Protesters, activists and draft evaders are being targeted by a broad programme of state repression.
Israel-Palestine
Months before the expiration of the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which Israel violated and refused to renew, the IDF began its preparations. Palestinians needed to be punished for supporting and democratically electing Hamas, for resisting the Israeli occupation, and for believing that their national rights are within the realm of possibility.
[A]s Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations, we must note that by agreeing to reconstruction without specific, binding assurances from the State of Israel, international donors are effectively underwriting Israel’s illegal actions in the occupied Palestinian territory.
A large majority of Israeli Jews support military action aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to a survey sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League.
For the last ten days or so, settlers from Bat ‘Ayin in the so-called Etzion Bloc have been paying violent daily visits to their Palestinian neighbors in Um Safa… They’ve already killed four innocents, and another eleven or twelve have been wounded by gunfire… the soldiers have apparently been making common cause with these settlers, opening fire readily at the villagers.
Yitzhak Laor, our best protest poet, may soon face arrest. On Independence Day eve he published a poem in Haaretz’s literary supplement with the lines: “Perhaps shame prevents me from getting up to embrace my son / And warning him of those who want to enlist him.” Arresting Laor for having written such lines may sound like fiction, but something similar has already happened.
B. Michael says official Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics annual Independence Day report claiming that Jews comprise 75% of Israel’s population is inaccurate.
Dozens of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem are demolished each year because they do not have planning permits. Critics say the demolitions are part of an effort to extend Israeli control as Jewish settlements continue to expand.
Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din is taking the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the Israeli civil administration and a number of Israeli mining companies to court [for] illegally stripping Palestinian West Bank quarries of raw construction material for the benefit of the Israeli construction industry and the building of illegal Israeli settlements.
Hadash Chairman MK Mohammed Barakeh: “Passing our heritage from one generation to the next is essential for our steadfastness and survival in our homeland. Our survival is not open to interpretation or negotiation, and is our formative feature as a community that narrowly escaped the threat of expulsion and remained in its country.”
“Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation,” Shapira said.
A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll finds that three-quarters of Americans think that Israel should not build settlements in the Palestinian territories. This is up 23 points from when this question was last asked in 2002.
The fact is, soldiers who took part in the operation, and not only Israeli and foreign observers suspected of self-righteousness or hypocrisy, were revolted by what they saw, heard, and sometimes even did in the Gaza Strip. This revulsion, which the IDF officially rejects and seeks to contain, was recorded in Haaretz… and stirred up a storm. The presentation of the probes’ findings sounded like a belated defensive move, partly because senior people in the army and government are concerned about legal measures against them overseas.
On Friday evening, television news viewers witnessed the ultimate reality show – the murder of a human being on camera. The site of the killing was next to the West Bank village of Bil’in, 80 kilometers south of the ancient city of Jezreel, where a murder was committed under similar circumstances some 2,800 years ago. Bil’in is located 10 kilometers south of the village of Qibya, itself a notorious locale in Israel’s history for the 1953 IDF raid in which 69 Palestinian civilians, some of them children, were killed by troops commanded by a young Ariel Sharon.
The authorities consider him a traitor, even though he did not betray secrets to enemy countries, a terrorist organization or foreign security organizations. He exposed Israel’s nuclear secrets to the British Sunday Times… The justifications are weak and exaggerated. The claim is that Vanunu holds more secret information about Israel’s nuclear program. The entire world assumes Israel has nuclear weapons, so what further damage can he cause to the security of the state? Based on this logic, he may never leave Israel.
A complaint of racism and incitement has been lodged against an Upper Nazareth city councillor who called for Arabs to “disappear,” in an Independence Day greeting to local residents… Upper Nazareth is a sister city to Nazareth, the largest Israeli Arab municipality in Israel.
IOA Editor: Referring to Upper Nazareth as a “Sister City” to Nazareth is quite remarkable: Might the Haaretz editors mean the younger sister who sneaked up behind her older sibling, stabbed her and grabbed her jewelry?
Lawyers accuse Israel of “massive terrorist attacks” in the Gaza Strip,” stating “[t]here can be no doubt that these subjects knew about, ordered or approved the actions in Gaza and that they had considered the consequences of these actions.”
Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said Monday that the Middle East policy of U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration could endanger Israel… In a surprising shift, Yadlin also said that the Islamist Hamas movement has been deterred and is now interested in reaching a peace settlement with Israel.
IOA Editor: It is unclear precisely what the surprise or shift is. As indicated elsewhere on these pages, agreement with Hamas was possible in the past, well before Israel’s massive killing of Gaza civilians. As to Obama’s ’threat’ to Israel, nothing the new administration has said or done so far suggests a meaningful change from past US attitudes, especially towards the Israeli occupation and the basis for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
The answer to this question can be found in Israeli culture, in which the sanctity of life is pretentiously discussed, while only death is really held sacred. Holocaust Remembrance Day is a good example of how in Israel the dead become heroes who get commemorated, honored and glorified, while those who survived, those who were saved, those who are alive but not fully intact mentally and physically are ignored or humiliated.
A coalition of international aid agencies today warned that tens of thousands of Gazans are still homeless and without basic services such as piped drinking water three months after the 18 January ceasefire.
“So the father of the Hamas movement told you he recognized the State of Israel? ’Yes. He was smart and brave. Cruel, but credible. He gave his life in the war for the freedom of his people. I tend to think that if we had tried for an agreement with him, we would have succeeded. He thought the reason the Israelis were dealing with [then PLO leader] Yasser Arafat is that they were very smart, because we knew we would get nowhere with him. In his opinion, Arafat was thoroughly corrupt.’”
Aided by a carefully crafted narrative (by intellectuals on the Zionist left) we have been built as a nation that makes no room whatsoever for a contradictory private narrative, or at least an argument about sacred cows. Everyone is marching to the same drummer. The symbols are always ready. Anything that did not fit the “nationalist” template was rejected. Exodus? Good enough for us. The Struma affair? Only for advanced researchers. Deir Yassin? It was not “us” who did it, but “dissidents.” The massacre of Sasa, Tiberias or Lod? A non-sequitor. Qibya? Forget about it! Sabra and Chatila? That can be remembered (Christians killing Muslims).
[L]et’s admit it: We are (almost) a state governed by religious law.
The problem with the ruling is that Soufir knew very well what he was doing. He was sane enough to pick an Arab driver instead of a Jewish one. He knew what kind of knife to take from his brother’s house and how to lure Karaki to his apartment, where he murdered him in cold blood. It is clear he could differentiate between right and wrong. He chose not to take his own life – is that not sign enough that he was sufficiently sane to stand trial? Instead, he was declared “insane” and is now waiting to start a new life in Paris.
The message to soldiers is just as clear: Kill as much as you please, no wrong will come to you, the army won’t even bother to look into it. Now, after 1,300 deaths in Gaza, the military advocate general confirmed this policy. Any adherent of the rule of law in Israel should have been shocked by this rash decision, but our army of lawyers is concerned with other things.
Israel’s recent bombing and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead, killed 1,417 Palestinians; thirteen Israelis were killed, five by friendly fire. Thousands of Palestinians were seriously wounded and left without adequate medical care, shelter or food. Among the Palestinian dead, more than 400 were children. In response to this devastation, Caryl Churchill wrote a play.
The Guardian has compiled detailed evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Israel during the 23-day offensive against Gaza earlier this year, involving the use of Palestinian children as human shields, the targeting of medics and hospitals, and drone aircraft firing on civilians.
Israel Defense Forces soldiers did not consider medical teams as entitled to receive the special protection granted to them within the framework of their duties during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, according to a new report by Physicians for Human Rights due to be released on Monday.
Haaretz last week published an expose revealing soldiers’ accounts of ethical violations in the Gaza offensive earlier this year. Less than a month after the end of Operation Cast Lead, dozens of graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory program convened at Oranim Academic College in Tivon to testify to their experiences during the war.
All these propagandistic and ridiculous responses are meant not only to deceive the public, but also to offer shameless lies. The IDF knew very well what its soldiers did in Gaza. It has long ceased to be the most moral army in the world. Far from it – it will not seriously investigate anything.
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty.
The inherent aim of the Zionist enterprise was and is to turn the country – at least up to the Jordan River – into a homogeneous Jewish state. Throughout the course of Zionist-Israeli history, this aim has not been forsaken for a moment. Every cell of the Israeli organism contains this genetic code and therefore acts accordingly, without the need for a specific directive.
“That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”
One account tells of a sniper killing a mother and children at close range whom troops had told to leave their home. Another speaker at the seminar described what he saw as the “cold blooded murder” of a Palestinian woman.
The IDF’s internal investigations, which are moving ahead very slowly, are not enough. The army is absorbing more and more religious extremism from the teachings of the IDF’s rabbinate. It would be appropriate to investigate the problems from outside the IDF and root them out before the rot destroys the IDF and Israeli society.
