Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
While Israeli soldiers can’t fight in the war in Afghanistan, Israeli drones can. Starting next week, five NATO member countries will be operating unmanned aerial vehicles produced in the Jewish state in anti-Taliban operations in the Central Asian country.
IOA Editor: Controlling the Third World, remotely.
The Sheikh Jarrah vigils started as an avowedly political act – an outcry against a system which allows Jews to reclaim property held in east Jerusalem prior to 1948, but prohibits Palestinians from doing the same in west Jerusalem… Silencing the drums of Sheikh Jarrah is akin to eroding the pillars of Israel’s freedom.
IOA Editor: Written from an Israeli-centric perspective, this commentary supports citizens’ right to protest. But it overlooks a 61-year long reality where the “pillars of Israel’s freedom” never applied to Israel’s Palestinian citizens. And, no country running a four-decade long violent colonial occupation project can make any claims to “freedom.”
Israel will maintain a security presence along the eastern border of a future Palestinian state in order to prevent weapons smuggling, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday.
IOA Editor: This is part of the on-going Israeli snow-job, underway for years now: talking about the borders of the “future Palestinian state” while overwhelming the land of such conceptual state with Jewish settlements and urban neighborhoods thereby assuring that it can never materialize. The “rockets and missiles” excuse is particularly vacuous in that such missiles can be fired into Israel across far greater distances.
[I]n 1948, the Israelis wanted to create a state without Palestinians, and they almost succeeded in driving them out. In 1967, their victory reunited the refugees with those who had remained in Israel. We were scattered, they brought us back together. The Israelis are sowing their own failure by their success. The colonization of Jerusalem and the West Bank, which makes impossible a two-state solution, will force Israel to live with a sizable Arab population and to reconsider its democratic system.
IOA Editor: Sari Nusseibeh has long advocated the Two-State solution. After decades of relentless Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank, he now sees it as a near-impossibility.
Amira Hass: The Interior Ministry has stopped granting work permits to foreign nationals working in most international nongovernmental organizations operating in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, Haaretz has learned.
IOA Editor: This is part of a broader clamp down on non-violent Occupation-resistance activities in the West Bank that has taken place in the past few months. It includes a systematic campaign to arrest Palestinian and Israeli protesters (e.g., in Bil’in, Ni’ilin, Sheikh Jarrah), to expel or prevent entry to journalists, and now to limit visa and work permits to international aid organizations. All the while, Gaza remains under a tight siege controlled by both Israel and Egypt, with US approval.
The clamp down is now mentioned in mainstream US media. The “only democracy in the Middle East” is finally getting less than favorable press, after it illegally “detained the leader of a leading Israeli human rights group during a vigil against the eviction of Palestinian families whose homes were taken by Jewish settlers.” See AP report in the Washington Post: Israel accused of silencing political protest
[A]s far as the Middle East is concerned, Mrs. Merkel has paid scant attention to the miserable living conditions of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Israel’s settlements and detention policies. German legislators and analysts say that of all chancellors of the postwar period, Mrs. Merkel is considered the most pro-Israeli. “The chancellor is particularly close to Israel.”
Analysts say it is no surprise that the main effort to restore the relationship is coming from the two militaries, which have formed its bedrock ever since the alliance was formed in the mid-1990s… Israel and Turkey signed more than 20 military agreements in the 1990s. One called for four joint air force training sessions a year in each country. The two navies participated in joint exercises and staff officers collaborated on war-game simulations…
IOA Editor: In addition to being an important Israeli military industries’ customer and a strategic military partner, Turkey also provides the “Northern Route” alternative for an Israeli air-force attack on Iran, which is not mentioned in this WSJ article. See Anthony Cordesman and Abdullah Toukan’s Israeli attack on Iran: A Study of Options and Consequences
“Whereas the bulk of the (Goldstone) report addressed violations by Israel, the occupying power, it also considered violations by Palestinian armed groups and the Palestinian authorities in Gaza and the West Bank… We urge you to immediately take clear and public steps toward holding to account all those who prove to be responsible for the violations detailed in the report”
A few days before Israeli physicians rushed to save the lives of injured Haitians, the authorities at the Erez checkpoint prevented 17 people from passing through in order to get to a Ramallah hospital for urgent corneal transplant surgery… So what if the Goldstone Commission demanded that Israel lift the blockade on the Strip and end the collective punishment of its inhabitants? Only those who hate Israel could use frontier justice against the first country to set up a field hospital in Haiti.
See also: Larry Derfner: The pride and the shame
“The governments have failed to display the reactions that the world’s Muslims expected from them. And this has been a pitiful aspect of the matter,” Erdogan told reporters.
Akiva Eldar: Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told Abbas [in October 2009] that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote on the critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a “second Gaza.”
IOA Editor: The “thugs” of Gaza, to quote former Israeli Foreign Minister Livni, don’t seem to hesitate repeating their crimes in the West Bank.
The power to arrest individuals reasonably suspected of war crimes anywhere in the world should they set foot on UK soil is an efficient and necessary resource in the struggle against war crimes, and must not be interfered with.
Also: British MP: Israel and Egypt’s blockade of Gaza is ‘evil’
Ayalon praised Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s policies. “His policy is proving to be effective. We will not allow a situation where every country will kick us. If there will be an attack on Israel, we will leave all options open, including the expulsion of ambassadors.”
IOA Editor: The “only democracy in the Middle East,” and one that cannot stand criticism.
Alon Liel, a former director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry and an expert on relations with Turkey, said Mr Ayalon’s treatment of the ambassador had made “Israeli diplomacy look ridiculous.”
IOA Editor: The “thugs” of Gaza, to quote former Israeli Foreign Minister Livni, let their thuggery spill into the diplomatic arena. No wonder they look ridiculous.
A new global movement is challenging Israel’s violations of international law with the same strategies that were used against apartheid
Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare… In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel’s military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel’s leading weapons manufacturers.
IOA Editor: As covered in detail by Amira Hass and others, Israeli high technology warfare plays a lead role in spying on and killing Palestinians, most recently in Gaza, a development zone for Israel’s military industries. This will undoubtedly continue – paid for generously by the US, and by Third World client regimes – as Israelis are increasingly intolerant of death of their own, while they readily accept the death of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Tuesday that Israel would never cede control of united Jerusalem nor retreat to the 1967 borders, according to a statement.
Press reports highlighted the fact that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon made Ambassador Ahmet Celikkol sit on a low couch while the Israelis sat on high chairs, as he reprimanded the envoy over a Turkish television thriller which portrays Israeli Mossad agents as baby-snatchers.
A general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”. Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.
Because of this delay, the medical window of opportunity to perform the transplants for these patients was closed, because corneas can be transplanted only within the shortest time frame (24-48 hours after they are extracted from the donor’s body). The patients from Gaza whose exit was prevented will therefore have to wait for another donation, which may or may not happen.
The U.S. Army will double the value of emergency military equipment it stockpiles on Israeli soil, and Israel will be allowed to use the U.S. ordnance in the event of a military emergency, according to a report in Monday’s issue of the U.S. weekly Defense News.
The failure was a twin flop: An intelligence failure, which U.S. President Barack Obama has already stated, in the poor handling of information that arrived at the State Department and probably also the CIA from both the father of the would-be bomber and the British security service; and a failure within the security system, including that of the Israeli firm ICTS.
IOA Editor: The biggest “flop” is the refusal of the powerful to accept that terrorism is an outcome of underlying conditions which must be urgently reconsidered. As Seumas Milne argues powerfully in Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators, terrorism is the result of such support and “the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land.” As we already noted, this point, and the profound questions that follow, do not receive the public attention a single case of a would-be terrorist act (in the West) gets.
Egyptian FM Abul Gheit: “Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory”… Egypt accused Galloway, who once called at a London rally for the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, of trying to embarrass the country, which has refused to permanently open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza.
More on Mubarak’s position in Seumas Milne’s Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators
The Israeli authorities must immediately release, or bring before a fair trial, three Palestinian human rights activists detained in Israel following their protests against the construction of the West Bank fence/wall, Amnesty International said today.
Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.
From the wider international perspective, it is precisely this western embrace of repressive and unrepresentative regimes such as Egypt’s, along with unwavering backing for Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, that is at the heart of the crisis in the Middle East and Muslim world… The poisonous logic of this imperial quagmire is now leading inexorably to the spread of war under Barack Obama.
A country that believes in the morality of its actions and those of its soldiers should not behave like a permanent suspect and boycott institutions of international law. On the contrary: It must fight within those institutions for its positions and justice. Joining the International Criminal Court at The Hague will place Israel on the side of the enlightened nations, and will contribute to restraining forceful and harmful actions.
IOA Editor: It is not entirely clear whether Haaretz is saying that Israel should stop its thuggery and join the international (law) community, or that it should join the international community so that it can get away with its thuggery. It is clear, though, that the pressure of the international community is making the Israeli government, and public opinion, squirm – and that, of course, is a good thing.
In the wake of the release of the United Nation’s Goldstone report accusing Israel and Hamas of war crimes during the Gaza war, as well as efforts to issue warrants abroad for the arrest of senior IDF officers and former ministers, some Israeli officials have said the international rules of war need to be changed to better reflect the realities of asymmetric warfare… [E]efforts are being made to reach understandings with Western democracies and other countries… to adopt what some call a dynamic interpretation of existing rules of war that would be better suited to the changing realities. Such rules would not restrict armies from countering the threat of terrorism because of concern that its officers or political leadership would be accused of war crimes.
IOA Editor: As eloquently described by Daniel Machover, this new focus on international law is part of a strategy to blur the distinctions between military control of a population resisting occupation and a war against a terrorist organization such as al-Qaeda. If existing international laws of war were to undergo a “dynamic interpretation,” and be rewritten to “be better suited to the changing realities,” the occupiers will gain a far greater freedom of action – such as the ability to bomb civilian population centers and otherwise act “disproportionally,” without the threat of possible ICC charges.
[T]his strategy seems to require the blurring of any distinction between peoples fighting for self-determination or struggling against foreign occupation or internal repression and al-Qaeda or similar terrorist organisations… Tzipi Livni’s response to the arrest warrant against her: “what needs to be put on trial here is the abuse of the British legal system. This is not a suit against Tzipi Livni, this is not a lawsuit against Israel. This is a lawsuit against any democracy that fights terror.”
Instead of addressing the question of how to destroy the Iranian nuclear project by military means, the real interest of all peoples in the Middle East, including the Israeli and Iranian peoples, is to safeguard their security not through nuclear arsenals but through denuclearization of all states in the area. The opposition to the nuclear threat cannot be a selective issue, and should not be handled with double standards.
Baroness Scotland announces plans to alter laws after attempts to obtain warrants against Israeli generals for war crimes
British government under pressure to remove threat of legal action against Israeli leaders for war crimes in Gaza
“Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation… It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.” (Raphael Lemkin, 1943)
In Israel… institutional discrimination is meant to preserve the supremacy of a group of Jewish settlers over Palestinian Arabs. As far as discriminatory practices are concerned, it’s hard to find differences between white rule in South Africa and Israeli rule in the territories; for example, separate areas and separate laws for Jews and Palestinians.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
