News Commentaries
Bending the Rules for Israel
By NADIA HIJAB May 11th 2010
Israel’s inexorable accession to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development country club — is set to be confirmed this month barring last-minute hitches. Although several OECD members have doubts about Israel’s qualifications both on technical grounds and lack of shared values, no state has dared publicly oppose.
http://www.counterpunch.org/hijab05112010.html
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The new McCarthyism sweeping Israel
To disagree with the state is to ‘delegitimise’ the state: that is the increasingly strident response of the country’s political and military establishment to those who dare to criticise its conduct
By Donald Macintyre 13th Feb. 2010
Ms Chazan cites the arrests of Israelis at demonstrations against the encroachment of Jewish settlers in the Arab East Jerusalem district of Sheikh Jarrah.
“There is an assault on the basics of law and order but most important I see this as part of a very pernicious attempt to stifle alternative voices, and most seriously to equate criticism with betrayal. And there is a very strong political underpinning to that. I would go further … behind this [is] a group of people who don’t want a political settlement. They don’t want peace, so they’re trying to delegitimise the human rights movement.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-new-mccarthyism-sweeping-israel-1898156.html
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Distorting the Basic Law
Apartheid at the Israeli High Court
By URI WEISS 28 Jan 2010
In 1992 the Knesset enacted Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. This basic law speaks clearly about human dignity. It states explicitly: “All persons are entitled to protection of their life, body and dignity”.
However, for 17 years Israel’s Supreme Court has been regarding basic laws as currently irrelevant for granting constitutional protection to the Palestinians.
Thus, contrary to the common view, the Supreme Court has not only exercised a tight-fist policy in protecting Palestinians from violations carried out by the other Israeli branches of power, it has also exacerbated these violations, through its “legal activism” approach, denying Palestinians protection granted by the Israeli parliament.
http://www.counterpunch.org/weiss01282010.html
……………………………………………………………………………………………………… Arab Politicians Face Tide of Persecution
Israel is Criminalizing Dissent
By JONATHAN COOK 2nd Feb 2009
Leaders of the Arab minority in Israel warned this week that they were facing an unprecedented campaign of persecution, backed by the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, designed to stop their political activities.
Read more…http://www.counterpunch.org/cook02022010.html
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Israel: One law for all?
In 1948, Israel’s founding fathers issued a manifesto declaring among other things that the new state would uphold the equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race or creed.
Six decades later that is not a principal that many of Israel’s Arab citizens – who make up about 20 per cent of the population – believe applies to them, especially in matters involving law and order.
See the report and video showing Israeli Arabs are regularly victims of legal double standards:
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/01/20101111262174336.html
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Alan Hart – Israel’s right or not to exist – The facts and truth
By Alan Hart*
According to history as written by the winner, Zionism, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is propaganda nonsense.
In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
Read the full article:
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Hamas leader interview (published 17th Sept. 2009)
In a world exclusive, Ken Livingstone discusses religion, violence and the chances for peace with the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal
The key to peace in the Middle East is restoration of international law and the recognition of the right of both Palestinians and Israeli Jews to live in peace and security side by side. As President Obama says, there is no peace process today. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, continues to extend illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and maintain a near-complete blockade of Gaza. Palestinians fire ineffectual rockets into Israel. Israel regularly attacks Palestinian territories with modern weapons.
Read more: http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2009/09/israel-palestinian-hamas
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Settler Colonialism
Return to the Middle Ages
By BOUTHAINA SHAABAN
November 2, 2009
When you read a news story saying that “the United Nations called on Israel to stop demolishing Palestinian homes and put an end to the policy of forced evictions in East Jerusalem, warning that there are 60,000 Palestinians threatened of becoming homeless,” you cannot but wonder about the role of the international organization today and about the goal for which it was created on the eve of the victory of the forces of freedom against Nazism and Fascism and whether it is the same organization authorized by history and the world’s peoples to guarantee the right to ‘self determination’? Is it the same organization charged with “putting an end to colonialism”? Is it the same organization which believes in the right of all peoples to freedom without discrimination in terms of race or religion? If it is the same organization, why does it allow Palestinian civilians suffer from the brutality of armed settlers?
Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/shaaban11022009.html
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Lieberman, the EUIAA and Settlements. by Anne Candlin (LFoP)
Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is not pleased by the EU’s decision to suspend the upgrade of the EUIAA. The EU suspended the upgrade of the trading agreement with Israel because of Israel’s attack on Gaza and because Israel was under investigation for war crimes. More recently, EU Commissioner for External Affairs, Benita Ferrero -Waldner announced that any upgrade will be dependent on the Netanyahu administrations’ willingness to negotiate peace with the Palestinians on the basis of a two- state solution. In response to her announcement, Lieberman, who does not want a Palestinian state, threatened to expel the EU from the Quartet – and sack them from further ‘peace’ negotiations. The meeting arranged between Israel and the EU on May 18th to discuss the update was cancelled and has been re-scheduled for June 15th.
Lieberman is known for his advocacy of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. He lives in a settlement himself and regards the settlements not as stolen Palestinian land, but as legimate Israeli Jewish territory. He has advocated the transfer of the Arab population of Israel to Palestinian Authority control, the cantonisation of the West Bank (which has been acheived) and the execution of any Arab member of the Knesset who meets with Hamas.
Although official policy of the EU has been to accept those UN resolutions which define settlements in E.Jerusalem and in the W.Bank as illegal, the divisive thinking in the EU has been highlighted by the action of its’ Czech president. When Benita Ferrero-Waldner asked for the suspension of the EUIAA upgrade, the Czech president of the EU, distancing himself from Ferrero-Waldner, went off to Israel to express his support for the Israeli government. Like Lieberman, he declared his opinion that the settlements were a legitimate part of Israel. As EU President, he is meant to represent EU policy not his own opinions: his unilateral action was quite inconsistent with declared EU policy.
Lieberman is well-aware of this split in the EU and this week has been busy visiting European states which are pro-Israel: Germany, Italy, France, the Czech Republic and, on Wed 14th May, the UK, where he is scheduled to meet David Milliband in London. His purpose is to drum up support in the EU to end the suspension of the EUIAA upgrade and also for the EU to “normalise” the settlements.
Letters to MEPs and EU Comissioners are vitally important at this moment. There is a small “window” of time when, under the Czech presidency and a new Parliament, the upgrade could be pushed through. We must try to make sure that this does not happen. Please write to your MEPs, David Milliband, and to Benita Ferrero-Waldner to stress that you do not want the upgrade of the EUIAA to take place until Israel complies with International Law and that on no account must Israel’s illegal settlements be normalised.
See TAKE ACTION page for what you can do and sample letter
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EMPTY PLEDGES
If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
Carl Shurz – US politician (1829 – 1906)
Why should the Arabs hope for anything new from the new US president with regard to Palestine, having agreed so enthusiastically to Bush’s roadmap and having fixed their demands on Israel’s fulfilling its obligations under the plan after the Palestinians had carried out theirs? That they should not hope for much was clearly demonstrated during the war on Gaza. The Palestinian Authority (PA) on the West Bank not only repressed the resistance forces, but it also clamped down on peaceful demonstrations of solidarity with the people in Gaza. By so doing, the PA argued, the Palestinians would be in a position to insist that Israel meet its obligations under the roadmap because they were demonstrating their commitment to the destruction of terrorist infrastructure. The Arabs applauded Bush’s vision, and today they are applauding Obama’s. Bush envisioned a Palestinian state before the end of his term. Why expect anything from Obama, who has made exactly the same pledge?
From Cairo With Love
Azmi Bishara, Palestinian intellectual and exiled former MK
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Israeli defence depends on attacking the messenger
by Alan Philps 17th September 09
When Judge Richard Goldstone was appointed in April to lead a United Nations inquiry into Israel’s war in Gaza, some of the first reports noted with approval his closeness to Israel. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency pointed out that he was a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Others reported that the judge’s daughter speaks fluent Hebrew.
Now that Judge Goldstone’s 574-page report, highly critical of Israel and Hamas, has been published, the tone has changed. The internet is filled with lurid denunciations of him as a “self-hating Jew” who “should go back to South Africa.” The government of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which refused to co-operate with the inquiry, dismissed his report as a “kangaroo court” – harsh words for the work of one of the world’s most celebrated jurists.
Read More: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090918/OPINION/709179888/1080
Related article:
Robert Fisk’s World: Israel should pay attention to criticism from its own people
They wouldn’t accept that the casualties of this war were disproportionate
Saturday, 26 September 2009
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Israel’s racist policy on intermarriage- Jonathan Cook in Nazareth. 7th Sept 09
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews – “Lost” American Youth Urged to Come to Israel
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Israel’s war on Palestine —Brian Cloughley 3rd Sept 09
Israel’s war on the Palestinians will continue with the support of Washington. Obama is a good, decent man. But with enemies like AIPAC and its Congressional pawns, he hasn’t a hope of achieving justice for Palestinians in the occupied territories of their own country
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009%5C09%5C03%5Cstory_3-9-2009_pg3_2
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Story Puts Israeli Government in Frenzied Denial Mode
Israeli Bodysnatchers By Bouthaina Shaaban 31st Aug 09
The investigative report written by Swedish journalist Donald Boström and published in Sweden’s largest newspaper Aftonbladet about Israeli occupation forces killing Palestinians with the objective of stealing their organs has raised a political and media storm in Israel, disclosing up a horrible crime perpetrated for years under the full gaze of the ‘free’ world. These criminal acts began in 1992 when Palestinians started to witness a sharp rise in the number of young Palestinians disappearing and of bodies of Palestinians killed by occupation forces being returned with organs such as hearts, kidneys, livers and eyes missing.
http://www.counterpunch.org/shaaban08312009.html
See also: Israeli Organ Harvesting by Alison Weir
http://www.counterpunch.org/weir08282009.html
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Netanyahu’s “Peace” Plan
Ethnic Cleansing as State Policy
By NICOLA NASSER July 2nd 2009
In his speech at Bar Ilan University on June 14, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a new Israeli “peace plan,” with preconditions that a Palestinian negotiator must first meet before he would “promptly” engage in “unconditional” bilateral talks to meet an international consensus demanding the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. His preconditions added to the fourteen conditions the former Israeli government of comatose Ariel Sharon attached to Israel’s adoption in grudge of the 2003 Road Map blueprint for peace with the Palestinian side, on the basis of which the U.S. administration of President Barak Obama and his presidential envoy George Mitchell are now urging an early resumption of “immediate” Israeli – Palestinian peace talks, which Mitchell on June 26 hoped “very much to conclude this phase of the discussions and to be able to move into meaningful and productive negotiations in the near future.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/nasser07022009.html
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Natural Growth: Israel’s Demographic Hogwash
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY June 8th 2009
President Barack Obama has put Israel and its wholly-owned subsidiaries in the American press in uproar by demanding that Israel halt its policy of settlement growth in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the now infamous “natural growth.” He has posited this as a condition for a peace process that results in what is called the two-state solution. ….
To illustrate the depths of the mindlessness now shaping debate, let us set aside the obvious: “Natural growth” is a red herring because (1) all settlements are illegal under international law and (2) a two-state solution can not possibly succeed unless the Palestinian state on the West Bank is a coherent geographical entity, with at least one border open to a country other than Israel. Both of these conditions imply Israel must tear down its illegal separation wall, close down the hundreds of illegal checkpoints that strangle free movement of Palestinians in the West Bank, shut down all the illegal Israeli-only access roads that carve the West Bank into isolated Bantustans, and roll back its existing settlements to a point where Palestinian territory in the West Bank approximates that of the status quo ante on June 4, 1967. Yet now the debate has been joined over the question of natural growth? http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney06082009.html
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Israeli Doctors Collude in Torture
By JONATHAN COOK June 30, 2009
Israel’s watchdog body on medical ethics has failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are turning a blind eye to cases of torture, so Israeli human rights groups charge.
The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care…. http://www.counterpunch.org/cook06302009.html
New By-Law in Israeli Town Designed to Bar Arab Couple
Israeli Loyalty Oaths
By JONATHAN COOK June 8, 2009 http://www.counterpunch.org/cook06082009.html
The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire
The Wages of Hubris and Vengeance
By ARNO J. MAYER June 4 2009 http://www.counterpunch.org/mayer06042009.html
Israel’s war on dissent
Rela Mazali, The Electronic Intifada, 5 May 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10509.shtml
An Open Letter to Barack Obama from a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid
By MAIREAD MAQUIRE
http://www.counterpunch.org/maguire05012009.html
The Emperor’s Old Clothes
Netanyahu’s Plan
By URI AVNERY May 5th
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery05052009.html
Or course, Netanyahu has a plan. It consists of one word, which he learned from his mentor, Yitzhak Shamir: “NO”. Or, more precisely, NO NO NO – the three no’s of the Israeli Khartoum: No peace, No withdrawal, No negotiations. (It will be remembered that the 1967 Arab summit conference in Khartoum, right after the Six-day War, adopted a similar resolution.)
The “plan” which he is working on does not really concern the essence of this policy, but only the packaging. How to present to Obama something that will not sound like “no”, but rather like “yes, but”. Something that all the serfs of the Israeli lobby in Congress and the media can swallow painlessly.
One State- The OnlyPath to a Middle East Picnic? John Goekler April 30th 2009 http://www.counterpunch.org/goekler04302009.html
Sustaining global solidarity after Gaza
Jamal Juma’, The Electronic Intifada, 3 March 2009 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10363.shtml
This time, anger flared up by Israel’s latest attack is being channeled into a sustained campaign. (Matthew Cassel)
Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State
If Hamas Did Not Exist
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN – Jan 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein01012009.html
Israel’s Lies
Henry Siegman Jan 09
Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’
*It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.
When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’.
Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule.
In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots.
When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network. . . . .
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further.
Read further from this Jewish academic…http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n02/sieg01_.html
