“Our research showed that the checks conducted by El Al at foreign airports had all the hallmarks of Shin Bet interrogations,” said Mohammed Zeidan, the director of the Human Rights Association. “Usually the questions were less about the safety of the flight and more aimed at gathering information on the political activities or sympathies of the passengers.”
International Law
“To the best of my knowledge, there’s probably no other country in the world… which is subject to such an intrusive regime of aerial surveillance,” UN special envoy for Lebanon Michael Williams said this month.
Israeli Occupation Forces have escalated their systematic campaign against Palestinian civilian construction activities… Areas classified as Areas C in the West Bank are currently subjected to extensive Israeli campaigns aimed at undermining the Palestinian presence. Israel is also expanding construction activities in settlements and the annexation of new areas of Palestinian lands in Area C, including occupied East Jerusalem and its surroundings.
[Lacking] the most essential elements of statehood: independence and sovereignty, and effective control over its territory… A Palestinian state that is recognised under these circumstances, with its territory partitioned, and subdivided into cantons, surrounded by walls, fences, ditches, watchtowers, and barbed wire, would scarcely be a state worthy of the name.
“I would suggest that time has come for Israel to look at the allegations not only of the killing and injuring of so many civilians but also the collective punishment meted out to the people of Gaza by the substantial destruction of the infrastructure, and particularly the food infrastructure of Gaza. The debate should continue, not attempt to be silenced.”
Burin resident discovers 97 of his olive trees destroyed overnight. ‘When I saw the massacre which took place on my land, I cried.’
IOA Editor: Twenty first century Jewish cossacks continue to carry out pogroms against Palestinian farmers. (For the urban version, see Ellen Cantarow’s “Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape.”) This is nothing short of a state-sponsored ethnic-cleansing campaign designed to rid “Judea and Samaria” of its Palestinian inhabitants so as to make room for the ever-expanding Jewish State.
It has been five years since the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel should cease construction, dismantle the wall, and pay reparations to affected Palestinians. But the “Separation Barrier” is now 400 km, double its length at the time of the court ruling.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserted in January 2009, “We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation. Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing.”
Mr. Ban called on Israel to “cease such provocative actions,” and to implement its commitments under the Road Map peace plan by freezing all settlement activity, including natural growth; dismantling outposts; and reopening Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem.
Goldstone’s standing in the world will only rise as a consequence of Israel’s short-sighted attempts to discredit the man, the report and the facts. That our own government has chosen to join in this unworthy exercise should be a source of deep embarrassment and shame.
[South African lawyers] want to investigate South African citizens who may have fought for the Israeli army during the war on Gaza in December and January, with a view to prosecuting them on South African soil for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
I fully respect the right of the US Congress to examine and judge my mission and the resulting report, as well as to make its recommendations to the US Executive branch of government. However, I have strong reservations about the text of the resolution in question – text that includes serious factual inaccuracies and instances where information and statements are taken grossly out of context.
Israeli authorities are increasingly targeting and intimidating non-violent Palestinian grassroots activists involved in anti-occupation activities who are drawing increased support from the international community.
Wikipedia’s important review of Israel’s military free-range killing doctrine: a proposed and approved strategy under which “Israel finally realizes that Arabs should be accountable for their leaders’ acts”.
It was the sixth known forced return to Gaza of Palestinians stopped at [this] checkpoint… in 10 days, according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha. Israel has also been preventing family reunifications in the West Bank for Palestinians with relatives living in Gaza, in effect forcing people to relocate to the Strip. The steps are part of an Israeli policy of treating Gaza and the West Bank as two separate entities, thereby undermining the coherence of Palestinian claims for a state encompassing both territories. The 1993 Oslo agreement stipulates that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are to be treated as one territorial unit.
Attorney Daniel Machover from London is one of the best known figures in the international group of lawyers and pro-Palestinian activists trying to put IDF officers on trial in European countries for alleged war crimes… Anyone surprised by the activities of the Israeli-born lawyer does not know his family history. His parents, radical left-wing activists, left Israel in 1968… His father, Moshe Machover, was… one of the founders of the Matzpen movement.
“Israel is transparent,” Ya’alon said. “The IDF has recently conducted five serious probes, the criminal investigation division opened an investigation into credit card theft. There is a team that will respond to the report without having to stop the army in order to do so.”
IOA Editor: Israel’s most transparent liar. Will not stop “the army,” but will he be stopped by by global activists?
I want to know how and why it was decided to embark on Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip and to expand it into a ground offensive… I want to know if those who gave orders to the Israel Defense Forces assumed that hundreds of Palestinian civilians would be killed, and how they tried to prevent this.
A country’s conditions do not remove its obligations under international law… Whether a state is an aggressor or acting in self-defense, whether it faces a regular army or insurgents that commit abuses, the laws of war apply, imposing a duty to minimize civilian harm. And being a democratic country prevents Israel from committing wartime abuses no more than it stopped the United States from torture and unlawful detentions at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Human rights lawyers and pro-Palestinian activists in a number of European countries hold lists with names of Israel Defense Forces soldiers allegedly linked to war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. Existing legislation enables arrest warrants to be issued against these officers if they enter those countries.
Richard Goldstone responds to Israel: “In Gaza, I was surprised and shocked by the destruction and misery there. I had not expected it. I did not anticipate that the IDF would have targeted civilians and civilian objects. I did not anticipate seeing the vast destruction of the economic infrastructure of Gaza including its agricultural lands, industrial factories, water supply and sanitation works. These are not military targets.”
Cast Lead is what is bringing down Israel’s standing, not the reports written in its wake. Those are intended to prevent another Cast Lead, of the kind that the Goldas monstrously characterize as creating “an infrastructure of stability.” Nearly 1,400 were killed and tens of thousands were maimed and left homeless for an “infrastructure of stability,” which is neither an infrastructure nor stable.
Israeli authorities are planning to demolish 150 Palestinian houses, home to about 1,000 people in East Jerusalem, according to a new report from the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights… [This figure does] not include another 125 houses and apartments whose owners were given demolition orders.
While Israel often accuses Palestinians of misusing ambulances as cover for attacks, a new report from the country’s second-largest newspaper suggests Israel may want to clean up its own house.
[British Ambassador to the UN said that] he supports the findings of the Goldstone commission, and called for both Israel and the Palestinians to investigate its conclusions… The [Israeli] Foreign Ministry convened an emergency meeting in light of Sawer’s comments, and told ministers not to issue any official response.
Sahar Francis, a Palestinian Israeli human rights lawyer: [T]he US and Israel, in the name of peace, were actually trying to push the point that any kind of accountability measures against Israel will affect negotiations. But how can you reach peace without giving justice to the people?
After years of total disdain for the international community, of violating laws and treaties while Israeli legal experts turn into a kind of public defense counsel for our generals, there are finally members of the military elite who can no longer travel to Switzerland to ski, or to the opera in Covent Garden, or to a high-tech exhibition in Spain, without first consulting their lawyers. And that’s a good thing.
In a single phone call to his man in Geneva, Mahmoud Abbas has demonstrated his disregard for popular action, and his lack of faith in its accumulative power and the place of mass movements in processes of change.
Ya’alon was asked to attend the dinner by the British branch of the Jewish National Fund.
IOA Editor: Ya’alon is the former IDF chief of staff and a life-long career officer who, in different capacities – including the commanding officer of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank during the Second Intifada – was responsible for the death of possibly thousands of innocent Palestinians.
The Jewish National Fund, which predates Israel’s existence, is the foremost national institution responsible for the acquisition of lands, ultimately bearing a significant part of the responsibility for the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
There couldn’t be a more deserving person, or institution, to stand before the International Criminal Court.
See also Tiptoeing between lawsuits: Senior officials stay in Israel
Amnesty, HRW: US intervention to quash a vote on the report “obliges the United States and other governments blocking action at the council to press Israel and Hamas to commence credible investigations.”
The wounds of Gaza have not yet healed, the debris has not yet been cleared and the housing there has not yet been rehabilitated. Israel has also not been rehabilitated. It still insists that everything went as it should have. But cracks are now appearing. There is something cynical and depressing about the fact that it is happening only after Israeli leaders started to fear for their personal fates. Now it may be hoped that Goldstone, the United Nations and the world will not give in.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: “I lend my full support to Justice Goldstone’s report and its recommendations. I fully agree with him that the prevailing impunity for human rights violations in the Middle East conflict must end.”
The cases arise out of three incidents where the Israeli army entered Palestinian villages in the middle of the night and rounded up children en masse, accusing them of throwing stones at the Wall and settler by-pass roads in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Israel has warned the Palestinian Authority that it would condition permission for a second cellular telephone provider to operate in the West Bank – an economic issue of critical importance to the PA leadership – on the Palestinians withdrawing their request at the International Court.
