free enterprise and (from Israel’s) the wrong attitude to the dispossession of the Palestinians. Or it may be that the missiles were intended for the Syrian military, but the Israelis struck as a precaution, in case the missiles were indeed destined for Hezbollah.

While indulging Israel for its aggressions, Washington denies North Korea the right to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles for self-defense, for the obvious reason that North Korea’s self-defense is self-defense against the United States. Likewise, the threat posed to Israel of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles in Hezbollah’s hands is that they bolster the resistance organization’s ability to defend both itself, and its benefactor, Iran, from Israeli attack. It’s no secret that Israel has been threatening war on Iran for some time on grounds that Iran’s civilian nuclear energy industry may, at some point, provide Tehran with the capability of developing what Israel already has in abundance: nuclear weapons.

What’s more, if Israel has the right to defend itself, why not Syria? It’s not as if the Assad government’s actions, in defense of secular pan-Arabism, have come anywhere close to matching the level of barbarity regularly visited by the Zionist regime on its opponents in defense of its settler ideology, or in helping to promote the imperial interests of its American benefactor and sponsor.

Earlier, the White House declared that Syria’s use of chemical weapons against terrorist insurgents would be a red line whose crossing would trigger a strong US response, presumably direct US military intervention in Syria’s civil war. Recent claims by Israel, Britain and one US intelligence agency of evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against rebel forces—evidence the White House says is inconclusive—touched off a controversy over whether the Obama administration had blundered in setting a red line, and whether failure to act on even weak evidence undermines US credibility.

Lost in the polemic is the telling reality that Washington has set no red line for the insurgents’ use of the same weapons.

And that can’t be because there are no grounds to believe rebel forces would use deadly gas against Syrian loyalists. The UN independent commission of inquiry on Syria says there are strong, concrete suspicions that the rebels have used sarin gas (but has no evidence the Syrian government has deployed chemical weapons against the rebels.) (3)

Okay, let’s assume that the UN’s strong and concrete suspicions do reflect the rebels’ actual use of sarin gas against loyalist forces.

The obvious question (unasked as far as I can tell by the mass media) is where did the rebels’ chemical weapons come from? Were they captured from the Syrian military, or procured through a supplier of the rebels’ other weapons—Saudi Arabia, Qatar or a NATO state?

And does the United States plan to act on the UN’s strong and concrete suspicions?

The answer to the first question is uncertain. As to the second, the US might intervene to secure the rebels’ chemical weapons if the weapons have been captured from the Syrian army by jihadists acting independently of US control, but it would likely be done quietly, to avoid raising embarrassing questions about the rebellion putting dangerous weapons into the hands of Islamists who might use them later against US targets (including, if the Assad government falls, a US-client regime in Damascus.)

On the other hand, if the weapons have been used by US-controlled opposition factions, an intervention won’t occur, unless the weapons were used without US approval. If so, measures—again quiet ones—will likely to be taken to curb their use, or to use them only at Washington’s direction.

Another possibility is that Washington colluded in the weapons’ use.

Clearly, Washington’s chemical weapons standards are contigent and not absolute. The red line against the Syrian defense forces provides Washington with a pretext for direct and open military intervention against Damascus when and if intervention is feasible. Since no intervention against the rebel forces is desired—on the contrary, only intervention on their behalf is on the agenda—a rebel red line is unnecessary, and restrictive. It’s not the use of chemical weapons that Washington opposes, but their use by a government fighting for survival against US predations. Anyone else can use chemical weapons with impunity so long as it’s done in the service of US foreign policy goals.

Finally, we might ask whether the country that has the greatest store of weapons of mass destruction, is the world’s largest manufacturer of them, and has been the most ardent user of them, would act to stop their use by rebel forces it has backed against a pan-Arab nationalist regime it has for decades sought to overthrow? Again, subject to the condition the rebels were under US control, not likely.

The United States professed opposition to weapons of mass destruction is entirely one-sided. It is applied selectively to governments and organizations that it, itself, or its proxies, are opposed to, typically because they have the wrong attitude to US free enterprise, or the wrong attitude to their proxies’ plunder of the land, natural resources and markets of other people.

1. Sam Dagher, Nour Malas and Joshua Mitnick, “Strikes in Syria raise alarm”, The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2013.
2. Anne Barnard, Michael R. Gordon and Jodi Rudoren, “Israel targeted Iranian missiles in Syria attack”, The New York Times, May 4, 2013.
3. “Syrian rebels may have used Sarin” Reuters, May 5, 2013: “UN: ‘Strong suspicions’ that Syrian rebels have used sarin nerve gas,” Euronews, May 6, 2013.

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Categories Anti-War, Apartheid, Colonialism, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Internet, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Media & Culture, Palestine, Qatar, Reactionary Watch, Saudi Arabia, Statements, Syria, Talk Radio, TV, U.S. Military, U.S. News, United Kingdom, World History, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Outrage over disgusting “cripple Stephen Hawking” jokes after he joins boycott of Israel

20 May

Stephen Hawking has joined the academic embargo

By: Charlotte Meredith

WORLD renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has faced a barrage of vile abuse today from people furious over his boycott of Israel.

The tirade of criticism came after the highly-respected Cambridge professor joined an academic embargo by refusing to attend a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres.

Professor Hawking was to take part in the Facing Tomorrow annual conference planned to be held in June but pulled out in protest at the treatment of Palestinians.

“Hawking has made an independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there,” the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine said.

Reacting angrily to the Professor’s decision to join the academic boycott, pro-Israeli users voiced their outrage on social media sites.

“The anti-Semite Stephen Hawking can’t even wipe his own a**,” one sick user posted.

“He should die already!,” another said, while one user said Professor Hawking – widely considered one of the most intelligent men in the world today – is “also crippled in the head.”

“Someone should release the hand brake when he’s on a hill,” another vile post read.

Disgusted users condemned the revolting abuse, describing it as a “festival of hate.”

Professor Hawking’s move follows a boycott of Israel by the Teachers’ Union of Ireland and by the American members of the Association for Asian American Studies.

In 2009, Professor Hawking had also condemned the three-week onslaught on Gaza, saying the response to firing of rockets from the coastal strip was “plain out of proportion … The situation is like that of [Apartheid] South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue”.

The Israeli Ambassador to London, Daniel Taub, said: “The price that democratic societies all pay is freedom of speech, even for outrageous and objectionable opinions.

“This is why it is so important to encourage intelligent debate and discussion – and why it is such a shame that Professor Hawking will not be able to joining in such open dialogue at the President’s Conference.”

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Discrimination, Imperialism, International, Internet, Israel, Media & Culture, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Statements, U.S. News, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Israel launches second Syria airstrike in two days – reports

8 May

Strong blasts hit the outskirts of Syria’s capital early on Sunday, with reports saying that they were results of Israeli airstrikes on a military research center. Other sources suggest Damascus Airport was hit.

Massive explosions have been heard near Mount Qasioun in Damascus. The area hosts the Jamraya military research center, which came under Israeli attack earlier in January and marked the first incursion by Israel into Syrian airspace in six years.

A senior US official confirmed to NBC News that Israeli Air Force bombed the military research center.

The overnight Israeli strike reportedly targeted Iranian-supplied missiles to Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah, a Western intelligence source told Reuters. “In last night’s attack, as in the previous one, what was attacked were stores of Fateh-110 missiles that were in transit from Iran to Hezbollah,” the source said.

There have also been reports that the airstrikes targeted the 104th and 105th brigades of the Syrian Republican Guards, a source told RT Arabic.

A senior Israeli official confirmed to AFP that the Israeli airstrike on Syria was carried out near Damascus Airport overnight, targeting Iranian missiles destined for Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah movement.

“The attack was very close to the airport, the target was Iranian missiles which were destined for Hezbollah,” he said.

Mount Qasioun and Damascus Airport are located in different parts of the city, so if both were targets of airstrikes, this would likely require a more complex coordinated attack.

There are reports of gunfire shots heard in outskirts of Damascus, apparently indicating that some rebel groups tried to seize the opportunity and went into offensive amid the commotion caused by the airstrikes. However, no major breakthroughs on their part were reported.

The rebel offensive however may give the Syrian government grounds to further accuse Israel of supporting the Syrian armed opposition by saying they had foreknowledge of the Israeli airstrikes and were prepared to move out.

Syria’s Ministry of Health did not confirm if there were any deaths or injuries.

RT has managed to speak to local journalist Abdallah Mawazini, for a report on the latest developments.

“When the explosion happened in Damascus, all the houses were shaken. There was dust everywhere. Right now we’re receiving more information about the attack, which targeted the Jamraya military research center,” he told RT. “Everyone woke up, most of the people ran downstairs – to make sure they are safe. Now we are getting more information. The sound of the explosion was heard everywhere in Damascus. People are scared.”

Rumors fly as official info remains scarce

While no official casualty number has been made public, rumors on Syrian social media say that at least 300 soldiers stationed at Mount Qasioun have been killed and hundreds of others injured, Mawazini said. Many Syrians are calling for retaliation as the possibility of a full-scale war with Israel is speculated upon.

During the attack, one Israeli jet was reportedly shot down by Syria’s Air Force, according to Hezbollah’s Manar TV channel, citing security sources in Damascus. Two Israeli pilots of the downed IDF jet have been taken to a military area in Damascus under Assad’s control, according to reports in Lebanese and Syrian media.

War spillover into region feared

There has been no immediate official comment from Israel. “We don’t respond to this kind of report,” an Israeli military spokeswoman told Reuters.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened the security cabinet on Thursday night to approve the airstrike, a source told Reuters.

Israeli military has called up several thousand reservists earlier this week for what it called a “surprise” military exercise on its border with Lebanon, AP reported.

Earlier this week, the IDF deployed two Iron Dome batteries near the cities of Haifa and Safed in northern Israel, amid tensions along the border in that area.

Video footage uploaded onto the Internet showed a massive ball of fire rising into the sky. RT could not immediately verify the authenticity of the videos.

“Until we get a clear picture of what exactly was targeted it’s difficult to speculate why the targeting took place. I’d say that the US gave Israel the green light for the previous attack in past months and reportedly gave them an OK to launch future strikes. So this probably isn’t something that happens on the spur of the moment,” news editor at antiwar.com Jason Ditz told RT.

“Of course, Syria is unlikely, being in the middle of a civil war, to launch much of retaliation against Israel directly, but at the same time this probably undermines some of the more Islamist factions in the Syrian rebels especially with reports that they are benefiting from these airstrikes,” he added.

In the meantime Netanyahu is leaving on Sunday afternoon for a five-day trip to China that will focus on economic ties and regional issues such as Iran, Syria and Egypt. His departure however was delayed by two hours to make room for a security cabinet meeting, according to Haaretz newspaper.

Airstrikes escalating

The Israeli Air Force conducted an airstrike on Syrian territory on Friday, reportedly targeting a shipment of advanced missiles. Unnamed US officials claimed that the missiles had been en-route from Iran to Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Among the varying descriptions of the actual rockets, Fateh 110s have come up, which are advanced enough to strike Tel Aviv from southern Lebanon and, therefore perceived as a threat by Israel.

On Saturday, before Sunday’s overnight strike, US President Barack Obama stated that Israel has the right to defend against the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah.

“I’ll let the Israeli government confirm or deny whatever strikes that they’ve taken,” Obama said in an interview with the Spanish-language network Telemundo.

Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon earlier told journalists that any alleged delivery of Syrian weapons to Hezbollah would be considered a “red line.” Ya’alon then said Israel would not permit “sophisticated weapons” to fall into the hands of “Hezbollah or other rogue elements.”

Obama has also said in the past that the crossing of a ‘red line’ would warrant further action from outside. This was in relation to the possibility that Assad forces may have used chemical weapons against Syrians – a claim that is still being investigated, with no evidence so far.

Nonetheless, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced on Thursday that the US may now consider arming the Syrian opposition – something the US has shied away from openly doing in the two years since the start of the Syrian uprising.

Asked directly if the administration was reconsidering its position on that option, Hagel said “yes”.“Arming the rebels — that’s an option,” he said. “We must continue to look at options.”

The conflict in Syria has entered its third year. According to UN estimates, at least 70,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011.

Source

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Categories Apartheid, China, Colonialism, Egypt, Government, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Media & Culture, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Syria, TV, U.S. Military, U.S. News, Videos, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Israel injects Palestinian prisoners with dangerous viruses

21 Apr

Israeli troops arrest a Palestinian youth at the Shuafat refugee camp in al-Quds in February 2010.

The Israeli regime injects Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails with “dangerous viruses” before releasing them, a report says.

“A Palestinian released from Israeli jails, Rania Saqa, has brought to light that the Israeli regime injected detainees that are out of prisons with dangerous viruses,” Russian dailyKomsomolskaya Pravda wrote on Friday.

Saqa also said many of the prisoners are suffering from mysteriously incurable diseases such as bladder cancer and liver disorders.

She said it is a standard procedure for Israelis to inject Palestinian detainees before freeing them.

“Most former inmates die after being released from Israeli jails,” the newspaper wrote.

Palestinian prisoners are calling on international organizations to take urgent action to stop this.

A rights organization has accused Israel of using Palestinian prisoners to test new drugs.

The International Solidarity for Human Rights Institute said such conduct blatantly contradicts moral and medical principles.

According to human rights group B’Tselem, more than 4,700 Palestinian prisoners, including about 170 administrative detainees, are currently being held in Israeli prisons.

Administrative detention is a sort of imprisonment without trial or charge that allows Israel to incarcerate Palestinians for up to six months. The detention order can be renewed for indefinite periods of time.

GJH/MHB

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Israel, Media & Culture, Palestine, Police Brutality, Racism, Reactionary Watch, Statements, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Israel appropriates 82% of Palestinian water

3 Apr

A Palestinian water expert has criticised the 1993 Oslo Peace Agreement signed between the Palestinians and the Israelis for giving Israel the right to control Palestinian water.

The Director of the Association of Palestinian Hydrologists, Abur-Rahman Al-Tamimi, said: “The Oslo Agreements gave control over basic water resources to the Israelis. The role of the Palestinian side was limited to serving it.”

During a discussion panel in Ramallah, Al-Tamimi said: “The problem emerged when the Palestinians agreed to postpone the issue of water to final status negotiations. They did not even discuss the issue of irrigation water.” He said the Israelis steal about 82 per cent of Palestinian water.

Al-Tamimi severely criticised the “Palestinian negotiators who ignored the rights of the Palestinians regarding water.”

At the same time, he said: “The agreements laid down the right of the Israelis to the water of the River Jordan. It also laid down their rights to veto against any future talks regarding it.”

The Palestinian expert also added: “The agreements included the rights of the Israeli to control all Palestinian water wells.”

Regarding the future of Palestinian water, Al-Tamimi said: “As the Israelis completely control Palestinian water resources, future conflict in the region will be over water resources.”

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Economic Exploitation, Imperialism, International, Israel, Palestine, Reactionary Watch, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Israel strikes Gaza for the First Time since Truce

2 Apr

Israeli F-16 (AFP Photo / GPO)

Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon has said Tel Aviv will not tolerate any fire from Gaza on its territory. The statement comes after the first major exchange of fire since November.

Two rockets fired by Palestinians have gone off in an Israeli border town. Hours earlier, Tel Aviv fired rockets into Gaza, following a round of Palestinian rocket attacks.

“We will not allow shooting of any sort (even sporadic) towards our citizens and our forces,” Yaalon said.

No casualties or injuries happened in the exchange.

The initial fire from Gaza was reportedly in protest over a Palestinian prisoner’s death in an Israeli jail.

Maisara Abu Hamdiyeh, serving a life sentence since 2002 for attempted murder, membership in Hamas and weapons possession, was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus two months ago. The inmate asked for early release, but the processing of his application took too long and he died before it was completed.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas blamed the death on Israel.

Tuesday’s escalation in violence was not the first since the November truce, which was mediated by Egypt after eight days of violence killed 170 Palestinians and six Israelis.

In December, Israeli soldiers killed four Palestinians who they described as rioters, despite Hamas’ claim that the four men were simple farmers near the border.

Syrian spillover

Meanwhile, in the latest spillover of the Syrian conflict Israeli tanks fired into Syria Tuesday after shots were fired at troops in the occupied Golan Heights region. A mortar shell landed in the Israeli-controlled section of Golan Heights earlier in the day, although it was unclear if the projectile was fired intentionally.

“Shots were fired at an IDF patrol on the border,” a spokeswoman told Reuters. “No injuries or damage was caused. In response, IDF forces returned precise fire at the source and reported a direct hit.”

She said it is also unknown if the mortar was fired by Syrian rebels or Assad’s forces. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon remained adamant that Israel would not interfere in the Syrian conflict but would respond to any violation of the nation’s security along the border.

Last week the United Nations Security Council warned that violence from the Syrian conflict could spillover across the Israeli border. That concern was related at least in part to the sporadic violence in the region. Two Syrian soldiers were wounded recently after IDF troops launched a missile into the area.

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Categories Apartheid, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Palestinian hunger striker released, exiled to Gaza

23 Mar

Ayman Sharawna, a Palestinian prisoner who was on long-term hunger strike, reacts upon his arrival at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on March 17, 2013. (AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)

A Palestinian prisoner has been exiled to Gaza for ten years, after a long-term hunger strike led the Israelis to sign a deal, releasing the inmate from prison, after holding him without charge for months.

“Palestinian prisoner Ayman Sharawna, who has been on hunger strike since mid-July, has reached a deal with the Israeli side under which he will be released to Gaza and exiled there for 10 years,” Qadura Fares, head of the Prisoners’ Club said.

Sharawna is one of four Palestinian inmates that went on hunger strike in the summer protesting the conditions of their detention by Israel.

According to the Ramallah-based Prisoners’ Club, Sharawna would be allowed to go home after his exile if he was not involved in future militant activity.

“It was decided that after 10 years he would be able to return if it is concluded that he has not gone back to terror activity,” it said in a statement.

The 36-year-old had already been released in October 2011 under terms of a prisoner swap deal with the Palestinians, after being sentenced to 38 years in prison.

But three month later the Israelis arrested Sharawna for violating the terms of his release, without, critics say, providing convincing evidence. Israel tried to make him serve his original sentence, so in response Sharawna refused to take food.

Ayman Sharawna, a Palestinian prisoner who was on long-term hunger strike, is pictured inside an ambulance upon his arrival at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on March 17, 2013. (AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)

The other hunger strike inmates, Jaafar Ezzeddine and Tariq Qaadan, resumed eating late February after their three-month hunger strike, with Samer Issawi now in hospital because of deteriorating health conditions after intermittently refusing food for eight months.

Issawi was arrested in 2002 and was sentenced to thirty years in prison on charges of possession of weapons and forming insurgency cells in Jerusalem.

In October 2011, Issawi was released along with Ayman Sharawna and 1027 Palestinian prisoners as a result of a deal between Hamas and the Israeli government for the return of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier taken hostage by the militant group.

Issawi was rearrested in July 2012 and has been held without any charge or trial since then. Issawi has been on a hunger strike since July 29, 2012.

In February, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has tried to raise awareness of the condition of Issawi and other prisoners of Israel engaged in a hunger strike.

Last year Amnesty international also stepped up its efforts to end the illegal Israeli detention of Palestinians.

“Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the Israeli authorities to release … Palestinians held in administrative detention, unless they are promptly charged with internationally recognizable criminal offences and tried in accordance with international fair trial standards,” Ann Harrison, Amnesty International’s interim deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa said in 2012.

Prisoners in Israeli control can be held without trial or charge for a six month period, which can be renewed indefinitely. This practice of ‘administrative detention’ is supposedly used by the Israeli military when it fears an immediate risk to security or wants to protect informants.

Palestinian authorities claim that some 800,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders since the 1967 war, with an estimated 4,800 Palestinians held in Israeli jails today.

Israeli troops guard arrested Palestinian prisoners following an army raid on a prison compound in the West Bank town of Jericho to seize Palestinian militants. (AFP Photo / Pedro Ugarte)

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Author The Red Phoenix

Obama makes fun of heckler asking “who killed Rachel Corrie?”

22 Mar

by Linah Alsaafin

US President Barack Obama arrived in the West Bank city of Ramallah by helicopter yesterday and gave yet another insipid speech. The Palestinian Authority’s security forces, collaborating with US forces, designated a huge security perimeter with the PA compound — the Muqataa — in the middle. Some of the city’s busiest streets were closed off and inaccessible to those not living there. As helicopters filled the skies from the morning up until late afternoon, I was stuck at home working during the nine-hour lockdown, all too aware of the soldiers stationed on the rooftops around my building.

Protestors tried to march from Manara Square in the city center to the Muqataa yet again yesterday morning, but were stopped by hundreds of policemen and riot guards. The speech Obama gave at the compound was not littered with Arabic phrases (a speech he delivered the previous day was littered with Hebrew phrases) and gave the usual empty and irrational rhetoric of the US supporting an independent sovereign Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state that will only come into fruition through direct negotiations with Israel.

He also tried to play down the Jewish-only settlements by mentioning that the US does not consider them as “constructive” or “appropriate” for the advancement of peace, but refused to call for their dismantlement or use strong language to call out their illegal nature, which prompted Mahmoud Abbas to uncharacteristically interject and describe them as illegitimate and more than an obstacle to peace.

Obama’s next stop was at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, where he gave a long-winded sycophantic speech to more than a thousand Israeli students and academics from different universities. It was during this speech that Obama laid out his formula for peace: Palestinians, who have shown a willingness to renounce violence — as if violence is inherent to Arabs — should accept Israel, their colonizer and occupier, as a democratic and Jewish state. In return, Israel should halt its illegal settlement building.

Twenty-five-year-old Rabeea Eid, a student activist and member of the National Democratic Assembly, had heard and had enough. He stood up in the middle of Obama’s speech and called him out on three issues that summarized the flaccid nature and flagrant inefficacy of Obama’s visit to occupied Palestine.

“Did you really come here for peace or to give Israel more weapons to kill and destroy the Palestinian people? Did you happen to see the apartheid wall on your way here?”

Grovelling

What is the point of Obama’s visit? It is to bribe the PA to maintain its repression of Palestinian protests and “unrest” to uphold Israel’s security and to pressure it to re-enter bilateral negotiations with Israel without any pre-conditions?

The unnecessary bit is the Israeli side to the question. Obama wants to fall short from supplicating himself fully on the ground to an extremist government, in which the defense minister has likened Palestinians to cancer and the housing minister has pledged to construct more settlements and the minister of trade, industry and labor wants to annex more than half of the West Bank. US foreign policy has always favored and strongly supported the Israeli occupation and rewarded it with billions of dollars in military aid annually — that is nothing new. From 1949 until the present day, the US has given Israel more than $115 billion.

The level of groveling, the cringe-worthy speeches and recycled propaganda and lies of depicting Israel as a small pioneering country that started off with its back against the wall amid a sea of hostile enemies alternates between tedium and sarcastic amusement. Even David Ben Gurion recognized that Israel is a colonial enterprise, nothing more and nothing less. Is it necessary to out-Zionize even the most ardent Zionists just to reaffirm support for Israel?

Of course, Obama didn’t see the apartheid wall on his way from Ramallah to Jerusalem; he was too busy reveling in orgasmic pleasure at Israel’s innovative technology (with bases set up on occupied lands), its vibrant ancient history, and the mighty brave “Israeli Defense Forces” (who by the way arrested 30 schoolchildren on Wednesday in the old city of Hebron.) Eid continued:

“There are Palestinians sitting in this hall. This state should be for all of its citizens, not a Jewish state only.”

Ah, the conundrum of being Jewish and democratic. Twenty percent of Israel’s population, more than 1.5 million Palestinians, are citizens of Israel. Where exactly do they fit? Surely not as third class citizens battling an institutionalized racist and discriminatory society on a daily basis, or the more than 60 laws issued by Israel since 1949 that discriminate against Palestinians in the education, public services, and civil rights sectors, to name a few. Eid also said:

“Who killed Rachel Corrie? Rachel Corrie was killed by your money and weapons!”

Not a word

Some could say this is the nub of the relationship between Israel and the US. Rachel Corrie, an American citizen, was killed ten years ago by a bulldozer as she tried to protect a Palestinian family’s home from being demolished in Rafah, Gaza. Nine years after her murder, an Israeli court ruled that she was to blame for her own death. The US administration didn’t say a word.

Does the US allow Israel to continue with its impunity and grave violations of human rights and give it unconditional support because three thousand years ago, Jews were exiled from the holy land? Or — as Obama correctly noted in his opening speech on Tuesday — because of the similarities between the US and Israel: both colonizing entities that committed (in Israel’s case, continues to commit) massacres and ethnic cleansing of the population indigenous to the land they settled on?

“I couldn’t stand listening to the speech any more,” Rabeea Eid, who writes for the Arabs48 website, said. “It was a very Zionist speech that made other speeches by Zionist figures pale in comparison.”

Rabeea was dragged out of the hall by security guards, who handed him over to the police. They handcuffed him, threatened him, and attempted to intimidate him. They told him he was under arrest. A Fox News journalist had followed the security guards outside and wanted to know what Rabeea had said to Obama. Soon afterwards, other journalists and reporters followed suit, asking him questions.

“Baffled”

“You can say that the media circus is what got me released,” Rabeea told The Electronic Intifada a few hours later. “I felt it was important to show Palestinian voices within the ’48 territories do not welcome Obama.

“[Obama’s visit] in its entirety clearly shows the bias the US has towards Israel. I obviously wasn’t expecting Obama to talk about the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the discrimination against them. Yet I’m baffled that even after his pro-Israel speeches, the Palestinian leadership continues to welcome him, thus supporting the US hegemony in the Middle East and its policies around the world.”

(Speaking of bafflement, Mahmoud Abbas presented Obama with a painting of Abraham Lincoln and Obama. Was it a cunning message that Obama wouldn’t be where he is today if Lincoln didn’t “free all the slaves” back then?)

In response to Rabeea’s interruption of his speech, Obama laughed and made fun of the situation, to raucous applause and standing ovations from the audience.

“No, no — this is part of the lively debate that we talked about,” he joked. “This is good. You know, I have to say we actually arranged for that, because it made me feel at home. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I didn’t have at least one heckler.”

“A friend showed me a clip of what he said after I was taken outside,” Rabeea said. “It wasn’t very clear because the video was on a cell phone, but it tells you a lot about how Obama decided to make fun after I mentioned Rachel Corrie, the contradiction of being a Jewish and democratic state, and the weapons the US funds Israel with.”

For Rabeea, he considers the most crucial thing is for Obama’s visit not to go by without further “heckling.”

“The most important part is for this visit not to go on in a normal manner,” he said.

Protestors in Bethlehem already set fire to tires last night and burned the US flags hung at the entrance to town where Obama is expected to pass tomorrow.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Government, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Israel, Media & Culture, Palestine, Statements, U.S. News, Videos, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

IDF teargas int’l journalists covering peaceful protest in West Bank, incl RT crew

7 Mar

Image from twitter.com @yafastaiti_rt

Several international journalists, including an RT cameraman, have suffered from teargas as IDF have launched teargas bombs at the media crews outside Ofer Prison, West Bank. In recent weeks protests outside the facility have left scores of injured.

The RT crew, together with other international teams were documenting nonviolent protests near Ofer prison, which has been the site of numerous clashes with Israeli authorities in recent months, leading to hundreds of injuries. A recent Palestinian prisoner’s death has instigated an escalation in already-bitter relations.

On Thursday the activists had been peacefully demonstrating against the death of a young Palestinian man, who sustained injuries during clashes in the village of Abud, north of Jerusalem, and had unfurled banners and were waving flags.

“The rally was not numerous. No one [from the] activists was going to throw stones [at IDF soldiers] or initiate clashes,” RT’s correspondent Yafa Staiti said.

RT cameraman following the attack (Image from twitter.com @yafastaiti_rt)

IDF forces asked both the journalists and protesters to retreat 60 meters, and as the journalists began to stand back, Israeli elements started to fire the teargas at both them and the protesters.

The RT crew says that after their withdrawal, the forces proceeded to fire teargas at the car carrying them off.

“There was no necessity to use teargas. As a result our cameraman and dozens of other people, among those there have been correspondents of Maan and Sky News, as well as others sitting in TV crews’ cars, suffered from suffocation after [a] teargas grenade exploded,” Staiti added.

Image from twitter.com @yafastaiti_rt

On Wednesday, 15 civilians were also wounded when police attempted crowd dispersal with rubber bullets. Local press also reported the use of teargas. Among those injured included the head of Palestinian Prisoners Society, Qaddura Fares.

RT’s correspondent said they suppose “A day of Palestinian rage” may take place Friday “as well as [a] mass march during [the] funeral of that young man after Friday’s prayer.”

“It can end, as it often happens, with clashes between demonstrators and IDF.”

Over 2,000 Palestinians are currently being detained in Israeli jails and several are on a long-term hunger strike and becoming increasingly weak.

Many Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are in ‘administrative detention,’ which is a practice whereby a suspect can be held indefinitely without charge or the chance to face trial.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Imperialism, International, Israel, Media & Culture, Palestine, Police Brutality, Reactionary Watch, TV, Videos, Workers Struggle, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

How Israel legitimises torturing Palestinians to death

4 Mar

Many in the West Bank are in mourning over the passing of Arafat Jaradat, who was tortured to death in an Israeli prison – he leaves behind a pregnant widow and two children [AFP]

Israel’s policy of torture has left many dead and completely lacks accountability.

Six days after Arafat Jaradat was arrested by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, he was dead. Between the date of his arrest – February 18 – and the day of his death – February 23 – his lawyer Kamil Sabbagh met with Arafat only once: in front of a military judge at the Shin Bet’s Kishon interrogation facility.

Sabbagh reported that when he saw Jaradat, the man was terrified. Arafat told his lawyer that he was in acute pain from being beaten and forced to sit in stress positions with his hands bound behind his back.

When it announced his death, Israeli Prison Service claimed Arafat – who leaves a pregnant widow and two children – died from cardiac arrest. However, the subsequent autopsy found no blood clot in his heart. In fact, the autopsy concluded that Arafat, who turned 30 this year, was in fine cardiovascular health.

What the final autopsy did find, however, was that Jaradat had been pummelled by repeated blows to his chest and body and had sustained a total of six broken bones in his spine, arms and legs; his lips lacerated; his face badly bruised.

The ordeal that Arafat suffered before he died at the hands of Israel’s Shin Bet is common to many Palestinians that pass through Israel’s prisons. According to the prisoners’ rights organisation Addameer, since 1967, a total of 72 Palestinians have been killed as a result of torture and 53 due to medical neglect. Less than a month before Jaradat was killed, Ashraf Abu Dhra died while in Israeli custody in a case that Addameer argues was a direct result of medical neglect.

The legal impunity of the Shin Bet, commonly referred to as the GSS, and its torture techniques has been well established. Between 2001 and 2011, 700 Palestinians lodged complaints with the State Attorney’s Office but not a single one has been criminally investigated.

Writing in Adalah’s 2012 publication, On Torture [PDF], Bana Shoughry-Badarne, an attorney and the Legal Director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, wrote, “The GSS’s impunity is absolute.”

Israel’s High Court has been extravagantly helpful in securing the Shin Bet with its imperviousness to accountability to international law, and thus enabling widespread and lethal torture.

In August of 2012, Israel’s High Court rejected petitions submitted by Israeli human rights organisations Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and PCATI to demand that Israeli attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, carry out criminal investigations into each allegation of torture by the Shin Bet.

And in the first week of February, two weeks before Arafat was killed, the High Court of Justice threw out Adalah’s petition that demanded the GSS videotape and audio record all of its interrogations in order to comply with requirements of the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to which Israel is a signatory.

In May 2009, UNCAT condemned [PDF] Israel for exempting the Shin Bet’s interrogations from audio and video recording, noting that such oversight is an essential preventative measure to curtail torture. Yet despite this admonition, in 2012 the Knesset extended the exemption for another three years.

Rationalising its failure to comply with this most basic requirement of recording interrogations, the State maintains that it is in the interests of “national security” that its interrogation techniques not be made public.

Arafat was killed under torture. Torture is routine. But the following is not routine: upon the announcement of his death, thousands of Palestinians, already unified in solidarity with the arduous struggle waged by Palestinian hunger striking prisoners, responded in force. At least 3,000 prisoners refused their meals; thousands poured into the streets of Gaza and impassioned demonstrations erupted across the West Bank. While the State of Israel continues to deploy its deadly arsenal of weapons to repress Palestinians, the banality of the evil of this regime is, as it will always be, eclipsed by the mighty Palestinian will for self-determination.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Imperialism, International, Israel, Media & Culture, Palestine, Police Brutality, Racism, Reactionary Watch, Zionism
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Autopsy: Palestinian Prisoner Died of ‘Extreme Torture’ in Israeli Custody

1 Mar

Arafat Jaradat, a father of a 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son, worked as a gas station attendant and his wife, Dalal, is pregnant.

Craig Brown, staff writer

An autopsy on the body of Arafat Jaradat, a 30-year-old father of two, showed that he died of “extreme torture” in Israeli custody and did not have a cardiac arrest, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Detainee Affairs said Sunday.

Thousands of Palestinians prisoners are holding a hunger strike Sunday after the death of Jaradat and protests have erupted all across the occupied Palestinian territories.

“About 3,000 prisoners announced that they would refuse meals,” Sivan Weizman, Israel Prisons Service spokeswoman, told Agence France Presse on Sunday.

Arafat Jaradat died on Saturday in an Israeli jail. Jaradat was not on a hunger strike. Weizman of the Israel Prisons Service claimed that Jaradat died of an “apparent heart attack.” Jaradat’s family alleged that Jaradat was tortured by his captors and that he was very healthy at the time of his arrest on February 18. Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) and the Shin Bet had arrested Jaradat at his home in the town of Sa’eer at midnight accusing him of throwing stones at cars at a nearby settlement.

Israel’s main forensics institute performed an autopsy Sunday, with a Palestinian physician in attendance. Israeli officials said Sunday afternoon that that no evidence of any disease was discovered but that autopsy findings were “preliminary and inconclusive.”

However Palestine’s Ma’an news agency is reporting:

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — An autopsy has revealed that Arafat Jaradat died of extreme torture in Israeli custody and did not have a cardiac arrest, the PA Minister of Detainee Affairs said Sunday.

At a news conference in Ramallah, Issa Qaraqe said an autopsy conducted in Israel in the presence of Palestinian officials revealed that 30-year-old Jaradat had six broken bones in his neck, spine, arms and legs.

“The information we have received so far is shocking and painful. The evidence corroborates our suspicion that Mr. Jaradat died as a result of torture, especially since the autopsy clearly proved that the victim’s heart was healthy, which disproves the initial alleged account presented by occupation authorities that he died of a heart attack,” Qaraqe said.[...]

The minister said Jaradat had sustained injuries and severe bruising in the upper right back area and severe bruises of sharp circular shape in the right chest area[...] evidence of severe torture and on the muscle of the upper left shoulder, parallel to the spine in the lower neck area, and evidence of severe torture under the skin and inside the muscle of the right side of the chest. His second and third ribs in the right side of the chest were broken, Qaraqe said, and he also had injuries in the middle of the muscle in the right hand…Palestinian Prisoners Society president Qaddura Fares added that the autopsy revealed seven injuries to the inside of Jaradat’s lower lip, bruises on his face and blood on his nose…… no signs of bruising or stroke, the minister added. [...]

“Jaradat died due to torture and not a stroke or heart attack,” he said, adding that those responsible must be sued either through Interpol or the International Criminal Court.

Jaradat’s lawyer Kameel Sabbagh said he was tortured by Israeli interrogators. [...] “When I entered the courtroom I saw Jaradat sitting on a wooden chair in front of the judge. His back was hunched and he looked sick and fragile,” Sabbagh said in a statement Sunday.

“When I sat next to him he told me that he had serious pains in his back and other parts of his body because he was being beaten up and hanged for many long hours while he was being investigated. When Jaradat heard that the judge postponed his hearing he seemed extremely afraid.”

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Author The Red Phoenix

The dirty dozen: Israel’s racist ringleaders

26 Feb

Israelis chant “Sudanese Back To Sudan” during a right-wing demonstration against African refugees in south Tel Aviv, 30 May 2012.

(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)

David Sheen

Does Israel refuse to grant equal rights to Palestinian citizens of the state because it is based on an ideology of racism towards people who are not Jewish? Or does Israel refuse to grant equal rights to Palestinian citizens because, since some of them are opposed to the Jewish sectarian nature of the state, it prioritizes state security over racial equality?

While this debate has raged for decades, new evidence has come to light which would seem to suggest that the former is more true. Because if Jewish Israelis are only antagonistic to Palestinian citizens because they supposedly represent security risks, then why do they also despise sub-Saharan Africans, with whom they have never had any conflict?

Approximately 60,000 people from sub-Saharan African countries have migrated to Israel in recent years, fleeing persecution and requesting asylum. Instead of providing them with aid or permitting them to support themselves, the Israeli government refuses to grant them any rights, forces them into abject poverty, and seeks to deport the lot of them.

Although Israel is a regional superpower, it has the second-highest poverty rate among developed countries. After last year’s Arab uprisings, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, demanding a higher standard of living. In response, public officials scapegoated the Africans for Israel’s economic problems and launched a racist campaign to expel them.

If there is to be justice, these leaders must be brought to trial to answer for their crimes. Maybe Israelis will come to their senses, cancel all the laws that discriminate against African asylum-seekers and call for a truth and reconciliation commission. Sadly, that is unlikely to happen in the near future, because the hatred of African asylum-seekers has become so widespread in Israel.

Perhaps the people of Eritrea and Sudan will eventually overthrow their repressive regimes, install democratic governments and charge these Israeli officials in an international court of law.

Until that day comes — if it ever does — it is important to document evidence of the wrongdoing. In fact, this is an easy task. Since these officials are not ashamed of their racism, it is all a matter of public record. Of those most responsible, these are the top twelve, Israel’s dirty dozen, its axis of racism:

12. Chaim Avitan

In July 2007, there was only a smattering of African asylum-seekers in the country. At that time, a group of approximately 20 genocide survivors from Darfur in western Sudan were legally living and working in an orchard belonging to a moshav, a small agricultural settlement, near the city limits of Hadera.

A proposal to Hadera city council to open the city’s absorption center to these migrants was defeated by the mayor Chaim Avitan. Avitan then forged an eviction order and sent a security team in the middle of the night to rough up the Darfuris, destroy their documents, shove them onto buses and kick them out of town (“Complaint filed against Hadera mayor for expelling refugees,” Ynet, 7 August 2007).

Avitan announced that the city was not “the country’s garbage can,” called upon the government not to grant refugee status to anyone who is not Jewish and stressed that “Hadera will not permit a single Sudanese to enter.”

Hadera is twinned with Big Spring, Texas (5 percent African American), Saint Paul, Minnesota (14 percent African American) and Charlotte, North Carolina (35 percent African American).

11. Benjamin Babayof

In July 2010, dozens of rabbis in Tel Aviv issued a religious edict forbidding Jews from renting apartments to African asylum-seekers. The language of the letter included warnings against inter-racial marriages and references to Biblical passages calling for ethnic cleansing of all non-Jewish people from the “land of Israel.”

This initiative was such a hit that before the year was out, hundreds of leading rabbis from throughout Israel (who also draw their salaries from the public coffers) issued a similar edict applying to the entire country.

The brainchild behind the edict, the man who went from rabbi to rabbi collecting signatures, calling the African presence in Israel an “abomination,” was the Tel Aviv city councilor representing the Shas party, Benjamin Babayof (“South Tel Aviv realtors: we won’t rent to ‘infiltrators,’” The Jerusalem Post, 4 August 2010).

That same year, travel guide publishers Lonely Planet called Tel Aviv the third best city in the world.

Babayof continued his anti-African crusade in February 2012, calling upon the transportation ministry to run segregated bus lines for Africans, or at the very least to prevent them from riding the regular bus lines during rush hour, because “they smell bad.”

South Tel Aviv residents carrying signs reading “Return them now” during a protest calling on the government to deport African asylum-seekers back to their home countries.

(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)

10. Yaakov Asher

Weeks after the original rabbis’ edict was issued, the holy war against African asylum-seekers expanded from Tel Aviv to its environs.

In August 2010, Rabbi Yaakov Asher, the mayor of Tel Aviv satellite city Bnei Brak, met with the minister of public security and the police regional commander to discuss the expulsion of the African population.

When they explained to Asher that there was no legal basis for physically preventing African asylum-seekers from moving to Bnei Brak, Asher’s spokesperson announced that the municipality would use building code infractions by their landlords as an excuse to run the Africans out of town.

When winter came, the municipality followed through on its promise, informing asylum-seekers that they would have to vacate their apartments immediately. When an African man took his legal rental contract down to the city hall and asked to know on what basis he was being evicted, he was told that it was because he was not Jewish.

Many African asylum-seekers did not even receive the courtesy of an eviction notice before their water and electricity were summarily cut off. Without any way to stay warm, the asylum-seekers were frozen out of their flats and sent into the streets in the middle of the winter (“Eritreans say Bnei Brak waging campaign to run them out,” The Jerusalem Post, 1 December 2010).

While he still serves as Bnei Brak mayor, Asher also holds the number seven spot on the United Torah Judaism party list for upcoming elections to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The party has five seats in the current Knesset.

9. Meir Yitzhak Halevy

In 2007, African asylum-seekers began to move to Eilat at the invitation of the local hospitality industry. They found work washing dishes and performing other menial tasks for low wages.

Since hoteliers expressed satisfaction with this new arrangement, and since tourism is the only significant industry in Eilat, many more African asylum-seekers have since moved to town. They now number about 10,000 residents, approximately 12 percent of the population of Eilat.

In January 2011, Meir Yitzhak Halevi, the mayor of Eilat, said that African asylum-seekers were coming to conquer Eilat and announced that the city was at war with them. The municipality paid for anti-African posters to be plastered across the city and for red flags to be hung throughout the town (“Eilat demands gov’t action against migrant workers,” The Jerusalem Post,” 13 January 2011). In April 2012, Halevi said that all the Africans will be gone within two years’ time.

For years, Halevi refused to allow the children of African asylum-seekers to attend local schools, so they languished in a makeshift activity center run by sympathetic volunteers. It was only after the Israeli high court intervened and declared Eilat’s segregation policy illegal that children of asylum-seekers were permitted to enroll in September 2012.

Eilat is twinned with Los Angeles, California (10 percent African American).

8. Amnon Yitzhak

An immensely popular preacher, Amnon Yitzhak travels all across Israel turning secular and traditional Jews on to fundamentalist Judaism. Eilat is considered to be a secular stronghold, but Yitzhak crossed its cultural divide by infusing his religious message with rabid anti-African racism.

In February 2012 he told an Eilat audience that the dark skin of Sudanese people is a punishment from Yahweh, the god of Judaism. He further compared them to monkeys, saying that if a Jewish woman goes out with a Sudanese man, she will end up in Africa, “climbing trees and eating bananas” (“‘Cancer in our body’: On racial incitement, discrimination and hate crimes against African asylum-seekers in Israel,” Hotline for Migrant Workers, January-June 2012 [PDF]).

Over the past few weeks, Yitzhak founded a new political party, Power To Influence, that is now running for the Knesset. It is too early to estimate how many seats he might garner, but whether from within the Knesset or without, he wields tremendous clout.

7. Ben-Dror Yemini

Instead of using a neutral lexicon to describe African asylum-seekers, most of the Israeli media have uncritically adopted the pejorative language that government officials who are hostile to their presence use to describe them.

But the mainstream journalist who has spread the most lies about African asylum-seekers in order to stoke fears and incite hatred of them is the opinion page editor of the popular daily paper Maariv, Ben-Dror Yemini.

Some Western countries grant refugee status to between 80 percent and 90 percent of East African asylum-seekers. But in December 2011, just before the right-wing-dominated Knesset voted to criminalize asylum-seekers, Yemini provided them with the ideological ammunition to do so by printing the vicious lie that none of them are refugees, only work migrants.

An official Knesset report from May 2012 stated that the proportion of asylum-seekers out of the entire population of Israel is low compared to Western countries. But only days later Yemini published a column saying that Israel would soon have the largest proportion of asylum-seekers of any country in the world.

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s former foreign minister, recently offered Yemini a prominent spot on her Movement Party list for the Knesset elections. Whether he accepts her offer or not, the mere fact that he was invited is a testament to his widespread influence.

Michael Ben-Ari rallies the crowd during a protest against African refugees and asylum seekers in Tel Aviv’s Hatikva neighborhood, 23 May 2012.

(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)

6. Michael Ben-Ari

Although he lives in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, Michael Ben-Ari opened up a parliamentary office in south Tel Aviv, where more than half the Africans in Israel live, in order to mobilize residents opposed to their presence.

While other politicians draw complaints for only visiting the area and surrounding themselves with bodyguards when they finally arrive, the charismatic Ben-Ari confidently leads the community in anti-African street marches. He has also established an anti-African neighborhood watch posse there, earning the admiration of locals.

Ben-Ari has also called for Israeli soldiers to kill in cold blood any African person approaching the border to request political asylum. Ironically, when I interviewed him in the summer of 2010, he admitted that Israel was responsible for mass slaughter in Africa because it exported killing machines to Africa for profit.

Ben-Ari was refused admission to the United States in February 2012 because he was a member of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s now-defunct Kach organization, considered to be a Jewish terrorist group by the State Department.

In the current Knesset, he belongs to National Union, the only party that was too right-wing for the governing coalition. For the upcoming elections, he started a new party called Strength For Israel that is expected to pass the minimum threshold for Knesset representation. Ben-Ari may be an outlier, but he is pulling the entire political spectrum to the right.

5. Miri Regev

On 23 May 2012, a thousand Jewish Israelis ran rampant throughout Tel Aviv for hours, attacking any dark-skinned person — or property of dark-skinned people — they could find. They set off on their campaign of terror after being whipped into a frenzy by members of Knesset.

One of those parliamentarians whose comments were most incendiary was Miri Regev, a lawmaker with the main government party, Likud. She told the assembled crowd that African asylum-seekers were “a cancer in the body” of the nation.

After news of her racist comments and the pogrom that followed it was published the following day, she took to YouTube to make a public apology — but not to Africans for comparing them to cancer, but rather to Israeli cancer victims, for minimizing their suffering by comparing it to Africans (“Israeli MK: I didn’t mean to shame Holocaust by calling African migrants a ‘cancer,” Haaretz, 27 May 2012).

A professional survey conducted just days after the pogrom confirmed that 52 percent of Jewish Israelis identified with Regev’s contention that Africans are akin to cancer, and 33 percent of Jewish Israelis identified with the vigilante violence perpetrated against them.

Although Likud’s list for the forthcoming election must still be combined with that of its coalition partner Yisrael Beiteinu, Regev has already surged into its upper ranks, moving from number 26 to number 13 on the strength of these and other racist statements.

A section of the new detention camp for asylum seekers under construction in the Naqab/Negev Desert near the Egyptian border, 7 November 2012.

(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)

4. Ron Huldai

The day after the pogrom, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai initiated an anti-African “mayors’ letter,” gathering their pledges of support — just as Babayof, the city councilor, had initiated the anti-African “rabbis’ letter” and collected rabbis’ signatures.

The letter, supported by the mayors of Ashdod, Bnei Brak, Ashkelon, Petach Tikvah and Eilat, called for African asylum-seekers to be either imprisoned or deported (“Day after violent anti-African protest, Likud MK calls to ‘distance infiltrators’ immediately,” Haaretz, 24 May 2012).

If there are approximately 25,000 to 30,000 African asylum-seekers in Tel Aviv, then Huldai’s call to round up and remove African asylum-seekers amounts to ethnic cleansing between 6 percent and 8 percent of the city’s population.

Huldai is surely not the only mayor in the world that has called for the ethnic cleansing of a portion of its residents. But he is probably the only mayor to do so the same year that a corporate-sponsored gay organization crowned his town the “best gay city” in the world.

Tel Aviv is twinned with New York City (25 percent African American).

3. Yossi Edelstein

Edelstein’s official title is director of the interior ministry’s Population Administration’s Foreign Workers’ Enforcement Unit, established in 2009. Simply put, he is directly in charge of the Oz unit, the security agents who are tasked with physically harassing and arresting African asylum-seekers.

One would hope that agents of the state given a monopoly on the use of violence would exercise that power very carefully and with as little prejudice as possible. Sadly, it would seem that Oz agents are not instructed to treat African people with the respect that they deserve, but rather, exactly the opposite.

Even when the African people in question are Jewish, they can be subjected to shocking levels of physical and emotional abuse. In October 2010, the Oz unit brutally beat an entire family of African Americans who had converted to Judaism and were living in the country legally, including a seven-months-pregnant woman, her mother and her one-year-old daughter.

While beating them, the Oz officers yelled, “niggers, we don’t need you here!” (“Interior ministry’s Oz police unit accused of beating US immigrants,” Haaretz, 21 October 2010).

Edelstein made clear his true feelings for African asylum-seekers at a briefing for security officers in July 2012. When asked what to do in the event that an African woman begins to disrobe in protest — a not uncommon form of political protest in Africa — Edelstein suggested that the woman should be engaged sexually. The officers charged with carrying out his orders laughed heartily at his response (hear Edelstein and his audience’s laughter in the video embedded in Israel Channel 10’s report on the briefing).

2. Eli Yishai

The highest-ranking government official to spew the most amount of anti-African invective is without doubt Edelstein’s boss, Eli Yishai. Yishai holds the portfolio of interior minister, an immensely powerful position in Israel. Yishai uses this power to implement the Jewish supremacist ideology of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party that he leads.

This attitude was summarized best by the party’s spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef in October 2010, when he said that the sole reason non-Jewish people exist is to serve Jewish people. Yishai does his level best to ensure that the non-Jewish people who come to Israel — to do the dirty work that Israelis aren’t willing to do — leave the country before they find love and start having kids.

If he wanted to, Yishai could grant work permits to African asylum-seekers, allowing them to be self-sustaining. This would quickly dissolve the homeless African population that is a burden to south Tel Aviv and greatly reduce tensions in those run-down neighborhoods that were economically impoverished to begin with.

But instead of giving work to the non-Jewish Africans already in the country, Yishai prefers to import tens of thousands of Southeast Asians every year, which he expels and exchanges for new ones every few years. This revolving door policy ensures that the non-Jewish population is always vulnerable to abuse. It is also very lucrative for Israeli human resource agencies — a laundered term for glorified slave traders.

Yishai does not mince his words. In June 2012, he lamented that African asylum-seekers didn’t understand that “this country belongs to us, to the white man,” and in August 2012, he said, “until I can deport them I’ll lock them up to make their lives miserable.” That month, he also branded African asylum-seekers a threat as severe as nuclear missiles and fabricated a baseless blood libel against them, accusing them of turning synagogues into toilets (“Israel enacts law allowing authorities to detain illegal migrants for up to 3 years,”Haaretz, 3 June 2012).

Benjamin Netanyahu at the Likud party convention in Tel Aviv, 6 May 2012.

(Yin Dongxun /Xinhua/Zumapress)

1. Benjamin Netanyahu

Ultimately, the person primarily responsible for Israel’s racist war against non-Jewish African asylum-seekers is none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Although he has issued tame condemnations of the most egregious examples of anti-African racism, he has also rubber-stamped every draconian measure taken against them.

When hundreds of Israeli rabbis issued a religious edict forbidding Jewish Israelis from renting flats to Africans, Netanyahu criticized the clerics at an insignificant photo-op — a teenage trivia contest — but took no measures against them. Just the opposite: within months, Netanyahu’s government doubled and tripled their salaries.

In December 2011, Netanyahu announced that he would seal Israel’s open border with Egypt — by which Africans cross into Israel — as soon as possible. I contacted his office then to ask if he would balance his efforts to prevent any more African asylum-seekers from reaching Israel with other measures that would improve the lives of those already in the country — like granting them work permits and health benefits, for example.

Netanyahu’s office responded in the negative. He soon followed these words with actions, demonstrating that he does not only want to reduce the amount of Africans entering Israel, but to completely reverse their migration and expel them from the country. Until such time as that is feasible, he has heartily backed all of Yishai’s plans to construct prison camps to hold the African asylum-seekers indefinitely (“Shas’ Deri eyes Arab vote,” Ynet, 6 November 2012).

Netanyahu is likely to win the upcoming national elections and remain prime minister of the country for at least a few more years. There is no hope on the horizon that any political leader capable of forming a majority in the Knesset could see African asylum-seekers as human beings and potential partners — not as existential threats.

David Sheen is an independent writer and filmmaker. Born in Toronto, Canada, Sheen now lives in Jaffa. His website is www.davidsheen.com and he can be followed on Twitter:@davidsheen.

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Categories Apartheid, Colonialism, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Israel, Palestine, Racism, Reactionary Watch, Zionism
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WORLD renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has faced a barrage of vile abuse today from people furious over his boycott of Israel.

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Rumors fly as official info remains scarce

War spillover into region feared

Airstrikes escalating

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Syrian spillover

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Grovelling

Not a word

“Baffled”

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Many in the West Bank are in mourning over the passing of Arafat Jaradat, who was tortured to death in an Israeli prison – he leaves behind a pregnant widow and two children [AFP]

Israel’s policy of torture has left many dead and completely lacks accountability.

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Arafat Jaradat, a father of a 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son, worked as a gas station attendant and his wife, Dalal, is pregnant.

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12. Chaim Avitan

11. Benjamin Babayof

10. Yaakov Asher

9. Meir Yitzhak Halevy

8. Amnon Yitzhak

7. Ben-Dror Yemini

6. Michael Ben-Ari

5. Miri Regev

4. Ron Huldai

3. Yossi Edelstein

2. Eli Yishai

1. Benjamin Netanyahu

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