from Mazin Qumsiyeh's journal
A 1918 statement by the President of the US that remains valid
“The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or political relationship, rests upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery. If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed upon than this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the People’s rights, though it is kept within the forms of law.” (President Woodrow Wilson speech on Independence Day July 4, 1918, text in Tannous, Izzat. 1988. The Palestinians: Eyewitness History of Palestine Under British Mandate. I.G.T. Company, New York, p. 72.)
VERY IMPORTANT ACTION ITEM: UN Investigation should result in criminal charges! Maximum publicity and lobbying efforts needed.
Many of us had seen Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem’s report that 773 of the 1,387 Palestinians killed in Gaza last winter were civilians including over 300 children (use of white phosphorous and other weapons in civilian areas is also widely reported by B’Tselem and other human rights groups). Thirteen Israelis (10 soldiers, three civilians) were also killed during the same “Operation Cast Lead”. Now an independent UN Commission led by respected war crimes investigator Justice Richard Goldstone (Jewish from South Africa) reported in 575 pages (38 opages executive summary up front) details of what it described as gross violations of human rights and war crimes. Using very harsh language for Israeli actions. The Israeli government is mobilizing its spin machine and going into hyperdrive to try to prevent its officers from being brought before the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Let us all write to/call President Obama (Tel 202-456-1111 and/or http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/ ) and all world politicians to demand that indeed Israeli war criminals are brought to justice. And let us use this report to start legal proceedings in different countries against Israeli politicians because there is clear evidence as tehcommission puts it that “there are serious doubts about the willingness of Israel to carry out genuine investigations in an impartial, independent, prompt and effective way as required by international law. The Mission is also of the view that the Israeli system overall presents inherently discriminatory features that make the pursuit of justice for Palestinian victims very difficult.”. “The Mission then makes recommendations to a number of United Nations bodies, Israel, responsible Palestinian authorities and the international community, in the areas of: (i) Accountability for serious violations of International Humanitarian Law; (b) Reparations; (c) Serious violations of human rights law; (d) The blockade and reconstruction; (e) The use of weapons and military procedures; (f) The protection of human rights organizations and defenders; (g) Follow up to the Mission’s recommendations. The recommendations are detailed in Chapter XXX.” The full report (PDF) is at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf
Israel’s Arab Citizens Call General Strike by Jonathan Cook
The increasingly harsh political climate in Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s right-wing government has prompted the leadership of the country’s
1.3 million Arab citizens to call the first general strike in several years. The one-day stoppage is due to take place on October 1, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second intifada, when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police. The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called "racist" government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook09092009.html
We commemorate the anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in honor of the hundreds of men, women and children killed by death squads armed, trained, financed, and instructed by the Israeli colonial masters. For a good background, I suggest people buy the book "Sabra and Shatila: September 1982" by Bayan Nuwayhed Al-Hout, 2004, Pluto Press. Below is my 2005 review of the book that summarizes its amazing accomplishment. For other background on the massacre and Sharon's responsibility, visit http://www.indictsharon.net/
"Sabra and Shatila: September 1982" Bayan Nuwayhed Al-Hout, 2004, Pluto Press, London and Ann Arbor, MI, 462 pp., 36 photographjs, 5 maps
Book Review published in the Holy Land Studies Journal, Spring 2005 by Mazin Qumsiyeh
It would be correct but rather reductionist to state that this remarkable book is the most comprehensive and thorough documentation of the events of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The mark of a good book is that it leaves the reader changed and this volume does that. Upon first hearing about this book, my first and incorrect inclination was that perhaps I do not need to read it. Many of us Palestinians assume we know the suffering of our people over the past six decades, we have seen it and we have lived it. This thought quickly evaporated after flipping through the first few pages of this book and then it was hard to put it down.
It is appropriate that this edition came out in English after its initial publication in Arabic. Knowingly or unknowingly, many in the Western world lend their name and their tax money to support atrocities like the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Would it help those taxpayers see what is being done with their tax money and US diplomatic support? Would it help bring people to a better understanding of the "situation"? More importantly would it bring us closer to see the victims of this particular massacre as people and not mere numbers? Having lived in the US for many years I wanted to look at this English version from that perspective. I also wanted to compare it to other books that relate personal testimonies of survivors of atrocities.
Those murdered in Sabra and Shatila are not around to tell us their stories so we are left with the survivors, those relatives and friends and acquaintances who witnessed the event and/or came to pick the bodies and the pieces of their shattered lives. Telling their stories is not easy. A writer or editor of such a compilation has the heavy responsibility (and duty) to his or her subjects to let them tell the story with as little interference as possible. It is not easy to craft careful and neutral questions that allow for free and open answers. It is also not easy to select from all your interviews individual accounts to include in a readable book. It is not easy to research names then cross check all references and resources to ensure presenting a picture that is as close as possible to the reality of what happened. All this and more are achieved in this book.
The first part of this book consists of six chapters that relay the statements and testimonies of the families and witnesses. The first two chapters cover the place and time and events leading up to the massacre including the encirclement of the camps by the Israeli army. Chapters 3-5 cover chronologically the events of September 16-18; the horrific 40-hour period in which nearly 2000 men, women, and children were systematically massacred or abducted and "disappeared". Chapter 6 covers testimonies covering the search for victims following the massacre. Forty-six actual testimonies were selected and included in these six chapters out of total direct testimonies gathered on 430 victims (about half Palestinian, 28% Lebanese, and the remainder belonging to other nationalities).
The second part of this book summarizes the research (including field study) conducted by the author into the massacre. Chapter 7 reviews results of the detailed field study conducted in 1984.
Chapter 8 analyzes the issue of the number of victims killed. The chilling method used by Israeli governments to minimize the casualties (in the Kahan report) is analyzed in detail. In one part, the author recounts what the historian Toynbee once said in debate with Yaacov Herzog in 1961. Hetzog lashed out at Toynbee for mentioning the Nazi atrocities in talking about the massacre of Palestinians in Deir Yassin in 1948. Herzog’s contention was that the deaths of a few hundred Palestinians could never be even discussed in relation to the horror on Nazi atrocities. Toynbee’s answer was that "Every increase in numbers produces an increase in suffering but it is impossible to be wicked or criminal more than 100%." She ten explained how the wickedness of trying to obfuscate reality or minimize the numbers of victims (as happened in the Israeli Kahan report). There are lessons to be learned from that. Yet, the most astonishing fact is that no authority (Israeli, Lebanese, or Palestinian) took it upon itself to compile a list of the victims. As such, the list compiled by this author must remain the most complete such list to date.
There are four appendices to the work. Appendix 1 contains 28 tables related to the field study. Appendix 2 provides the most comprehensive listing of names of those known killed (906 names) or abducted and missing (484 names). Given that only a handful of the missing were ever found, over 1300 human beings lost their lives with this tragedy.
The book ends with a series of remarkable photographs. Most are ones I have never seen before and I am sure other readers will find equally transforming. Most books place such photos in the Middle of the book or close to the beginning. A photograph it is said is worth a thousand words. But a photograph can elicit all sorts of emotions that then detract from the importance of reading the text itself. In this case, the placement of the photos at the end was the right decision and I urge readers to read this text in the order it is presented. For me, this was particularly powerful. I, as a reader was able to read the testimonies and review the facts and figures taking time to draw the relevant lessons learned before I saw at the end a series of pictures of what the scene of the crime looked like. To me the most remarkable and damning evidence of Israeli culpability and the accompanying lies about the massacre are found on pages 304-317 and buttressed by pictures and maps of the Israeli command center overseeing the camp. Anyone examining this evidence and International law understands the culpability of the Israeli politicians, commanders and soldiers. They knew the camps were undefended, they knew that massacres would be committed by the 150 Phallange militias they invited in, they knew the bloody outcome would happen, and finally they watched without interfering as this unfolded over three days.
I never met the author, Dr. Bayan Nuwayah Al-Hout, a faculty member at the Lebanese University for the past 25 years. I can only marvel at the amount of efforts over two decades that such a project demanded. It is usually something done by well-financed teams with a cadre of paid staff. For the author to have done this with very limited resources and help is truly admirable.
It was once said that the sign of a good book is that when you close the last page it is like saying goodbye to a dear friend. Well in this case, it is like saying goodbye to hundreds of friends: those who died in that tragic massacre and those who survived to recount the stories and live their lives awaiting justice. If we are to honor them all then we must engage in the quest for peace with justice.
When in a few years, a museum is built for the Nakba (catastrophe) that befell the Palestinian people, it will have a prominent place in it for Sabra and Shatila. This book will be the key resource for this. Those who care for human rights should buy it, read it, and learn the lessons from it.
There is a section at the end of the book, not given a chapter status and seeming as orphaned as the Children of Sabra and Shatila, that is simply titled "Conclusion: who was responsible." For those looking for the simplified answers of assigning blame to just one person or party, they will be disappointed. For those who want to use the lessons learned from this tragedy to prevent future tragedy, the careful analysis here is a must reading. From the Lebanese militia, to the local Israeli commanders guarding the camps, to Ariel Sharon who gave the go ahead, to the Lebanese government, all share some of the guilt. But ultimately, all of us who heard the news and who took no action are responsible for the continuation of a string of atrocities against civilians. On page 324, the author quotes from the song lyrics of the Argentinean singer Alberto Cortez:
"Where was the sun when anger burst at Sabra and Shatila? Where was I? At what party, careless, when I red the news? And where were you – you so eager to defend the oppressed – when the massacre happened? Where is the pride of men? Where were you my friend with the sleeping conscience?.."
The road between the atrocities of Sabra and Shatila runs rather short to those of Jenin, Nablus and Rafah of today and to our suppressed humanity. Such books can be our tour guides.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD, is author of "Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle" http://qumsiyeh.org
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Israeli PM appeals to world leaders to reject Goldstone findings
By HERB KEINON AND E.B. SOLOMONT, JPOST CORRESPONDENT IN NY
A day after the release of the scathing Goldstone Commission report that accused Israel of war crimes, Jerusalem on Wednesday revealed its defensive strategy: convince the world's democracies the report handcuffs them in their fight against terrorism, and keep discussion of the document confined to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who on Wednesday termed the report a "prize for terrorists" that makes it more difficult for democratic countries to combat them, will be speaking in the coming days to a list of prime ministers of countries represented on the Human Rights Council, lobbying them to oppose any resolution adopting the findings of the report.
Netanyahu said the commission, headed by South African Constitutional Court Judge Richard Goldstone, was a "kangaroo court" whose conclusions were drawn up before the hearings even started.
The Human Rights Council, which mandated Goldstone to "investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people," will review the findings on September 29.
Simona Halperin, director of the Foreign Ministry's International Organizations and Human Rights department, said while it was almost certain - because of its composition - that the council would adopt a critical resolution, "we need to ensure that the democracies that care about the rule of law will not support the one-sided resolution."
In other words, Israel's diplomatic efforts are now centered on ensuring that any critical resolution that comes out of the Human Rights Council, and which perhaps forwards the report for discussion to the UN Security Council, will be approved by countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and not by countries like South Korea, Canada, Brazil, France and Italy.
Without support of the world's Western democracies, the logic goes, such a resolution would lack moral authority.
"The goal is to keep this from going outside of Geneva, to make sure the poisonous fruit born in sin in Geneva, stays in Geneva," Halperin said.
Previewing arguments Israeli officials will use in fighting against the report, Halperin said, "All democracies fighting terrorism, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world, should be worried that this report throws out the narrative of democracies fighting terrorists, and embraces the idea that terrorists are freedom fighters entitled to act the way they do. The world which cares about the rule of law and protection of human life should be outraged at this message."
Another senior government official said that while until now the Foreign Ministry's focus regarding the Goldstone Report was to argue about Israel's right to defend itself, and to deflect accusations of war crimes, since the document was issued the message has been recalibrated and is now portraying the report itself as part of a greater problem facing the West: defending itself against terrorists.
The Goldstone Report, in this light, becomes not only an Israeli problem, but an international one.
"We are trying to create awareness in the public that this report threatens every democratic country," the official said. "Those who are happy with the report are those trying to blow us up."
In an effort to get this message across, the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday launched a "Gaza Facts" Web site (www.mfa.gov.il/GazaFacts), which links to an in-depth, 160-page document on all aspects of Operation Cast Lead, from an Israeli perspective.
Links to Gaza Facts will be advertised on major Web sites in those countries considered friendly to Israel that are represented on the Human Rights Council, and whose vote on any resolution will be critical. For instance, anyone going on to The New York Times Web site in Slovenia will see a link to this site. The site will also be advertised extensively in the US.
Israel, meanwhile, is also mounting an aggressive diplomatic campaign at the United Nations, with Israeli officials planning to meet on Wednesday with US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, as well as with other US administration officials and members of Congress.
Gabriela Shalev, Israel's permanent representative to the UN, said "concentrated diplomatic efforts" would target members of the Security Council, which could send the matter to the International Criminal Court at The Hague unless the referral is vetoed by an Israeli ally.
"We trust our friends, the United States, for full support," Shalev said.
She said Israel hoped the US would also exert its influence in the Human Rights Council, which it rejoined earlier this year after a hiatus.
"We do hope this is an opportunity to show the US is standing with us regarding human rights and not singling out Israel," Shalev said.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who is currently in the US, said the Goldstone Report "is a dangerous attempt to harm the principle of self-defense by democratic states and provides legitimacy to terrorism."
Ayalon, who met with Jewish community leaders in New York and called on them to join together and act with full force against the report, said in a speech to the heads of the American Jewish Committee that this document "should be treated like the [eventually rescinded] UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. We must mobilize and act with all force against the report in order to remove it."
American and European officials have so far declined to offer specifics on how they will handle the report.
"Justice Goldstone's report regarding alleged violations of international humanitarian law and abuses during the Gaza conflict was just released yesterday. The issues it addresses are complex and the findings will take time to digest," one US official said Wednesday. "We will review it carefully."
Look for a media blitz in the U.S. about how unfair the U.N. report is to poor little picked on Israel. Will Obama keep bucking the Zionists or cave in as all his predecessors have?
A day after the release of the scathing Goldstone Commission report that accused Israel of war crimes, Jerusalem on Wednesday revealed its defensive strategy: convince the world's democracies the report handcuffs them in their fight against terrorism, and keep discussion of the document confined to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who on Wednesday termed the report a "prize for terrorists" that makes it more difficult for democratic countries to combat them, will be speaking in the coming days to a list of prime ministers of countries represented on the Human Rights Council, lobbying them to oppose any resolution adopting the findings of the report.
Netanyahu said the commission, headed by South African Constitutional Court Judge Richard Goldstone, was a "kangaroo court" whose conclusions were drawn up before the hearings even started.
The Human Rights Council, which mandated Goldstone to "investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people," will review the findings on September 29.
Simona Halperin, director of the Foreign Ministry's International Organizations and Human Rights department, said while it was almost certain - because of its composition - that the council would adopt a critical resolution, "we need to ensure that the democracies that care about the rule of law will not support the one-sided resolution."
In other words, Israel's diplomatic efforts are now centered on ensuring that any critical resolution that comes out of the Human Rights Council, and which perhaps forwards the report for discussion to the UN Security Council, will be approved by countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and not by countries like South Korea, Canada, Brazil, France and Italy.
Without support of the world's Western democracies, the logic goes, such a resolution would lack moral authority.
"The goal is to keep this from going outside of Geneva, to make sure the poisonous fruit born in sin in Geneva, stays in Geneva," Halperin said.
Previewing arguments Israeli officials will use in fighting against the report, Halperin said, "All democracies fighting terrorism, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world, should be worried that this report throws out the narrative of democracies fighting terrorists, and embraces the idea that terrorists are freedom fighters entitled to act the way they do. The world which cares about the rule of law and protection of human life should be outraged at this message."
Another senior government official said that while until now the Foreign Ministry's focus regarding the Goldstone Report was to argue about Israel's right to defend itself, and to deflect accusations of war crimes, since the document was issued the message has been recalibrated and is now portraying the report itself as part of a greater problem facing the West: defending itself against terrorists.
The Goldstone Report, in this light, becomes not only an Israeli problem, but an international one.
"We are trying to create awareness in the public that this report threatens every democratic country," the official said. "Those who are happy with the report are those trying to blow us up."
In an effort to get this message across, the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday launched a "Gaza Facts" Web site (www.mfa.gov.il/GazaFacts), which links to an in-depth, 160-page document on all aspects of Operation Cast Lead, from an Israeli perspective.
Links to Gaza Facts will be advertised on major Web sites in those countries considered friendly to Israel that are represented on the Human Rights Council, and whose vote on any resolution will be critical. For instance, anyone going on to The New York Times Web site in Slovenia will see a link to this site. The site will also be advertised extensively in the US.
Israel, meanwhile, is also mounting an aggressive diplomatic campaign at the United Nations, with Israeli officials planning to meet on Wednesday with US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, as well as with other US administration officials and members of Congress.
Gabriela Shalev, Israel's permanent representative to the UN, said "concentrated diplomatic efforts" would target members of the Security Council, which could send the matter to the International Criminal Court at The Hague unless the referral is vetoed by an Israeli ally.
"We trust our friends, the United States, for full support," Shalev said.
She said Israel hoped the US would also exert its influence in the Human Rights Council, which it rejoined earlier this year after a hiatus.
"We do hope this is an opportunity to show the US is standing with us regarding human rights and not singling out Israel," Shalev said.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who is currently in the US, said the Goldstone Report "is a dangerous attempt to harm the principle of self-defense by democratic states and provides legitimacy to terrorism."
Ayalon, who met with Jewish community leaders in New York and called on them to join together and act with full force against the report, said in a speech to the heads of the American Jewish Committee that this document "should be treated like the [eventually rescinded] UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. We must mobilize and act with all force against the report in order to remove it."
American and European officials have so far declined to offer specifics on how they will handle the report.
"Justice Goldstone's report regarding alleged violations of international humanitarian law and abuses during the Gaza conflict was just released yesterday. The issues it addresses are complex and the findings will take time to digest," one US official said Wednesday. "We will review it carefully."
Look for a media blitz in the U.S. about how unfair the U.N. report is to poor little picked on Israel. Will Obama keep bucking the Zionists or cave in as all his predecessors have?
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
UN condemns 'war crimes' in Gaza
There is evidence that both Israeli and Palestinian forces committed war crimes in the recent conflict in the Gaza Strip, a UN report says.
It accuses Israel of deliberately using "disproportionate force" in the three-week operation in December and January.
The report also condemned rocket attacks by Palestinian groups, which Israel says sparked its offensive.
Palestinians and human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed, but Israel puts the figure at 1,166.
Three Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers were also killed.
The report said Israel must be held accountable for its actions during the war, a process which could lead to the conflict being referred to the International Criminal Court.
The military operation was a result of disrespect for the fundamental principle of 'distinction' in international humanitarian law
Key extracts from UN statement
Israel, which had refused to co-operate with the UN fact-finding team, said the report was "clearly one-sided".
It reiterated that it was "committed to acting fully in accordance with international law and to examining any allegations of wrongdoing by its forces".
The investigation, led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, found evidence "indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict", a UN statement said.
Israel also "committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity".
Palestinian militants prepare to fire weapons into Israel (file image)
Israel said the conflict was to end rockets attacks from Gaza
The report accuses Israel of imposing "a blockade which amounted to collective punishment" in the lead-up to the conflict.
It "concludes that the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population," said the UN statement.
Statements by the Israel military that its operation involved very few errors showed, said the report, that its failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets was "the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions".
'Arbitrary arrests'
The report found there was also evidence that Palestinian groups had committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity, in their repeated rockets and mortars attacks on Israel.
It said the launching of rockets which "cannot be aimed with precision at military targets" breaches the fundamental principle of sparing civilian lives.
ANALYSIS
Tim Franks
Tim Franks, BBC News, Jerusalem
If this report is to matter, it will be for a number of reasons. One is its length. There have been a slew of reports into the war in Gaza. This is the lengthiest, weighing in at 575 pages.
There is the man who wrote it: Richard Goldstone is a judge and judicial investigator with an impressive record. The UN Human Rights Council, for whom he wrote this, is also no longer a body which is quite as easy for Israel to dismiss as a congenitally biased. The US has recently run for, and been elected to a seat on its council.
Mr Goldstone has also shown a measure of political astuteness. This is not the first time that Israel, or Palestinian militants, have been accused of war crimes - and in Israel's case, crimes against humanity as well. But previous allegations have quickly begun to moulder on the shelf.
Mr Goldstone recommended that the Security Council require Israel, and the Gaza authorities, to report in six months about its own investigations into the alleged crimes. If they did not come up to scratch, then the International Criminal Court should become involved. Who, said Judge Goldstone, could object to that?
"Where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population," it said.
It called for the immediate release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier seized in a Palestinian raid in 2006 and taken to Gaza.
Both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities are criticised for the treatment of their own civilians during the conflict.
Israel's interrogation of political activists and repression of criticism of its activities had "contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent was not tolerated", it said.
Meanwhile, the alleged "arbitrary arrests" and "extra-judicial executions" of Palestinians by the authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank were also criticised.
The 574-page document recommends that authorities in both Israel and Gaza be required to investigate the allegations and report to the UN Security Council within six months.
Israel says it has carried out more than 100 investigations into allegations of abuses by its forces - most were dismissed as "baseless" but 23 criminal investigations are still pending.
The Israeli military says troops acted lawfully during the conflict.
It has admitted to a small number of errors - such as the deaths of 21 people in a wrongly targeted house - but said these had been "unavoidable".
The full report - which is based on 188 interviews, more than 10,000 pages of documentation and 1,200 photographs - will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council at the end of this month.
Eight months after the conflict, very little reconstruction has taken place in Gaza because of the strict Israeli-imposed blockade which bans all but essential supplies from entering the enclave.
The stated aim of the blockade is to weaken Hamas's leadership but aid agencies say it serves only to punish the civilian population.
UN officials have repeatedly urged Israel to end its blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory.
It accuses Israel of deliberately using "disproportionate force" in the three-week operation in December and January.
The report also condemned rocket attacks by Palestinian groups, which Israel says sparked its offensive.
Palestinians and human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed, but Israel puts the figure at 1,166.
Three Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers were also killed.
The report said Israel must be held accountable for its actions during the war, a process which could lead to the conflict being referred to the International Criminal Court.
The military operation was a result of disrespect for the fundamental principle of 'distinction' in international humanitarian law
Key extracts from UN statement
Israel, which had refused to co-operate with the UN fact-finding team, said the report was "clearly one-sided".
It reiterated that it was "committed to acting fully in accordance with international law and to examining any allegations of wrongdoing by its forces".
The investigation, led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, found evidence "indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict", a UN statement said.
Israel also "committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity".
Palestinian militants prepare to fire weapons into Israel (file image)
Israel said the conflict was to end rockets attacks from Gaza
The report accuses Israel of imposing "a blockade which amounted to collective punishment" in the lead-up to the conflict.
It "concludes that the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population," said the UN statement.
Statements by the Israel military that its operation involved very few errors showed, said the report, that its failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets was "the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions".
'Arbitrary arrests'
The report found there was also evidence that Palestinian groups had committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity, in their repeated rockets and mortars attacks on Israel.
It said the launching of rockets which "cannot be aimed with precision at military targets" breaches the fundamental principle of sparing civilian lives.
ANALYSIS
Tim Franks
Tim Franks, BBC News, Jerusalem
If this report is to matter, it will be for a number of reasons. One is its length. There have been a slew of reports into the war in Gaza. This is the lengthiest, weighing in at 575 pages.
There is the man who wrote it: Richard Goldstone is a judge and judicial investigator with an impressive record. The UN Human Rights Council, for whom he wrote this, is also no longer a body which is quite as easy for Israel to dismiss as a congenitally biased. The US has recently run for, and been elected to a seat on its council.
Mr Goldstone has also shown a measure of political astuteness. This is not the first time that Israel, or Palestinian militants, have been accused of war crimes - and in Israel's case, crimes against humanity as well. But previous allegations have quickly begun to moulder on the shelf.
Mr Goldstone recommended that the Security Council require Israel, and the Gaza authorities, to report in six months about its own investigations into the alleged crimes. If they did not come up to scratch, then the International Criminal Court should become involved. Who, said Judge Goldstone, could object to that?
"Where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population," it said.
It called for the immediate release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier seized in a Palestinian raid in 2006 and taken to Gaza.
Both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities are criticised for the treatment of their own civilians during the conflict.
Israel's interrogation of political activists and repression of criticism of its activities had "contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent was not tolerated", it said.
Meanwhile, the alleged "arbitrary arrests" and "extra-judicial executions" of Palestinians by the authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank were also criticised.
The 574-page document recommends that authorities in both Israel and Gaza be required to investigate the allegations and report to the UN Security Council within six months.
Israel says it has carried out more than 100 investigations into allegations of abuses by its forces - most were dismissed as "baseless" but 23 criminal investigations are still pending.
The Israeli military says troops acted lawfully during the conflict.
It has admitted to a small number of errors - such as the deaths of 21 people in a wrongly targeted house - but said these had been "unavoidable".
The full report - which is based on 188 interviews, more than 10,000 pages of documentation and 1,200 photographs - will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council at the end of this month.
Eight months after the conflict, very little reconstruction has taken place in Gaza because of the strict Israeli-imposed blockade which bans all but essential supplies from entering the enclave.
The stated aim of the blockade is to weaken Hamas's leadership but aid agencies say it serves only to punish the civilian population.
UN officials have repeatedly urged Israel to end its blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically wrong?
Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted January 28, 2009.
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically wrong?
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?
And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land -- holy in all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions -- based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There's probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a "Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.
Inventing a People?
Zand's central argument is that the Romans didn't expel whole nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today's Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their homeland during the 20th century.
As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the book in Ha'aretz:
There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened -- hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua.
But this begs the question: if the ancient people of Judea weren't expelled en masse, then how did it come to pass that Jewish people are scattered across the world? According to Zand, who offers detailed histories of several groups within what is conventionally known as the Jewish Diaspora, some were Jews who emigrated of their own volition, and many more were later converts to Judaism. Contrary to popular belief, Zand argues that Judaism was an evangelical religion that actively sought out new adherents during its formative period.
This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel's national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than "a people" descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a "Jewish state."
And that brings us to Zand's second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel."
Zand Gets Slammed; Do His Arguments Stand Up?
The ramifications of Zand's argument are far-reaching; "the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants," he told Ha'aretz. Zand argues that Israel should be a state in which all of the inhabitants of what was once "British Palestine" share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, rather than maintaining it as a "Jewish and democratic" state, as it's now identified.
Predictably, Zand was pilloried according to the time-tested formula. Ami Isseroff, writing on ZioNation, the Zionism-Israel blog, invoked the customary Holocaust imagery, accusing Zand of offering a "final solution to the Jewish problem," one in which "No auto da fe is required, no charging Cossacks are needed, no gas chambers, no smelly crematoria." Another feverish ideologue called Zand's work "another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel."
That kind of overheated rhetoric is a standard straw man in the endless roil of discourse over Israel and the Palestinians, and is easily dismissed. But more serious criticism also greeted Zand's work. In a widely read critical review of Zand's work, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, slammed the author's second assertion -- that Zionist academics had suppressed the true history of Judaism's spread through emigration and conversion in favor of a history that would give legitimacy to the quest for a Jewish state.
Bartal raised important questions about Zand's methodology and pointed out what appears to be some sloppy details in the book. But, interestingly, in defending Israel's academic community, Bartal supported Zand's more consequential thesis, writing, "Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions." Bartal added: "no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically 'pure.' " He noted that "[i]mportant groups in the [Zionist] movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely."
"As far as I can discern," Bartal wrote, "the book contains not even one idea that has not been presented" in previous historical studies. Segev added that "Zand did not invent [his] thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others."
One can reasonably argue that this ancient myth of a Jewish nation exiled until its 20th century return is of little consequence; whether the Jewish people share a common genetic ancestry or are a far-flung collection of people who share the same faith, a common national identity has in fact developed over the centuries. But Zand's central contention stands, and has some significant implications for the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Changing the Conversation?
The primary reason it's so difficult to discuss the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the remarkably effective job supporters of Israel's control of the Occupied Territories -- including Gaza, still under de facto occupation -- have done equating support for Palestinian self-determination with a desire to see the destruction of Israel. It effectively conflates any advocacy of Palestinian rights with the specter of Jewish extermination.
That's certainly been the case with arguments for a single-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Until recent years, advocating a "single-state" solution -- a binational state where all residents of what are today Israel and the Occupied Territories share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship -- was a relatively mainstream position to take. In fact, it was one of several competing plans considered by the United Nations when it created the state of Israel in the 1940s.
But the idea of a single, binational state has more recently been marginalized -- dismissed as an attempt to destroy Israel literally and physically, rather than as an ethnic and religious-based political entity with a population of second-class Arab citizens and the legacy of responsibility for world's longest-standing refugee population.
A logical conclusion of Zand's work exposing Israel's founding mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense -- raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the "children of Israel" really are -- in another sense, it hints at the commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the idea that they should have a "right of return."
And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are guaranteed equal protection -- equal protection under the laws of a state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question.
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted January 28, 2009.
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically wrong?
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?
And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land -- holy in all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions -- based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There's probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a "Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.
Inventing a People?
Zand's central argument is that the Romans didn't expel whole nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today's Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their homeland during the 20th century.
As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the book in Ha'aretz:
There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened -- hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua.
But this begs the question: if the ancient people of Judea weren't expelled en masse, then how did it come to pass that Jewish people are scattered across the world? According to Zand, who offers detailed histories of several groups within what is conventionally known as the Jewish Diaspora, some were Jews who emigrated of their own volition, and many more were later converts to Judaism. Contrary to popular belief, Zand argues that Judaism was an evangelical religion that actively sought out new adherents during its formative period.
This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel's national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than "a people" descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a "Jewish state."
And that brings us to Zand's second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel."
Zand Gets Slammed; Do His Arguments Stand Up?
The ramifications of Zand's argument are far-reaching; "the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants," he told Ha'aretz. Zand argues that Israel should be a state in which all of the inhabitants of what was once "British Palestine" share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, rather than maintaining it as a "Jewish and democratic" state, as it's now identified.
Predictably, Zand was pilloried according to the time-tested formula. Ami Isseroff, writing on ZioNation, the Zionism-Israel blog, invoked the customary Holocaust imagery, accusing Zand of offering a "final solution to the Jewish problem," one in which "No auto da fe is required, no charging Cossacks are needed, no gas chambers, no smelly crematoria." Another feverish ideologue called Zand's work "another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel."
That kind of overheated rhetoric is a standard straw man in the endless roil of discourse over Israel and the Palestinians, and is easily dismissed. But more serious criticism also greeted Zand's work. In a widely read critical review of Zand's work, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, slammed the author's second assertion -- that Zionist academics had suppressed the true history of Judaism's spread through emigration and conversion in favor of a history that would give legitimacy to the quest for a Jewish state.
Bartal raised important questions about Zand's methodology and pointed out what appears to be some sloppy details in the book. But, interestingly, in defending Israel's academic community, Bartal supported Zand's more consequential thesis, writing, "Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions." Bartal added: "no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically 'pure.' " He noted that "[i]mportant groups in the [Zionist] movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely."
"As far as I can discern," Bartal wrote, "the book contains not even one idea that has not been presented" in previous historical studies. Segev added that "Zand did not invent [his] thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others."
One can reasonably argue that this ancient myth of a Jewish nation exiled until its 20th century return is of little consequence; whether the Jewish people share a common genetic ancestry or are a far-flung collection of people who share the same faith, a common national identity has in fact developed over the centuries. But Zand's central contention stands, and has some significant implications for the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Changing the Conversation?
The primary reason it's so difficult to discuss the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the remarkably effective job supporters of Israel's control of the Occupied Territories -- including Gaza, still under de facto occupation -- have done equating support for Palestinian self-determination with a desire to see the destruction of Israel. It effectively conflates any advocacy of Palestinian rights with the specter of Jewish extermination.
That's certainly been the case with arguments for a single-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Until recent years, advocating a "single-state" solution -- a binational state where all residents of what are today Israel and the Occupied Territories share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship -- was a relatively mainstream position to take. In fact, it was one of several competing plans considered by the United Nations when it created the state of Israel in the 1940s.
But the idea of a single, binational state has more recently been marginalized -- dismissed as an attempt to destroy Israel literally and physically, rather than as an ethnic and religious-based political entity with a population of second-class Arab citizens and the legacy of responsibility for world's longest-standing refugee population.
A logical conclusion of Zand's work exposing Israel's founding mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense -- raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the "children of Israel" really are -- in another sense, it hints at the commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the idea that they should have a "right of return."
And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are guaranteed equal protection -- equal protection under the laws of a state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
After 30 years, US accepts face-to-face talks with Iran
The Iranian foreign minister, right, presents Iran's package of proposals to the ambassadors of France, Russia, and the Swiss ambassador, who represents US interests in Tehran.
Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:33:01 GMT
After Iran's lead nuclear negotiator expressed readiness to resume talks over the country's nuclear program and a range of other issues with the West, the Obama administration responds by accepting Tehran's offer to meet face-to-face.
According to a report by the New York Times, the United States has broken with the past American policy of shunning direct talks with Iran and is ready to "put a senior representative from the Obama administration at the bargaining table, along with emissaries from five other nations, for the first time since Mr. Obama took office."
Saeed Jalili, the Iranian chief nuclear negotiator, issued a statement in early September saying that Tehran had completed a package of proposals "regarding all security, political and economic issues, in addition to the nuclear issue."
Jalili, who is also the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, added that the Islamic Republic is ready to cooperate with Western countries to 'remove common concerns [about its nuclear program] in the international arena.'
Iran faces pressure to halt its nuclear enrichment, as world powers believe its program is aimed at building a nuclear bomb.
Tehran, however, has denied seeking nuclear weapons and called for the removal of all weapons of mass destruction across the globe.
While Iran is already under three rounds of UN Security Council sanctions resolutions for its enrichment work, tougher sanctions are likely to be considered against the country.
US President Barack Obama had earlier declared that Western powers would give Iran until September to resume talks on its much-debated program.
The controversial decision by the US to engage directly with Iran comes as Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Saturday that Tehran is ready for talks with the West on the basis of its latest package of proposals but reiterated that there will not be any 'compromise' on the nuclear issue.
Mottaki told a press conference that Iran would not relinquish its fundamental rights to acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
Despite Mottaki's remarks, a State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said "If we have talks, we will plan to bring up the nuclear issue."
CS/MD
Friday, September 11, 2009
Iran nuclear proposal rejected as Russia dismisses sanctions
President Obama had hoped to pressure Iran by building international consensus on tougher sanctions.
By David Montero |
Correspondent 09.11.09
CSMonitor.com
As the United States rejected a new proposal for talks presented by Iran this week, Russia has broken ranks sharply with Washington, warning that it will not support the US call for tougher sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Russia’s statement comes as a setback for President Barack Obama, who had hoped to build an international consensus about sanctions before the United Nations General Assembly meeting in two weeks.
Russia’s stance, and its veto power as a member of the United Nations Security Council, makes such a consensus look unlikely.
Iran on Wednesday handed over a much-awaited proposal for new talks to the so-called P5+1 group – the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany.
The contents have not been made public, but the independent investigative news outlet, ProPublica, obtained and posted a copy of the document, saying, “[T]he new proposal is silent on Iran’s own nuclear program…[it] reiterated many of its previous ideas for talks while scaling back specific requests made in previous proposals.
The Washington Post summarized the gist of the proposal:
Iran is not prepared to discuss halting its uranium enrichment program in response to Western demands but is proposing instead a worldwide control system aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top political aide said in an interview Thursday.
Washington immediately rejected the proposal, the Post adds:
“It’s not really responsive to our greatest concern, which is obviously Iran’s nuclear program,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said of Tehran’s package of proposals. “Iran reiterated its view that as far as it is concerned, its nuclear file is closed. . . . That is certainly not the case. There are many outstanding issues.”
And that has opened up a rift with Russia, according to the Wall Street Journal:
[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] disagreed with the U.S. assessment, contending there was “something there to use” in the proposal Tehran sent to the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany….
Mr. Lavrov appeared to dismiss U.S. and Israeli warnings of urgency.
This week Glyn Davies, Washington’s chief envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iran might already be in possession of enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb. Iran’s Press TV reports that Russia also disagrees with this point.
Mr. Davies’ remarks are in apparent contradiction with those of Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who declared on Thursday that “Iran cannot produce uranium for military purposes, even if it wanted to.” Lavrov said that his claim was based on surveillance by the…IAEA.
Due to the disagreements, sanctions now look increasingly unlikely, reports Reuters:
World powers meeting at the U.N. General Assembly and the G-20 gathering later this month are unlikely to push immediately for tougher sanctions on Iran, an official familiar with preparations for the meetings said on Thursday.
The Associated Press adds that Obama administration, despite rejecting Iran’s proposal, “remains open to talks and held out hope that Iranian officials might signal a similar interest by the time world leaders meet later this month at the U.N. General Assembly.”
Israel's control of America's and Europe's foreign policies towards Iran is being tested here. Obama's sold out to the Zionists but can his stance withstand ethical scrutiny? Iran looks like it may very well back Obama into a moral corner making him eat his own words about wanting to stop nuclear weapons. Once the world understands who's the real nuclear nutcase in the Middle East, the country armed with nukes thanks to U.S.A. assistance, the country that has repeatedly invaded its Middle East neighbors, the country that has violated more U.N. mandates than any other nation, the rogue state of Israel. Zionists have the nukes and don't want Middle East Muslim nations they can't control having them. Zionists need to keep their neighbors in fear because Zionists have no real interest in becoming cooperative neighbors with the people they've invaded.
By David Montero |
Correspondent 09.11.09
CSMonitor.com
As the United States rejected a new proposal for talks presented by Iran this week, Russia has broken ranks sharply with Washington, warning that it will not support the US call for tougher sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Russia’s statement comes as a setback for President Barack Obama, who had hoped to build an international consensus about sanctions before the United Nations General Assembly meeting in two weeks.
Russia’s stance, and its veto power as a member of the United Nations Security Council, makes such a consensus look unlikely.
Iran on Wednesday handed over a much-awaited proposal for new talks to the so-called P5+1 group – the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany.
The contents have not been made public, but the independent investigative news outlet, ProPublica, obtained and posted a copy of the document, saying, “[T]he new proposal is silent on Iran’s own nuclear program…[it] reiterated many of its previous ideas for talks while scaling back specific requests made in previous proposals.
The Washington Post summarized the gist of the proposal:
Iran is not prepared to discuss halting its uranium enrichment program in response to Western demands but is proposing instead a worldwide control system aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top political aide said in an interview Thursday.
Washington immediately rejected the proposal, the Post adds:
“It’s not really responsive to our greatest concern, which is obviously Iran’s nuclear program,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said of Tehran’s package of proposals. “Iran reiterated its view that as far as it is concerned, its nuclear file is closed. . . . That is certainly not the case. There are many outstanding issues.”
And that has opened up a rift with Russia, according to the Wall Street Journal:
[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] disagreed with the U.S. assessment, contending there was “something there to use” in the proposal Tehran sent to the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany….
Mr. Lavrov appeared to dismiss U.S. and Israeli warnings of urgency.
This week Glyn Davies, Washington’s chief envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iran might already be in possession of enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb. Iran’s Press TV reports that Russia also disagrees with this point.
Mr. Davies’ remarks are in apparent contradiction with those of Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who declared on Thursday that “Iran cannot produce uranium for military purposes, even if it wanted to.” Lavrov said that his claim was based on surveillance by the…IAEA.
Due to the disagreements, sanctions now look increasingly unlikely, reports Reuters:
World powers meeting at the U.N. General Assembly and the G-20 gathering later this month are unlikely to push immediately for tougher sanctions on Iran, an official familiar with preparations for the meetings said on Thursday.
The Associated Press adds that Obama administration, despite rejecting Iran’s proposal, “remains open to talks and held out hope that Iranian officials might signal a similar interest by the time world leaders meet later this month at the U.N. General Assembly.”
Israel's control of America's and Europe's foreign policies towards Iran is being tested here. Obama's sold out to the Zionists but can his stance withstand ethical scrutiny? Iran looks like it may very well back Obama into a moral corner making him eat his own words about wanting to stop nuclear weapons. Once the world understands who's the real nuclear nutcase in the Middle East, the country armed with nukes thanks to U.S.A. assistance, the country that has repeatedly invaded its Middle East neighbors, the country that has violated more U.N. mandates than any other nation, the rogue state of Israel. Zionists have the nukes and don't want Middle East Muslim nations they can't control having them. Zionists need to keep their neighbors in fear because Zionists have no real interest in becoming cooperative neighbors with the people they've invaded.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Gas firms 'prop up Burma's junta'
An unidentified official (L) of the French oil company Total briefing visiting media representatives near the Yadana gas pipeline between Burma and Thailand (archive image - 2003)
The Yadana pipeline takes gas between Burma and Thailand
Energy giants Total and Chevron have been accused of propping up Burma's military government through their gas projects in the country.
Rights group Earth Rights International says this has allowed the government to siphon off $5bn (£3bn) in revenue.
The money has reportedly been stashed in banks in Singapore, instead of being used to ease poverty in Burma.
The rights group also accuses Total and Chevron of ignoring forced labour, killings and high-level corruption.
The two companies deny the allegations and say they play a positive and constructive role in communities, with development and educational programmes.
Two Singapore banks named in the report also denied involvement.
Government 'lifeline'
Earth Rights International has published two reports about the Yadana gas pipeline project, which transports gas overland from offshore fields to Thailand.
''Total and Chevron have essentially provided the military regime with its single largest lifeline - that being the revenue generated from the project," said Matthew Smith, the co-ordinator of Earth Rights International's Burma project.
Than Shwe
Critics accuse the Burmese junta of numerous human rights abuses
He explained that, in research conducted over a two-year period, sources explained how the Burmese generals kept the money out of the country's budget and stored it in bank accounts in Singapore.
"Of the $4.83bn generated since 2000, approximately $4.8bn of that is not included in the national budget, and our sources indicate that the military regime is storing its illicit revenue and ill-gotten gains in two foreign banks in Singapore," he said.
The report names the two banks, but both issued statements denying involvement in Burma's Yadana project and saying the findings are untrue and without basis.
The allegation of human rights abuses are against the Burmese army which provides security for the Total and Chevron operated pipeline.
Sanctions?
Sean Turnell, an associate professor of economics at Macquarie University in Sydney who follows energy issues in Burma closely, says the way the ruling generals make so much money raises the issue of sanctions.
''As we know, countries like the United States and Europe have fairly strict financial sanctions on Burma," he said.
"Burma's generals are able to evade these using other countries and I think what could be an interesting step forward would be for the countries that are levying these sanctions to try and pressure some of the other countries to similarly apply sanctions."
Chevron and Total are not restricted by economic sanctions imposed on Burma's rulers by the US and the European Union.
According to the BBC's Asia correspondent Alistair Leithead, there is a debate over whether sanctions should be strengthened or abandoned as an international approach towards Burma, where the majority of people live in severe poverty.
Iran Officials Counter With Proposal for Worldwide System to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons
Iran Won't Discuss Halting Uranium Enrichment Program
By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 10, 2009; 1:39 PM
TEHRAN, Sept. 10 -- Iran is not prepared to discuss halting its uranium enrichment program in response to Western demands but is proposing instead a worldwide control system aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's top political aide said in an interview Thursday.
In the proposal, which was handed to the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany on Wednesday, Iran also offers cooperation in solving problems in Afghanistan and fighting terrorism, as well as collaboration on oil and gas projects, said Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi. A longtime confidant of Ahmadinejad, Samareh Hashemi is considered the president's closest aide and is reportedly under consideration for appointment as first vice president, a key post in Ahmadinejad's new government.
As described by Samareh Hashemi, Iran's proposal is similar to a call by President Obama in April to eliminate the world's nuclear weapons. At the upcoming United Nations General Assembly meeting later this month, Obama is scheduled to chair a special U.N. session aimed at seeking broad consensus on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons rather than on targeting individual nations such as Iran and North Korea. Ahmadinejad is also scheduled to attend the U.N. meeting and has said he is ready to debate Obama in front of the world media.
On Wednesday, Iran gave its package of proposals to representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- and Germany. The group, known as the P5-plus-one, has sought unsuccessfully since 2006 to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear program. The group wants Iran to abandon its program to enrich uranium, which Iran insists it needs to ensure an independent source of fuel for nuclear power plants. Highly enriched uranium can also be used in nuclear weapons, however, leading the United States and other Western nations to suspect that Iran secretly plans to divert the material to a weapons program.
The United States said on Wednesday it would consider the Iranian initiative very carefully. Russia said it hopes negotiations with Iran will resume in the near future. France said on Thursday that it is studying the proposal along with the other P5-plus-one members, the French news agency AFP reported.
In the interview, Samareh Hashemi called Washington's Iran policy a "paradox" and said it was influenced by "Zionists." He refused to confirm or deny that the Obama administration has sent two secret letters to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying only that he would "respond later" to questions about the matter.
The top presidential aide said the United States has not submitted any request to open a consular office or interests section in Tehran, an idea that was floated in Washington last year. "If such a request comes, we will study it positively," he said.
He said Iran has given the United States "practical proposals" in the past to improve relations, including a request for direct airline flights between Tehran and New York. "But the Americans gave no response," he said.
Samareh Hashemi also called on the United States to apologize for "interfering in Iran's election and other instances of meddling," attacked America's two-party political system and denounced "liberal democracy" in Western nations. "Both the internal and external signs of this Western liberal democracy show that it's approaching defeat and collapse," he said.
Ahmadinejad began a second presidential term last month after his government effectively crushed opposition protests over his disputed reelection in June. He has accused the West of orchestrating the protests.
Addressing the nuclear issue, Samareh Hashemi strongly rejected a senior U.S. diplomat's accusation Wednesday that Iran "is now either very near or in possession" of enough low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon. The diplomat, Glyn Davies, Washington's chief envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, said in a speech, "We have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear weapons option." He charged that Iran's continuing enrichment activity, in defiance of three U.N. Security Council resolutions, "moves Iran closer to a dangerous and destabilizing possible breakout capacity."
Samareh Hashemi charged in reply that the United States is allowing its position on the issue to be dictated by Israel. "This is the Israelis speaking; it's better that the Americans give their own opinion," he said.
By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 10, 2009; 1:39 PM
TEHRAN, Sept. 10 -- Iran is not prepared to discuss halting its uranium enrichment program in response to Western demands but is proposing instead a worldwide control system aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's top political aide said in an interview Thursday.
In the proposal, which was handed to the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany on Wednesday, Iran also offers cooperation in solving problems in Afghanistan and fighting terrorism, as well as collaboration on oil and gas projects, said Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi. A longtime confidant of Ahmadinejad, Samareh Hashemi is considered the president's closest aide and is reportedly under consideration for appointment as first vice president, a key post in Ahmadinejad's new government.
As described by Samareh Hashemi, Iran's proposal is similar to a call by President Obama in April to eliminate the world's nuclear weapons. At the upcoming United Nations General Assembly meeting later this month, Obama is scheduled to chair a special U.N. session aimed at seeking broad consensus on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons rather than on targeting individual nations such as Iran and North Korea. Ahmadinejad is also scheduled to attend the U.N. meeting and has said he is ready to debate Obama in front of the world media.
On Wednesday, Iran gave its package of proposals to representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- and Germany. The group, known as the P5-plus-one, has sought unsuccessfully since 2006 to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear program. The group wants Iran to abandon its program to enrich uranium, which Iran insists it needs to ensure an independent source of fuel for nuclear power plants. Highly enriched uranium can also be used in nuclear weapons, however, leading the United States and other Western nations to suspect that Iran secretly plans to divert the material to a weapons program.
The United States said on Wednesday it would consider the Iranian initiative very carefully. Russia said it hopes negotiations with Iran will resume in the near future. France said on Thursday that it is studying the proposal along with the other P5-plus-one members, the French news agency AFP reported.
In the interview, Samareh Hashemi called Washington's Iran policy a "paradox" and said it was influenced by "Zionists." He refused to confirm or deny that the Obama administration has sent two secret letters to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying only that he would "respond later" to questions about the matter.
The top presidential aide said the United States has not submitted any request to open a consular office or interests section in Tehran, an idea that was floated in Washington last year. "If such a request comes, we will study it positively," he said.
He said Iran has given the United States "practical proposals" in the past to improve relations, including a request for direct airline flights between Tehran and New York. "But the Americans gave no response," he said.
Samareh Hashemi also called on the United States to apologize for "interfering in Iran's election and other instances of meddling," attacked America's two-party political system and denounced "liberal democracy" in Western nations. "Both the internal and external signs of this Western liberal democracy show that it's approaching defeat and collapse," he said.
Ahmadinejad began a second presidential term last month after his government effectively crushed opposition protests over his disputed reelection in June. He has accused the West of orchestrating the protests.
Addressing the nuclear issue, Samareh Hashemi strongly rejected a senior U.S. diplomat's accusation Wednesday that Iran "is now either very near or in possession" of enough low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon. The diplomat, Glyn Davies, Washington's chief envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, said in a speech, "We have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear weapons option." He charged that Iran's continuing enrichment activity, in defiance of three U.N. Security Council resolutions, "moves Iran closer to a dangerous and destabilizing possible breakout capacity."
Samareh Hashemi charged in reply that the United States is allowing its position on the issue to be dictated by Israel. "This is the Israelis speaking; it's better that the Americans give their own opinion," he said.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Why not sanctions for Israel?
By Paul Craig Roberts
In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week Netanyahu called for “crippling sanctions” against Iran.
The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as an act of war. Israel has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but prefers to draw in the U.S. and NATO.
Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United States and Iran?
Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure?
No. These are crimes committed by Israel and the U.S.
Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have occupied for centuries and herding them into ghettoes?
No, that’s what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for 60 years.
What is Iran doing?
Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s nuclear energy program is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.
The position taken by Israel, and by Israel’s puppet in Washington, is that Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has, because Iran might divert enriched uranium to a weapons program.
In other words, Israel and the U.S. claim the right to abrogate Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/U.S. position has no basis in international law or in anything other than the arrogance of Israel and the United States.
The hypocrisy is extreme. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far as we know, U.S. help.
As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm.
Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another reason. It is an apartheid state, as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
The U.S. led the imposition of sanctions against South Africa because of South Africa’s apartheid practices. The sanctions forced the white government to hand over political power to the black population. Israel practices a worse form of apartheid than did the white South African government. Yet, Israel maintains that it is “anti-semitic” to criticize Israel for a practice that the world regards as abhorrent.
What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not been stolen by Israel consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut off from hospitals, schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot travel from one ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at checkpoints.
The Israeli government’s explanation for its gross violation of human rights comprises one of the greatest collection of lies in world history. No one, with the exception of American “Christian Zionists,” believes one word of it.
The United States also qualifies for crippling sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. is over-qualified. On the basis of lies and intentional deception of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. public, the UN and NATO, the U.S. government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and used the “war on terror” that Washington orchestrated to overturn U.S. civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America’s crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in ruins, and Iraq’s professional elites, necessary to a modern organized society, are dead or dispersed. The U.S. government has committed a war crime on a grand scale. If Iran qualifies for sanctions, the U.S. qualifies a thousand times over.
No one knows how many women, children, and village elders have been murdered by the U.S. in Afghanistan. However, the American war of aggression against the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According to the U.S. military, an American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August that the military situation in Afghanistan is “serious and deteriorating.”
Older Americans can look forward to the continuation of this war for the rest of their lives, while their Social Security and Medicare rights are reduced in order to free up funds for the U.S. armaments industry. Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe stock investment in the United States.
What is the purpose of the war of aggression against Afghanistan? Soon after his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide an answer but did not. Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million Pakistanis. Obama has sent 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan and already the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting 20,000 more.
Obama is escalating America’s war of aggression against the Afghanistan people despite three high profile opinion polls that show that the American public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan.
Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington to war against Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between the American public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party last Thursday for Israel’s military attache in Washington, who is returning to Israel to become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, and and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, were present to pay their respects. Admiral Mullen declared that the U.S. will always stand with Israel. No matter how many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how many women and children Israel murders. No matter how many Palestinians Israel drives from their homes, villages, and lands. If truth could be told, the true axis-of-evil is the United States and Israel.
Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures. Millions more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access to health care. Yet, the U.S. government continues to squander hundreds of billions of dollars on wars that serve no U.S. purpose. President Obama and General McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American public be damned.
It could not be made any clearer that the President of the United States and the U.S. military have no regard whatsoever for democracy, human rights, and international law. This is yet another reason to apply crippling sanctions against Washington, a government that has emerged under Bush/Obama as a brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war crimes, and deception.
Many governments are complicit in America’s war crimes. With Obama’s budget deep in the red, Washington’s wars of naked aggression are dependent on financing by the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, South Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The second this foreign financing of American war crimes stops, America’s wars of aggression against Muslims stop.
The U.S. is not a forever “superpower” that can indefinitely ignore its own laws and international law. The U.S. will eventually fall as a result of its hubris, arrogance, and imperial overreach. When the American Empire collapses, will its enablers also be held accountable in the war crimes court?
-- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.
In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week Netanyahu called for “crippling sanctions” against Iran.
The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as an act of war. Israel has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but prefers to draw in the U.S. and NATO.
Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United States and Iran?
Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure?
No. These are crimes committed by Israel and the U.S.
Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have occupied for centuries and herding them into ghettoes?
No, that’s what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for 60 years.
What is Iran doing?
Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s nuclear energy program is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.
The position taken by Israel, and by Israel’s puppet in Washington, is that Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has, because Iran might divert enriched uranium to a weapons program.
In other words, Israel and the U.S. claim the right to abrogate Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/U.S. position has no basis in international law or in anything other than the arrogance of Israel and the United States.
The hypocrisy is extreme. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far as we know, U.S. help.
As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm.
Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another reason. It is an apartheid state, as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
The U.S. led the imposition of sanctions against South Africa because of South Africa’s apartheid practices. The sanctions forced the white government to hand over political power to the black population. Israel practices a worse form of apartheid than did the white South African government. Yet, Israel maintains that it is “anti-semitic” to criticize Israel for a practice that the world regards as abhorrent.
What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not been stolen by Israel consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut off from hospitals, schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot travel from one ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at checkpoints.
The Israeli government’s explanation for its gross violation of human rights comprises one of the greatest collection of lies in world history. No one, with the exception of American “Christian Zionists,” believes one word of it.
The United States also qualifies for crippling sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. is over-qualified. On the basis of lies and intentional deception of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. public, the UN and NATO, the U.S. government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and used the “war on terror” that Washington orchestrated to overturn U.S. civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America’s crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in ruins, and Iraq’s professional elites, necessary to a modern organized society, are dead or dispersed. The U.S. government has committed a war crime on a grand scale. If Iran qualifies for sanctions, the U.S. qualifies a thousand times over.
No one knows how many women, children, and village elders have been murdered by the U.S. in Afghanistan. However, the American war of aggression against the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According to the U.S. military, an American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August that the military situation in Afghanistan is “serious and deteriorating.”
Older Americans can look forward to the continuation of this war for the rest of their lives, while their Social Security and Medicare rights are reduced in order to free up funds for the U.S. armaments industry. Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe stock investment in the United States.
What is the purpose of the war of aggression against Afghanistan? Soon after his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide an answer but did not. Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million Pakistanis. Obama has sent 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan and already the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting 20,000 more.
Obama is escalating America’s war of aggression against the Afghanistan people despite three high profile opinion polls that show that the American public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan.
Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington to war against Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between the American public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party last Thursday for Israel’s military attache in Washington, who is returning to Israel to become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, and and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, were present to pay their respects. Admiral Mullen declared that the U.S. will always stand with Israel. No matter how many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how many women and children Israel murders. No matter how many Palestinians Israel drives from their homes, villages, and lands. If truth could be told, the true axis-of-evil is the United States and Israel.
Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures. Millions more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access to health care. Yet, the U.S. government continues to squander hundreds of billions of dollars on wars that serve no U.S. purpose. President Obama and General McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American public be damned.
It could not be made any clearer that the President of the United States and the U.S. military have no regard whatsoever for democracy, human rights, and international law. This is yet another reason to apply crippling sanctions against Washington, a government that has emerged under Bush/Obama as a brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war crimes, and deception.
Many governments are complicit in America’s war crimes. With Obama’s budget deep in the red, Washington’s wars of naked aggression are dependent on financing by the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, South Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The second this foreign financing of American war crimes stops, America’s wars of aggression against Muslims stop.
The U.S. is not a forever “superpower” that can indefinitely ignore its own laws and international law. The U.S. will eventually fall as a result of its hubris, arrogance, and imperial overreach. When the American Empire collapses, will its enablers also be held accountable in the war crimes court?
-- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.
Israel 'understated' Gaza deaths
An Israeli human rights group says many more Palestinian civilians were killed in the Israeli military's campaign in Gaza than the army admits.
B'Tselem said detailed research with careful cross-checking showed 1,387 Palestinians died, over half of them civilians and 252 of them children.
This contradicts an Israeli army report stating fewer than 300 civilians died in fighting in December and January.
Israel launched the assault to halt rocket attacks from Hamas-run Gaza.
The overall B'Tselem total broadly tallies with the official Palestinian death toll and the findings of other non-governmental organisations, although the proportion of civilians it identifies is lower.
DIFFERENT DEATH TOLLS
Palestinians killed during Israeli military offensive in Gaza, 27 Dec to 18 Jan
Total dead: 1,387 (1,166)
Fighters: 330 (710-870)
Uniformed police: 248 (not counted by IDIRD)
Non-combatants: 773 (295-460)
Women: 109 (49)
Children under 16: 252 (89)
Sources: B'Tselem (and Israeli Defence Intelligence Research Dept)
The group says the extent of civilian deaths does not prove, in itself, that Israel violated the laws of war.
However, it says it raises grave concerns about the military's behaviour when taken in the context of "numerous testimonies" from troops and Palestinians.
Amnesty International has already accused Israel of committing war crimes during its offensive.
The Israeli army has admitted "rare mishaps" during the campaign but denies troops violated international humanitarian law.
'Serious introspection'
B'Tselem said the findings had been compiled during months of research, including visits to the families of those killed.
It said it was unable to compare its figures with the official Israeli ones because the military refused to provide its list of fatalities.
The group said the results should compel the Israeli government to launch an independent investigation into its three-week offensive.
The complexity of combat in a densely populated area against armed groups that use illegal means and find refuge within the civilian population... cannot legitimise such extensive harm to civilians by a state committed to the rule of law
B'Tselem statement
Earlier this year the Israeli army said that 1,166 Gazans were killed in the conflict, a quarter of whom were civilians.
Its figures indicated that the toll included 709 militants from Hamas and other groups, and 295 non-combatants.
According to B'Tselem, 1,387 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military, including 773 civilians, 300 combatants and 248 civilian police - whom Israeli officials classify as militants.
B'Tselem has counted 252 children under the age of 16 who were killed - the military puts that figure at 89 - and 109 women over 18.
"The extremely heavy civilian casualties and the massive damage to civilian property require serious introspection on the part of Israeli society," B'Tselem said, adding that it considered the army's internal probe insufficient.
The group acknowledged the challenges of combat in the densely crowded Gaza Strip, and criticised the "illegal and immoral actions" by Palestinian militants accused of hiding among the civilian population.
But this "cannot legitimise such extensive harm to civilians by a state committed to the rule of law", B'Tselem added.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the report, but has previously rejected such criticism.
It has said the aim of the campaign "was target the Hamas terror organisation and not citizens of the Gaza Strip".
B'Tselem said detailed research with careful cross-checking showed 1,387 Palestinians died, over half of them civilians and 252 of them children.
This contradicts an Israeli army report stating fewer than 300 civilians died in fighting in December and January.
Israel launched the assault to halt rocket attacks from Hamas-run Gaza.
The overall B'Tselem total broadly tallies with the official Palestinian death toll and the findings of other non-governmental organisations, although the proportion of civilians it identifies is lower.
DIFFERENT DEATH TOLLS
Palestinians killed during Israeli military offensive in Gaza, 27 Dec to 18 Jan
Total dead: 1,387 (1,166)
Fighters: 330 (710-870)
Uniformed police: 248 (not counted by IDIRD)
Non-combatants: 773 (295-460)
Women: 109 (49)
Children under 16: 252 (89)
Sources: B'Tselem (and Israeli Defence Intelligence Research Dept)
The group says the extent of civilian deaths does not prove, in itself, that Israel violated the laws of war.
However, it says it raises grave concerns about the military's behaviour when taken in the context of "numerous testimonies" from troops and Palestinians.
Amnesty International has already accused Israel of committing war crimes during its offensive.
The Israeli army has admitted "rare mishaps" during the campaign but denies troops violated international humanitarian law.
'Serious introspection'
B'Tselem said the findings had been compiled during months of research, including visits to the families of those killed.
It said it was unable to compare its figures with the official Israeli ones because the military refused to provide its list of fatalities.
The group said the results should compel the Israeli government to launch an independent investigation into its three-week offensive.
The complexity of combat in a densely populated area against armed groups that use illegal means and find refuge within the civilian population... cannot legitimise such extensive harm to civilians by a state committed to the rule of law
B'Tselem statement
Earlier this year the Israeli army said that 1,166 Gazans were killed in the conflict, a quarter of whom were civilians.
Its figures indicated that the toll included 709 militants from Hamas and other groups, and 295 non-combatants.
According to B'Tselem, 1,387 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military, including 773 civilians, 300 combatants and 248 civilian police - whom Israeli officials classify as militants.
B'Tselem has counted 252 children under the age of 16 who were killed - the military puts that figure at 89 - and 109 women over 18.
"The extremely heavy civilian casualties and the massive damage to civilian property require serious introspection on the part of Israeli society," B'Tselem said, adding that it considered the army's internal probe insufficient.
The group acknowledged the challenges of combat in the densely crowded Gaza Strip, and criticised the "illegal and immoral actions" by Palestinian militants accused of hiding among the civilian population.
But this "cannot legitimise such extensive harm to civilians by a state committed to the rule of law", B'Tselem added.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the report, but has previously rejected such criticism.
It has said the aim of the campaign "was target the Hamas terror organisation and not citizens of the Gaza Strip".
Monday, September 07, 2009
The true face of Zionist Judaism: The rise of Israel's military rabbis's
Katya Adler
BBC Newsnight, Israel
Israel's army is changing. Once proudly secular, its combat units are now filling with those who believe Israel's wars are "God's wars".
Military rabbis are becoming more powerful. Trained in warfare as well as religion, new army regulations mean they are now part of a military elite.
They graduate from officer's school and operate closely with military commanders. One of their main duties is to boost soldiers' morale and drive, even on the front line.
Israeli general warns of dangers of turning war into 'jihad'
This has caused quite some controversy in Israel. Should military motivation come from men of God, or from a belief in the state of Israel and keeping it safe?
The military rabbis rose to prominence during Israel's invasion of Gaza earlier this year.
Some of their activities raised troubling questions about political-religious influence in the military.
Gal Einav, a non-religious soldier said there was wall-to-wall religious rhetoric in the base, the barracks and on the battlefield.
As soon as soldiers signed for their rifles, he said, they were given a book of psalms.
And, as his company headed in to Gaza, he told me, they were flanked by a civilian rabbi on one side and a military rabbi on the other:
"It felt like a religious war. Like a crusade. It disturbed me. Religion and the army should be completely separate," he said.
'Sons of light'
But military rabbis, like Lieutenant Shmuel Kaufman, welcome the changes.
In previous wars rabbis had to stay far from the front, he says. In Gaza, they were ordered to accompany the fighters.
Lieutenant Shmuel Kaufman
Our job was to boost the fighting spirit of the soldiers. The eternal Jewish spirit from Bible times to the coming of the Messiah
Rabbi Kaufman
"Our job was to boost the fighting spirit of the soldiers. The eternal Jewish spirit from Bible times to the coming of the Messiah."
Before his unit went in to Gaza, Rabbi Kaufman said their commander told him to blow the ram's horn: "Like (biblical) Joshua when he conquered the land of Israel. It makes the war holier."
Rabbis handed out hundreds of religious pamphlets during the Gaza war.
When they came to light, they caused huge controversy in Israel. Some leaflets called Israeli soldiers the "sons of light" and Palestinians, the "sons of darkness".
Others compared the Palestinians to the Philistines, the bitter biblical enemy of the Jewish people.
Israel's military has distanced itself from the publications, but they carried the army's official stamp.
Still, army leaders insist their rabbis respect military ethics and put their private convictions aside. They say the same about the new wave of nationalist religious solders joining Israel's fighting forces.
'Religious duty'
I visited an orthodox Jewish seminary near Hebron in the West Bank. It is one of an increasing number of religious schools that encourage taking the Jewish Bible to the battlefield.
At the orthodox Jewish seminary near Hebron
The seminary is in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank
All students at the seminary choose to serve in Israel's combat units while statistics suggest less ideologically-driven Israelis are avoiding them. This has made headline news in Israel.
The 19-year-olds I spoke to at the seminary told me religious soldiers like them can make the army behave better and become "more moral".
They believe it is their religious duty to protect the citizens of Israel, the Jewish state. The Lord commands it, they said.
The students' seminary is built in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.
If President Barack Obama gets his way, Israel will eventually evacuate most settlements.
They are illegal under international law and Palestinians claim the territory as part of their future state. But for the religious soldiers the West Bank is part of land, given to the Jews by God.
Gal Einav thinks many soldiers will refuse to close settlements down.
The settlement issue could well tear the army apart, he told me, adding that most of his officers are settlers these days.
"If it comes to a clash between political orders from Israel's government and a contradictory message from the rabbis, settlers and religious right-wing soldiers will follow the rabbis," he said.
Threat of 'Jihad'
Israel's military leaders strongly disagree.
Brigadier General Eli Shermeister is the army's chief education officer.
Religious pamphlets
Pamphlets were handed out comparing Palestinians to the Philistines
He admits some mistakes were made in the past but says the right balance has now been found with the military rabbis.
He insists Israel's military commanders are the only ones in charge of the soldiers' spirit.
"The moral code of the Israel's army is clear. We judge soldiers in the light of this code. Nobody can create another moral code. [Certainly] not a religious one."
But Brig Gen Shermeister's predecessor describes what he sees as clear and worrying changes within the military.
According to Reserve Gen Nehemia Dagan, what is happening in the army is far more dangerous than most Israelis realise: "We (soldiers) used to be able to put aside our own ideas in order to do what we had to do. It didn't matter if we were religious or from a kibbutz. But that's not the case anymore.
"The morals of the battlefield cannot come from a religious authority. Once it does, it's Jihad. I know people will not like that word but that's what it is, Holy War. And once it's Holy War there are no limits."
Many religious Jews object to the type of preaching heard during Israel's recent Gaza operation.
They say it perverts the true teachings of Judaism as well as contradicts Israel's military code.
Day to day, Israel's army mainly operates in civilian areas - in Gaza, the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
Influences Israeli soldiers are exposed to are extremely significant.
The way they view Palestinians who live here is likely to affect the way they use their power and their weapons.
BBC Newsnight, Israel
Israel's army is changing. Once proudly secular, its combat units are now filling with those who believe Israel's wars are "God's wars".
Military rabbis are becoming more powerful. Trained in warfare as well as religion, new army regulations mean they are now part of a military elite.
They graduate from officer's school and operate closely with military commanders. One of their main duties is to boost soldiers' morale and drive, even on the front line.
Israeli general warns of dangers of turning war into 'jihad'
This has caused quite some controversy in Israel. Should military motivation come from men of God, or from a belief in the state of Israel and keeping it safe?
The military rabbis rose to prominence during Israel's invasion of Gaza earlier this year.
Some of their activities raised troubling questions about political-religious influence in the military.
Gal Einav, a non-religious soldier said there was wall-to-wall religious rhetoric in the base, the barracks and on the battlefield.
As soon as soldiers signed for their rifles, he said, they were given a book of psalms.
And, as his company headed in to Gaza, he told me, they were flanked by a civilian rabbi on one side and a military rabbi on the other:
"It felt like a religious war. Like a crusade. It disturbed me. Religion and the army should be completely separate," he said.
'Sons of light'
But military rabbis, like Lieutenant Shmuel Kaufman, welcome the changes.
In previous wars rabbis had to stay far from the front, he says. In Gaza, they were ordered to accompany the fighters.
Lieutenant Shmuel Kaufman
Our job was to boost the fighting spirit of the soldiers. The eternal Jewish spirit from Bible times to the coming of the Messiah
Rabbi Kaufman
"Our job was to boost the fighting spirit of the soldiers. The eternal Jewish spirit from Bible times to the coming of the Messiah."
Before his unit went in to Gaza, Rabbi Kaufman said their commander told him to blow the ram's horn: "Like (biblical) Joshua when he conquered the land of Israel. It makes the war holier."
Rabbis handed out hundreds of religious pamphlets during the Gaza war.
When they came to light, they caused huge controversy in Israel. Some leaflets called Israeli soldiers the "sons of light" and Palestinians, the "sons of darkness".
Others compared the Palestinians to the Philistines, the bitter biblical enemy of the Jewish people.
Israel's military has distanced itself from the publications, but they carried the army's official stamp.
Still, army leaders insist their rabbis respect military ethics and put their private convictions aside. They say the same about the new wave of nationalist religious solders joining Israel's fighting forces.
'Religious duty'
I visited an orthodox Jewish seminary near Hebron in the West Bank. It is one of an increasing number of religious schools that encourage taking the Jewish Bible to the battlefield.
At the orthodox Jewish seminary near Hebron
The seminary is in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank
All students at the seminary choose to serve in Israel's combat units while statistics suggest less ideologically-driven Israelis are avoiding them. This has made headline news in Israel.
The 19-year-olds I spoke to at the seminary told me religious soldiers like them can make the army behave better and become "more moral".
They believe it is their religious duty to protect the citizens of Israel, the Jewish state. The Lord commands it, they said.
The students' seminary is built in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.
If President Barack Obama gets his way, Israel will eventually evacuate most settlements.
They are illegal under international law and Palestinians claim the territory as part of their future state. But for the religious soldiers the West Bank is part of land, given to the Jews by God.
Gal Einav thinks many soldiers will refuse to close settlements down.
The settlement issue could well tear the army apart, he told me, adding that most of his officers are settlers these days.
"If it comes to a clash between political orders from Israel's government and a contradictory message from the rabbis, settlers and religious right-wing soldiers will follow the rabbis," he said.
Threat of 'Jihad'
Israel's military leaders strongly disagree.
Brigadier General Eli Shermeister is the army's chief education officer.
Religious pamphlets
Pamphlets were handed out comparing Palestinians to the Philistines
He admits some mistakes were made in the past but says the right balance has now been found with the military rabbis.
He insists Israel's military commanders are the only ones in charge of the soldiers' spirit.
"The moral code of the Israel's army is clear. We judge soldiers in the light of this code. Nobody can create another moral code. [Certainly] not a religious one."
But Brig Gen Shermeister's predecessor describes what he sees as clear and worrying changes within the military.
According to Reserve Gen Nehemia Dagan, what is happening in the army is far more dangerous than most Israelis realise: "We (soldiers) used to be able to put aside our own ideas in order to do what we had to do. It didn't matter if we were religious or from a kibbutz. But that's not the case anymore.
"The morals of the battlefield cannot come from a religious authority. Once it does, it's Jihad. I know people will not like that word but that's what it is, Holy War. And once it's Holy War there are no limits."
Many religious Jews object to the type of preaching heard during Israel's recent Gaza operation.
They say it perverts the true teachings of Judaism as well as contradicts Israel's military code.
Day to day, Israel's army mainly operates in civilian areas - in Gaza, the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
Influences Israeli soldiers are exposed to are extremely significant.
The way they view Palestinians who live here is likely to affect the way they use their power and their weapons.
Israel approves 366 new West Bank apartments
(AP) – 1 hour ago
JERUSALEM — Israel has officially approved construction of 366 new apartments in the West Bank.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday that he intends to soon approve about 84 more.
This the first new construction that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hawkish government has approved since taking office in March.
It has allowed Netanyahu to cement the support of a coalition that is committed to expanding Israel's borders into the West Bank.
But it has deepened an already unprecedented rift with the U.S. over Israeli settlement expansion.
Palestinians say they won't resume peace talks until settlement construction comes to a complete halt.
Washington's Mideast envoy is due in the region this week to try to bridge differences and get peace talks back on track.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
JERUSALEM — Israel has officially approved construction of 366 new apartments in the West Bank.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday that he intends to soon approve about 84 more.
This the first new construction that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hawkish government has approved since taking office in March.
It has allowed Netanyahu to cement the support of a coalition that is committed to expanding Israel's borders into the West Bank.
But it has deepened an already unprecedented rift with the U.S. over Israeli settlement expansion.
Palestinians say they won't resume peace talks until settlement construction comes to a complete halt.
Washington's Mideast envoy is due in the region this week to try to bridge differences and get peace talks back on track.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Israel Levels Land for Construction of 20 New West Bank Homes
By Gwen Ackerman
Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Israeli building contractors have begun leveling land in the West Bank settlement of Maskiyot ahead of the construction of 20 new homes intended for Israelis evacuated from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the council head said.
“Bulldozers have been at work there for a period of time,” said David Elhayani, head of the Jordan Valley Regional Council. The infrastructure work follows the approval of a May tender to prepare for the construction in Maskiyot, a settlement approved in July 2008.
Israel and the U.S. are in talks to bridge differences over Washington’s demand for a total freeze of construction in the West Bank that would clear the way for a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he won’t build new settlements, while continuing construction in existing communities.
“The work going on in Maskiyot is further evidence that all this talk of freezing settlements is virtual and in reality the settlers have nothing to worry about,” Yariv Oppenheimer, spokesman for the settlement monitoring group Peace Now, said in a phone interview. “Not one day will pass where there will be no construction work in the West Bank.”
A senior government official, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said Netanyahu has plans to approve hundreds of new housing starts in the West Bank that would precede agreement on a freeze in settlement construction. The U.S. is trying to broker a deal in an effort to renew peace talks, which includes steps by Arab states to normalize relations with Israel.
The daily Haaretz reported last week that the new construction would be added to 2,500 homes already being built in the West Bank.
EU Criticism
The European Union criticized the plans for a final burst of settlement construction ahead of a freeze and warned yesterday against throwing away a “window of opportunity” to restart the Middle East peace talks.
Talks with President Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell over a formula on the settlement issue are scheduled for later this week in Israel. Washington does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion, Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement on Sept. 4.
Netanyahu told ministers from his Likud party in a meeting today that he expected to reach an agreement with Mitchell on the settlement freeze this week, the Ynet news Web site said, without saying where it got the information.
Netanyahu told the ministers, some of whom strongly oppose a freeze, that construction of public buildings in West Bank communities would continue despite the moratorium on other building, Ynet said.
Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Israeli building contractors have begun leveling land in the West Bank settlement of Maskiyot ahead of the construction of 20 new homes intended for Israelis evacuated from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the council head said.
“Bulldozers have been at work there for a period of time,” said David Elhayani, head of the Jordan Valley Regional Council. The infrastructure work follows the approval of a May tender to prepare for the construction in Maskiyot, a settlement approved in July 2008.
Israel and the U.S. are in talks to bridge differences over Washington’s demand for a total freeze of construction in the West Bank that would clear the way for a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he won’t build new settlements, while continuing construction in existing communities.
“The work going on in Maskiyot is further evidence that all this talk of freezing settlements is virtual and in reality the settlers have nothing to worry about,” Yariv Oppenheimer, spokesman for the settlement monitoring group Peace Now, said in a phone interview. “Not one day will pass where there will be no construction work in the West Bank.”
A senior government official, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said Netanyahu has plans to approve hundreds of new housing starts in the West Bank that would precede agreement on a freeze in settlement construction. The U.S. is trying to broker a deal in an effort to renew peace talks, which includes steps by Arab states to normalize relations with Israel.
The daily Haaretz reported last week that the new construction would be added to 2,500 homes already being built in the West Bank.
EU Criticism
The European Union criticized the plans for a final burst of settlement construction ahead of a freeze and warned yesterday against throwing away a “window of opportunity” to restart the Middle East peace talks.
Talks with President Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell over a formula on the settlement issue are scheduled for later this week in Israel. Washington does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion, Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement on Sept. 4.
Netanyahu told ministers from his Likud party in a meeting today that he expected to reach an agreement with Mitchell on the settlement freeze this week, the Ynet news Web site said, without saying where it got the information.
Netanyahu told the ministers, some of whom strongly oppose a freeze, that construction of public buildings in West Bank communities would continue despite the moratorium on other building, Ynet said.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation
An Open Letter to the Toronto International Film Festival:
September 2, 2009
As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.
In 2008, the Israeli government and Canadian partners Sidney Greenberg of Astral Media, David Asper of Canwest Global Communications and Joel Reitman of MIJO Corporation launched “Brand Israel,” a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel. Brand Israel would take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its aggressive wars, and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. An article in Canadian Jewish News quotes Israeli consul general Amir Gissin as saying that Toronto would be the test city for a promotion that could then be deployed around the world. According to Gissin, the culmination of the campaign would be a major Israeli presence at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. (Andy Levy-Alzenkopf, “Brand Israel set to launch in GTA,” Canadian Jewish News, August 28, 2008.)
In 2009, TIFF announced that it would inaugurate its new City to City program with a focus on Tel Aviv. According to program notes by Festival co-director and City to City programmer Cameron Bailey, “The ten films in this year’s City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today’s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”
The emphasis on 'diversity' in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.
We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime.
This letter was drafted by the following ad hoc committee:
Udi Aloni, filmmaker, Israel; Elle Flanders, filmmaker, Canada; Richard Fung, video artist, Canada; John Greyson, filmmaker, Canada; Naomi Klein, writer and filmmaker, Canada; Kathy Wazana, filmmaker, Canada; Cynthia Wright, writer and academic, Canada; b h Yael, film and video artist, Canada
Endorsed by:
Ahmad Abdalla, Filmmaker, Egypt
Hany Abu-Assad, Filmmaker, Palestine
Mark Achbar, Filmmaker, Canada
Zackie Achmat, AIDS activist, South Africa
Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, Filmmaker, Jerusalem
Anthony Arnove, Publisher and Producer, USA
Ruba Atiyeh, Documentary Director, Lebanon
Joslyn Barnes, Writer and Producer, USA
John Berger, Author, France
Dionne Brand, Poet/Writer, Canada
Judith Butler, Professor, USA
David Byrne, Musician, USA
Guy Davidi Director, Israel
Na-iem Dollie, Journalist/Writer, South Africa
Igor Drljaca, Filmmaker, Canada
Eve Ensler, Playwright, Author, USA
Eyal Eithcowich, Director, Israel
Sophie Fiennes, Filmmaker, UK
Peter Fitting, Professor, Canada
Jane Fonda, Actor and Author, USA
Danny Glover, Filmmaker and Actor, USA
Noam Gonick, Director, Canada
Malcolm Guy, Filmmaker, Canada
Mike Hoolboom, Filmmaker, Canada
Annemarie Jacir, Filmmaker, Palestine
Fredric Jameson, Literary Critic, USA
Juliano Mer Khamis, Filmmaker, Jenin/Haifa
Bonnie Sherr Klein Filmmaker, Canada
Paul Laverty, Producer, UK
Min Sook Lee, Filmmaker, Canada
Paul Lee, Filmmaker, Canada
Yael Lerer, publisher, Tel Aviv
Jack Lewis, Filmmaker, South Africa
Ken Loach, Filmmaker, UK
Arab Lotfi, Filmmaker, Egypt/Lebanon
Kyo Maclear, Author, Toronto
Mahmood Mamdani, Professor, USA
Fatima Mawas, Filmmaker, Australia
Tessa McWatt, Author, Canada and UK
Cornelius Moore, Film Distributor, USA
Yousry Nasrallah, Director, Egypt
Rebecca O'Brien, Producer, UK
Pratibha Parmar, Producer/Director, UK
Jeremy Pikser, Screenwriter, USA
John Pilger, Filmmaker, UK
Shai Carmeli Pollak, Filmmaker, Israel
Ian Iqbal Rashid, Filmmaker, Canada
Judy Rebick, Professor, Canada
David Reeb, Artist, Tel Aviv
B. Ruby Rich, Critic and Professor, USA
Wallace Shawn, Playwright, Actor, USA
Eyal Sivan, Filmmaker and Scholar, Paris/London/Sderot
Elia Suleiman, Fimmlaker, Nazareth/Paris/New York
Eran Torbiner, Filmmaker, Israel
Alice Walker, Writer, USA
Thomas Waugh, Professor, Canada
Howard Zinn, Writer, USA
Slavoj Zizek, Professor, Slovenia
To add your name to this letter, please send your name, occupation and country to tiff.letter@gmail.com. We will accept signatures until September 8, 2009
For further reading on this issue:
Letter by Canadian filmmaker John Greyson on withdrawing his film from the Toronto International Film Festival in protest against City to City:
http://tiny.cc/tiff_open_letter
Response by TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey to Greyson’s withdrawal and this petition:
http://www.tiff.net/livefromthefestival/openlettercitytocity
Report in Israeli daily Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1110750.htmlspages/1110750.html
Report in Guardian newspaper, UK:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/sep/01/israel-palestine-boycott-film
Statement by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1085etemplate.php?id=1085
The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation
An Open Letter to the Toronto International Film Festival:
September 2, 2009
As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.
In 2008, the Israeli government and Canadian partners Sidney Greenberg of Astral Media, David Asper of Canwest Global Communications and Joel Reitman of MIJO Corporation launched “Brand Israel,” a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel. Brand Israel would take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its aggressive wars, and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. An article in Canadian Jewish News quotes Israeli consul general Amir Gissin as saying that Toronto would be the test city for a promotion that could then be deployed around the world. According to Gissin, the culmination of the campaign would be a major Israeli presence at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. (Andy Levy-Alzenkopf, “Brand Israel set to launch in GTA,” Canadian Jewish News, August 28, 2008.)
In 2009, TIFF announced that it would inaugurate its new City to City program with a focus on Tel Aviv. According to program notes by Festival co-director and City to City programmer Cameron Bailey, “The ten films in this year’s City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today’s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”
The emphasis on 'diversity' in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.
We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime.
This letter was drafted by the following ad hoc committee:
Udi Aloni, filmmaker, Israel; Elle Flanders, filmmaker, Canada; Richard Fung, video artist, Canada; John Greyson, filmmaker, Canada; Naomi Klein, writer and filmmaker, Canada; Kathy Wazana, filmmaker, Canada; Cynthia Wright, writer and academic, Canada; b h Yael, film and video artist, Canada
Endorsed by:
Ahmad Abdalla, Filmmaker, Egypt
Hany Abu-Assad, Filmmaker, Palestine
Mark Achbar, Filmmaker, Canada
Zackie Achmat, AIDS activist, South Africa
Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, Filmmaker, Jerusalem
Anthony Arnove, Publisher and Producer, USA
Ruba Atiyeh, Documentary Director, Lebanon
Joslyn Barnes, Writer and Producer, USA
John Berger, Author, France
Dionne Brand, Poet/Writer, Canada
Judith Butler, Professor, USA
David Byrne, Musician, USA
Guy Davidi Director, Israel
Na-iem Dollie, Journalist/Writer, South Africa
Igor Drljaca, Filmmaker, Canada
Eve Ensler, Playwright, Author, USA
Eyal Eithcowich, Director, Israel
Sophie Fiennes, Filmmaker, UK
Peter Fitting, Professor, Canada
Jane Fonda, Actor and Author, USA
Danny Glover, Filmmaker and Actor, USA
Noam Gonick, Director, Canada
Malcolm Guy, Filmmaker, Canada
Mike Hoolboom, Filmmaker, Canada
Annemarie Jacir, Filmmaker, Palestine
Fredric Jameson, Literary Critic, USA
Juliano Mer Khamis, Filmmaker, Jenin/Haifa
Bonnie Sherr Klein Filmmaker, Canada
Paul Laverty, Producer, UK
Min Sook Lee, Filmmaker, Canada
Paul Lee, Filmmaker, Canada
Yael Lerer, publisher, Tel Aviv
Jack Lewis, Filmmaker, South Africa
Ken Loach, Filmmaker, UK
Arab Lotfi, Filmmaker, Egypt/Lebanon
Kyo Maclear, Author, Toronto
Mahmood Mamdani, Professor, USA
Fatima Mawas, Filmmaker, Australia
Tessa McWatt, Author, Canada and UK
Cornelius Moore, Film Distributor, USA
Yousry Nasrallah, Director, Egypt
Rebecca O'Brien, Producer, UK
Pratibha Parmar, Producer/Director, UK
Jeremy Pikser, Screenwriter, USA
John Pilger, Filmmaker, UK
Shai Carmeli Pollak, Filmmaker, Israel
Ian Iqbal Rashid, Filmmaker, Canada
Judy Rebick, Professor, Canada
David Reeb, Artist, Tel Aviv
B. Ruby Rich, Critic and Professor, USA
Wallace Shawn, Playwright, Actor, USA
Eyal Sivan, Filmmaker and Scholar, Paris/London/Sderot
Elia Suleiman, Fimmlaker, Nazareth/Paris/New York
Eran Torbiner, Filmmaker, Israel
Alice Walker, Writer, USA
Thomas Waugh, Professor, Canada
Howard Zinn, Writer, USA
Slavoj Zizek, Professor, Slovenia
To add your name to this letter, please send your name, occupation and country to tiff.letter@gmail.com. We will accept signatures until September 8, 2009
For further reading on this issue:
Letter by Canadian filmmaker John Greyson on withdrawing his film from the Toronto International Film Festival in protest against City to City:
http://tiny.cc/tiff_open_letter
Response by TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey to Greyson’s withdrawal and this petition:
http://www.tiff.net/livefromthefestival/openlettercitytocity
Report in Israeli daily Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1110750.htmlspages/1110750.html
Report in Guardian newspaper, UK:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/sep/01/israel-palestine-boycott-film
Statement by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1085etemplate.php?id=1085
Friday, September 04, 2009
White House blasts Israeli plan to continue settlement construction
Alarmed by Israeli plans to build new housing units in settlements and dimming prospects for American peace efforts, the Obama administration on Friday put out a rare and harsh public rebuke of its main Mideast ally.
The White House said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's settlement plans were "inconsistent" with commitments the Jewish state has made previously and harmful to U.S. attempts to lay the groundwork for a resumption in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
"United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate."
Israeli plan for settlement building angers US
Israel said Friday it will construct hundreds of new housing units in West Bank settlements before any slowdown in building, an announcement that drew harsh criticism from Washington, which demands a complete settlement freeze as a prelude to renewing Mideast peace talks.
Israeli officials painted the move as a concession to the U.S. demand because it might bring a temporary halt to other construction. But since it would also mean building the new units and finishing some 2,500 others now under construction, it looked more like defiance than acquiescence.
Israel's proposal also does not include any freeze in building in east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians hope to make their future capital.
Peres: Palestinian state first, full peace later
Israeli President Shimon Peres, a longtime advocate of peace with the Palestinians, said Friday that a comprehensive settlement resolving the century-old dispute was not currently achievable.
He called instead for a Palestinian state under a provisional arrangement even without a formal peace deal.
"Israel has decided to make peace on the basis of two states - an Israeli state and a Palestinian state," he told the Ambrosetti Forum, a gathering of political and business leaders on the shores of Italy's Lake Como. "I would like that we do it in one step. Apparently we cannot do it in one step."
Israel PM: progress made with US on settlements
The Israeli and Palestinian leaders are likely to hold their first meeting in the coming weeks, both sides indicated Wednesday, in what would be an important step toward a formal resumption of peace talks and a key achievement for U.S. President Barack Obama.
The announcements came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held four hours of talks with Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, in London on Wednesday. Mitchell has been pressing Israel to halt construction of West Bank settlements as a confidence-building gesture toward the Palestinians.
Before the meeting, Netanyahu said he was making headway in defusing the unusually public disagreement with the Americans. Netanyahu has said he wants a compromise that would allow Israel to proceed with some settlement construction while at the same time restarting peace talks with the Palestinians.
Huckabee slams Obama in pro-settlement Israel visit
JERUSALEM — Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee slammed President Barack Obama's policies toward Israel on Monday in a visit here that underscored the tensions between the Obama administration and the Israeli government over Jewish settlements in what traditionally have been Palestinian areas.
Huckabee criticized the Obama administration's calls for ending such settlements and said Obama's position had only encouraged the Palestinian government not to negotiate with Israel.
More important than Huckabee's words, however, was where he chose to deliver them: at several controversial Jewish enclaves in the mostly Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, which both Israel and the Palestinian Authority claim.
By CLIFF CHURGIN
McClatchy Newspapers
JERUSALEM -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to approve the construction of hundreds of new homes in the occupied West Bank before he considers a freeze on building new Jewish settlements. The homes would be in addition to 2,500 houses that already are under construction in the West Bank.
The White House, which has called on Israel to halt all settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, swiftly responded Friday with an unusually blunt statement. "We regret the reports of Israel's plans to approve additional settlement construction," President Barack Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement.
"As the president has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop. We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate," the statement said.
Obama reportedly had been hoping to announce a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks when he travels to the United Nations later this month. The Israeli move appears to undercut that goal, although Netanyahu and his aides have been discussing curbs on future settlement activity with Obama's special envoy, former Maine Sen. George Mitchell.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has demanded that Israel halt all settlement construction as a precondition to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh condemned the announcement, calling it "part of a policy of maneuvering and waiting that has been going on for 15 years, and it is unacceptable."
Rudeineh told McClatchy Newspapers that he expects Israel to implement a complete settlement freeze, saying: "There should be a total freeze according to what Obama said."
An aide to Netanyahu, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly, said the Israeli leader would consider a settlement freeze, but he said that Netanyahu had made it clear that East Jerusalem was part of Israel and that he wouldn't limit construction in the city.
Mitchell has been trying to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, including discussions with Israel of a settlement freeze.
While there's been little official word about these negotiations, they've focused on issues such as the length of a settlement freeze and whether it includes "settlement blocs," areas inhabited by large numbers of settlers.
Officials in the previous Israeli government said the George W. Bush administration had agreed to continued construction in these blocs. Israel also has demanded that existing settlements be allowed to expand to account for natural population growth.
According to the aide to Netanyahu, the negotiations have progressed. "We're getting close," he said. He also said that Netanyahu had mentioned the need to allow normal life in the settlements to continue, which has been interpreted as code for continuing construction to accommodate what Israel calls "natural" population growth.
The negotiations include Obama's call for Arab countries to make goodwill gestures to Israel, such as granting Israeli airlines permission to fly over Arab nations. Qatar and Oman in the Persian Gulf reportedly have agreed to formal ties with Israel if it implements a settlement freeze.
According to the Netanyahu aide, the steps the Arab world is willing to take would affect Israel's actions in the West Bank. "There is no question that the more the Arab world shows that it is willing to take steps, the more flexibility Israel would be able to show on these issues," he said.
According to another senior Israeli official, Netanyahu's move is a message to Arab countries that Israel expects reciprocation for a settlement freeze: "My assumption is that it is a tactical move in the indirect negotiations with Arab governments, saying, 'I'm going to freeze, but if we don't get full satisfaction we have plans that are already approved.' "
The same official, who also asked not to be identified because of a lack of authority to speak publicly, noted that this move also could be aimed at internal Israeli opposition to a freeze, saying, "It can also be used to shut down home opposition."
The White House said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's settlement plans were "inconsistent" with commitments the Jewish state has made previously and harmful to U.S. attempts to lay the groundwork for a resumption in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
"United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate."
Israeli plan for settlement building angers US
Israel said Friday it will construct hundreds of new housing units in West Bank settlements before any slowdown in building, an announcement that drew harsh criticism from Washington, which demands a complete settlement freeze as a prelude to renewing Mideast peace talks.
Israeli officials painted the move as a concession to the U.S. demand because it might bring a temporary halt to other construction. But since it would also mean building the new units and finishing some 2,500 others now under construction, it looked more like defiance than acquiescence.
Israel's proposal also does not include any freeze in building in east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians hope to make their future capital.
Peres: Palestinian state first, full peace later
Israeli President Shimon Peres, a longtime advocate of peace with the Palestinians, said Friday that a comprehensive settlement resolving the century-old dispute was not currently achievable.
He called instead for a Palestinian state under a provisional arrangement even without a formal peace deal.
"Israel has decided to make peace on the basis of two states - an Israeli state and a Palestinian state," he told the Ambrosetti Forum, a gathering of political and business leaders on the shores of Italy's Lake Como. "I would like that we do it in one step. Apparently we cannot do it in one step."
Israel PM: progress made with US on settlements
The Israeli and Palestinian leaders are likely to hold their first meeting in the coming weeks, both sides indicated Wednesday, in what would be an important step toward a formal resumption of peace talks and a key achievement for U.S. President Barack Obama.
The announcements came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held four hours of talks with Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, in London on Wednesday. Mitchell has been pressing Israel to halt construction of West Bank settlements as a confidence-building gesture toward the Palestinians.
Before the meeting, Netanyahu said he was making headway in defusing the unusually public disagreement with the Americans. Netanyahu has said he wants a compromise that would allow Israel to proceed with some settlement construction while at the same time restarting peace talks with the Palestinians.
Huckabee slams Obama in pro-settlement Israel visit
JERUSALEM — Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee slammed President Barack Obama's policies toward Israel on Monday in a visit here that underscored the tensions between the Obama administration and the Israeli government over Jewish settlements in what traditionally have been Palestinian areas.
Huckabee criticized the Obama administration's calls for ending such settlements and said Obama's position had only encouraged the Palestinian government not to negotiate with Israel.
More important than Huckabee's words, however, was where he chose to deliver them: at several controversial Jewish enclaves in the mostly Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, which both Israel and the Palestinian Authority claim.
By CLIFF CHURGIN
McClatchy Newspapers
JERUSALEM -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to approve the construction of hundreds of new homes in the occupied West Bank before he considers a freeze on building new Jewish settlements. The homes would be in addition to 2,500 houses that already are under construction in the West Bank.
The White House, which has called on Israel to halt all settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, swiftly responded Friday with an unusually blunt statement. "We regret the reports of Israel's plans to approve additional settlement construction," President Barack Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement.
"As the president has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop. We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate," the statement said.
Obama reportedly had been hoping to announce a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks when he travels to the United Nations later this month. The Israeli move appears to undercut that goal, although Netanyahu and his aides have been discussing curbs on future settlement activity with Obama's special envoy, former Maine Sen. George Mitchell.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has demanded that Israel halt all settlement construction as a precondition to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh condemned the announcement, calling it "part of a policy of maneuvering and waiting that has been going on for 15 years, and it is unacceptable."
Rudeineh told McClatchy Newspapers that he expects Israel to implement a complete settlement freeze, saying: "There should be a total freeze according to what Obama said."
An aide to Netanyahu, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly, said the Israeli leader would consider a settlement freeze, but he said that Netanyahu had made it clear that East Jerusalem was part of Israel and that he wouldn't limit construction in the city.
Mitchell has been trying to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, including discussions with Israel of a settlement freeze.
While there's been little official word about these negotiations, they've focused on issues such as the length of a settlement freeze and whether it includes "settlement blocs," areas inhabited by large numbers of settlers.
Officials in the previous Israeli government said the George W. Bush administration had agreed to continued construction in these blocs. Israel also has demanded that existing settlements be allowed to expand to account for natural population growth.
According to the aide to Netanyahu, the negotiations have progressed. "We're getting close," he said. He also said that Netanyahu had mentioned the need to allow normal life in the settlements to continue, which has been interpreted as code for continuing construction to accommodate what Israel calls "natural" population growth.
The negotiations include Obama's call for Arab countries to make goodwill gestures to Israel, such as granting Israeli airlines permission to fly over Arab nations. Qatar and Oman in the Persian Gulf reportedly have agreed to formal ties with Israel if it implements a settlement freeze.
According to the Netanyahu aide, the steps the Arab world is willing to take would affect Israel's actions in the West Bank. "There is no question that the more the Arab world shows that it is willing to take steps, the more flexibility Israel would be able to show on these issues," he said.
According to another senior Israeli official, Netanyahu's move is a message to Arab countries that Israel expects reciprocation for a settlement freeze: "My assumption is that it is a tactical move in the indirect negotiations with Arab governments, saying, 'I'm going to freeze, but if we don't get full satisfaction we have plans that are already approved.' "
The same official, who also asked not to be identified because of a lack of authority to speak publicly, noted that this move also could be aimed at internal Israeli opposition to a freeze, saying, "It can also be used to shut down home opposition."
Netanyahu to allow new Israeli settler homes-aide
Fri Sep 4, 2009 5:14am EDT
By Ori Lewis
JERUSALEM, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will approve building new settler homes before considering a freeze that could lead to a resumption of peace talks with Palestinians, an aide said on Friday. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has been pressuring Israel to halt settlement construction, a major obstacle in stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, so it can announce a resumption of the negotiations later this month.
Netanyahu also is under pressure from many lawmakers in his rightist Likud party members to resist any freeze on settlement building in the occupied West Bank, land Palestinians want as part of a future state.
One of the more hardline Likud members, Danny Danon, told Israel Radio the party would not become a "rubber stamp" for Netanyahu's decisions and that they would resist any announcement on a settlement freeze.
The Netanyahu aide, who declined to be identified by name, said that after the several hundred housing units are authorised, the Israeli leader would be prepared to consider a moratorium on building, lasting a few months.
Israel is already building some 2,500 housing units at West Bank settlements that are in various stages of construction.
Palestinian officials say they will resume talks only if Israel stops all building within Jewish enclaves in the West Bank, in keeping with a 2003 U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan that also called on the Palestinians to rein in attacks on Israelis.
TOTAL HALT
Nabil Abu Rdainah, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said that peace talks, suspended since December, could not resume without an Israeli pledge to a total freeze of settlement building.
"The Palestinian ... and American position, calls for ... a settlement freeze, including 'natural growth.' A partial settlement freeze is not enough and there must be a commitment to the obligations of the peace process as stated by President Obama," Abu Rdainah told Reuters.
Obama has taken the public stance that Israel must halt all settlement activity under the "road map". Palestinians say settlements, built on land Israel occupied in a 1967 war, could deny them a viable state.
The United States is seeking to bridge the Israeli and Palestinian positions and persuade Arab states to take steps towards normalising relations with the Jewish state.
Obama's special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell this week met Netanyahu aides in New York to work to achieve an agreement to resume talks in time for an announcement at the U.N. General Assembly towards the end of September.
On Wednesday, Israel and the Palestinians held their highest-level talks since Netanyahu's government was inaugurated in March when Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom met Palestinian Economy Minister Bassem Khoury in Jerusalem to discuss economic issues.
A settlement deal would end the most serious rift in U.S.-Israeli relations in a decade but Netanyahu has so far resisted a complete construction moratorium, saying settlers were entitled to lead what he termed "normal lives".
(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah. Editing by Dominic Evans)
"Normal lives" means Israelis can keep building their settlements on Palestinian land taking more and more of it. "Palestine" for Palestinians is now down to less than 22% of what Palestine was before 1947.
By Ori Lewis
JERUSALEM, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will approve building new settler homes before considering a freeze that could lead to a resumption of peace talks with Palestinians, an aide said on Friday. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has been pressuring Israel to halt settlement construction, a major obstacle in stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, so it can announce a resumption of the negotiations later this month.
Netanyahu also is under pressure from many lawmakers in his rightist Likud party members to resist any freeze on settlement building in the occupied West Bank, land Palestinians want as part of a future state.
One of the more hardline Likud members, Danny Danon, told Israel Radio the party would not become a "rubber stamp" for Netanyahu's decisions and that they would resist any announcement on a settlement freeze.
The Netanyahu aide, who declined to be identified by name, said that after the several hundred housing units are authorised, the Israeli leader would be prepared to consider a moratorium on building, lasting a few months.
Israel is already building some 2,500 housing units at West Bank settlements that are in various stages of construction.
Palestinian officials say they will resume talks only if Israel stops all building within Jewish enclaves in the West Bank, in keeping with a 2003 U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan that also called on the Palestinians to rein in attacks on Israelis.
TOTAL HALT
Nabil Abu Rdainah, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said that peace talks, suspended since December, could not resume without an Israeli pledge to a total freeze of settlement building.
"The Palestinian ... and American position, calls for ... a settlement freeze, including 'natural growth.' A partial settlement freeze is not enough and there must be a commitment to the obligations of the peace process as stated by President Obama," Abu Rdainah told Reuters.
Obama has taken the public stance that Israel must halt all settlement activity under the "road map". Palestinians say settlements, built on land Israel occupied in a 1967 war, could deny them a viable state.
The United States is seeking to bridge the Israeli and Palestinian positions and persuade Arab states to take steps towards normalising relations with the Jewish state.
Obama's special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell this week met Netanyahu aides in New York to work to achieve an agreement to resume talks in time for an announcement at the U.N. General Assembly towards the end of September.
On Wednesday, Israel and the Palestinians held their highest-level talks since Netanyahu's government was inaugurated in March when Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom met Palestinian Economy Minister Bassem Khoury in Jerusalem to discuss economic issues.
A settlement deal would end the most serious rift in U.S.-Israeli relations in a decade but Netanyahu has so far resisted a complete construction moratorium, saying settlers were entitled to lead what he termed "normal lives".
(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah. Editing by Dominic Evans)
"Normal lives" means Israelis can keep building their settlements on Palestinian land taking more and more of it. "Palestine" for Palestinians is now down to less than 22% of what Palestine was before 1947.
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- Prophesy bearer for four religious traditions, revealer of Christ's Sword, revealer of Josephine bearing the Spirit of Christ, revealer of the identity of God, revealer of the Celestial Torah astro-theological code within the Bible. Celestial Torah Christian Theologian, Climax Civilization theorist and activist, Eco-Village Organizer, Master Psychedelic Artist, Inventor of the Next Big Thing in wearable tech, and always your Prophet-At-Large.