'We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the era of impunity,' Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, was quoted by IPS in response to the findings of a 574-page report by a four-member United Nations Fact finding mission. The mission, led by internationally-renowned former South African supreme court justice and chief prosecutor in the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, investigated alleged war crimes committed by Israeli troops in Gaza in a 23-day bloody, unprecedented onslaught against a largely defenseless population. 

But Hijab was not the only one who expressed optimism. Others did, encouraged perhaps, by the report’s use of terminology unfamiliar in a conflict where empirical experience has shown that Israeli actions, no matter how outrageously violent, will have no meaningful legal repercussions whatsoever. 

Goldstone’s report, released on September 15, made some important recommendations, following a most thorough investigation that was carefully compiled by the mission – which was organized by the UN Human Rights Council last April. 

One is that the UN Security Council should set up a team of experts to monitor Israel’s investigations of the war crimes committed in Gaza. If Israel fails to do so, then the situation should be referred to the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court (ICC). 

This raises many questions, lead amongst them is: did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza, and, second, is Israel capable of conducting an honest investigation into those crimes, considering the state’s bloody legacy and lack of any serious legal accountability. 

Goldstone answers both questions. 

“The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly in some respects crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defense Force,” Goldstone told reporters on September 16. He also said that the Israeli government has carried out no credible investigation. 

Despite his recommendations that UN experts follow the progress of the internal investigation by Israel, and the Palestinians (since they too were accused of violating international law by lobbing home-made rockets into Israel, without taking into account the possible harm to civilians) it’s puzzling why Goldstone would think that any genuine investigation is possible in the first place.

Goldstone knows, as many of us already do, that the events in Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of 1,387 (other estimates put the number at 1,417, mostly civilians, including over 300 children), the wounding of thousands more, the targeting of an already dilapidating infrastructure (hospitals, police stations, factories, schools, and even chicken farms) of a deprived and besieged society was very much a political decision made at the highest levels by the likes of Olmert, Livni, Barak and other serial criminals who have tormented Palestinians for too long. 

Palestinians were also chastised for rockets fired from besieged Gaza. Of course, Goldstone was not expected to justify or applaud the homemade rockets, or even underline their lack of effectiveness, as four Israelis were killed by rocket fire, during the period of the war. Out of the nine Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting, four were killed in friendly fire. 

While both Hamas and the PA fully cooperated with Goldstone and his colleagues, Israel fully rejected the mission, refusing entry into Israel or Gaza, forcing the use of alternative routes into the besieged strip, through Egypt. 

Israeli officials claim that the report was pre-written, rendering it biased from the start. They used the same predictable pattern of smears, redundant diatribes and predictable language. 

Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said the report created unjust “equivalence of a democratic state with a terror organization,” in reference to Hamas. 

Following the good old democracy reference, racism kicks in. “We have nothing to be ashamed of, and don’t need lessons in morality from a committee established by Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Somalia,” Levy said. Apparently dark-skinned people of the South are both incapable of being democratic or moral. Only Israel and her allies are capable of those qualities. 

“The Goldstone report has set a new standard for equating the behavior of democratic nations and terrorists,” wrote Richard Sideman, President of the New York-based American Jewish Committee in a letter published in the New York Times on September 18. 

The same disingenuous sentiment utilized by Levy and Sideman (how curious that both seemed to be using the same script) echoed by many Israeli officials and their lobbyists abroad, who went into crisis management mode following the release of the report. 

But why should they care? 

Could it be because Goldstone called on the 192-member General Assembly to establish an escrow fund so that Israel can compensate Palestinians in Gaza? Israel would never spend its hard-earned US tax payers money on such frivolous matters. 

Could it be because the Human Rights Council is convening on September 29 in Geneva to discuss the report, and could call for its transfer to the Security Council, and even the ICC? 

Could it be because the report’s findings might empower an already growing boycott movement world-wide? 

Could it be because it’s much harder to doubt the credibility of Goldstone, to smear him as anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew? 

Could it be because all these factors are escalating Israeli fears that the “era of impunity” is indeed over? 

“Perhaps next time we set out to wage another vain and miserable war, we will take into account not only the number of fatalities we are likely to sustain, but also the heavy political damage such wars cause,” wrote Israeli columnist Gideon Levy. 

One would have to wait for the next miserable war, the next massacre to find out whether Israel has learned its lesson. Until then, thousands of starved, desperate yet resilient Palestinians in Gaza continue to live in their makeshift tents, atop the rubble, which was once called home, awaiting food, cement and international justice. 

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author of several books and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London), and his forthcoming book is, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon.

Israeli officials and hasbara doctors have been railing against Goldstone, who is both Jewish and Zionist, to the extent of accusing him of “anti-Semitism,” an increasingly stale and ineffective weapon which Israel resorts to when all other propaganda tools don’t work. 

Benyamin Netanyahu, the extremist Prime Minister of the Zionist regime has even asked US Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell to assist Israel, especially at the American arena, in order to curb the fallout from the report. 

Meanwhile, Israel is embarking on a frantic propaganda campaign to discredit the report. In the past, Israel succeeded in endearing itself to western public opinion by enlisting the often Jewish-controlled media which effectively helped disseminate the Zionist narrative. In so doing, that media often turned the black into white, and the big lie into a “virtual truth” glorified by millions of gullible westerners who wouldn’t overburden themselves with the task of finding out the “real truth.”

Now, Israel is facing an uphill task doing the same job successfully. 

First of all, Goldstone has, by and large, done a professional job. His report is nearly completely devoid of rhetorical overindulgence and presents facts and as facts without any overly tendentious interpretation. 

Hence, the anti-Semitic insinuations made by Israeli hasbara officials should be treated as no more than cheap diversionary tactics aimed at evading the facts. In fact, Goldstone’s own daughter has been quoted by the Israeli press as saying that had her father not been at the helm of the investigating commission, Israel would have been condemned much more harshly. 

Second, nearly all credible human rights commissions, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even Israel’s own B’tselem had more or less reached the same conclusions about the December-January blitz, namely that Israel knowingly and deliberately targeted innocent civilians. 

More to the point, numerous Israeli soldiers who participated in the virtually genocidal onslaught on the nearly completely unprotected enclave have testified that they had been instructed to shoot and kill innocent civilians, including people carrying white flags. 

As an observer of Israeli behavior for many years, I have no doubt that Israeli leaders realize that they did commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. After all, many Israeli military and political officials are bona fide war criminals who would be thrown immediately behind bars in any country with even minimal adherence to the rules of justice and norms of civility and human decency. 

However, these war criminals think, at least privately, that Jews shouldn’t be subject to the same rules of war that apply to other nations. Hence, they don’t view the deliberate collective murder of innocent civilians as “wrong.”

Indeed, a few days ago, an Israeli cabinet minister urged the international community to grant Israel special treatment concerning the conduct of war, presumably one that would allow the Israeli occupation army and paramilitary Jewish terrorists to murder with impunity. 

I strongly believe that the international community must adopt a stringent and morally uncompromising stand against Israel.  In the final analysis, war crimes and crimes against humanity can’t be treated as diabolic in places like Nazi Germany and the former Yugoslavia while ignored or dismissed as “controversial” when Israel is involved. 

This is why, the Goldstone Commission report’s recommendations ought to be presented to the International Court of Justice in The Hague as soon as possible. 

Moreover, civilized nations around the world ought to act on this serious issue of Israeli criminality by treating Israel as a pariah state at least until justice is done and measures are taken to prevent the recurrence of the Nazi-like onslaught. 

It is true that Israel is not the former South Africa apartheid regime which was successfully forced to end the apartheid system. However, there is much that can be done to prevent the criminal entity from mocking international law and the basic human rights, including the right to life, of the Palestinian people. 

One way of doing this is to compile a comprehensive list of all Israeli war criminals, from private soldiers up to the Minister of Defense, who were involved in the Gaza atrocities. 

These suspected war criminals must be arrested upon their arrival in any country. And if there is compelling evidence indicting them, they should be shipped like drugged wild animals to The Hague to face their crimes before an international tribunal. We simply owe it to the unwept victims to pursue their killers and narrow their horizons as much as possible until they are caught and made to pay for their crimes. 

The Goldstone report recommended that Israel immediately start a serious investigation into the Gaza war crime. However, it is amply clear that this recommendation carries with it a great deal of naivety, if not hypocrisy.  Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on Israel to realize that the Israeli justice system is a virtual rubber stamp in the hands of the military-political establishment. 

Besides, it would be foolhardy to expect Israel, a state that has been murdering Palestinians, destroying their homes and stealing their land from time immemorial, to suddenly grant them justice and morph into a decent state where justice is pursued regardless of the identity of the victim and victimizer. 

To be honest, Israel is an irremediable case of oppression and criminality, a state  so sick and criminal-minded that it is pointless to appeal to any sense of justice that its military and political leaders might be thought to have. 

Two more points I would like to make in this regard. First, it is extremely imperative to hold Israel accountable for these crimes. Because otherwise, if the world allows Israel to get away with impunity, the December-January blitz would look very much like an innocuous child play compared with the next genocidal war. 

Hence, the world must never ever allow this despicable entity to desensitize whatever semblance of morality the international community still has. More to the point, this issue acquires a special significance because it is no secret that the Palestinians rely for their very physical survival on the goodwill and moral power of the peoples of the world. Hence, the world’s moral conscience must not be allowed to go into even a brief slumber lest the unthinkable happens.

The second point is the totally inadequate manner in which the Palestinian Authority has treated this issue. Indeed, as an entity that claims to represent the Palestinian people, the PA should have spearheaded efforts to expose, incriminate and criminalize Israel. 

However, the fact that the PA has only contented itself with a few laconic statements about Israeli responsibility for the war crimes in Gaza underscores the moral and political bankruptcy of the PA regime. 

Well, how can the Palestinian people really expect these flamboyant “leaders” who dread calling Israel by its real name to be able to liberate Jerusalem and enable the repatriation of the refugees to their ancestral homeland?

“The Israel Project”, a US media advocacy group, has produced a revised training manual to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war, keep their ill-gotten territorial gains and persuade international audiences to accept that their crimes are necessary and conform to “shared values” between Israel and the civilized West.

It’s a clever document.

The manual teaches how to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and the blatant disregard for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of the aerosol of persuasive language. It is designed to hoodwink us ignorant and gullible Americans and Europeans into believing that we actually share values with the racist regime in Israel and that its abominable behaviour is therefore deserving of our support.

Israel is hoping for a public relations massacre. The other side – the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization – don’t take communications seriously and have neglected to correct Israeli distortion. They are happy, it seems, for Israel’s one-sided definitions to prevail, which of course makes the task for Israel so much easier. This latest propaganda offensive is potentially the “coup de grace” to finish off the tormented Palestinians. See it here.

And the manual will no doubt serve as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks is recruiting to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet.

This quote at the beginning sets the tone: "Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear."

Top priority: demonise Hamas

The manual’s numerous messages are aimed at the mass of “persuadables”, primarily in America but also in the UK. The strategy from the start is to isolate the democratically-elected Hamas and to rob the resistance movement and the Palestinian population of their human rights.

• “Clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas. There is an immediate and clear distinction between the empathy Americans feel for the Palestinians and the scorn they direct at Palestinian leadership. Hamas is a terrorist organization – Americans get that already. But if it sounds like you are attacking the Palestinian people (even though they elected Hamas) rather than their leadership, you will lose public support. Right now, many Americans sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, and that sympathy will increase if you fail to differentiate the people from their leaders.”

The plight of the Palestinians under Israel’s heel was an international concern long before Hamas appeared on the scene.

But this is familiar ground. We scorned George Bush and Tony Blair and had to differentiate between them and their respective peoples. We now have to do the same with Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. We are tired of having to make that same differentiation between the Israeli people and the dreadful leaders they produce.

• "ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO DEFENSIBLE BORDERS: With more than three years of violent history since Israel’s agreement to withdraw from Gaza and portions of the West Bank [sic], Americans have had time to take stock of the situation and form opinions. The big picture: they believe that Hamas’s leadership of Gaza has made Israel and the region less safe, while some are more receptive to what they perceive as a moderate approach in the West Bank by Mahmoud Abbas. Based on these experiences, they are willing to grant Israel more leeway in resisting calls to give more land for more peace."

Here we clearly see the motive for demonizing Hamas – Israel wants more leeway to continue its land-grabs and other criminal activities.

• “If… If… If… Then”: Put the burden on Hamas to make the first move for peace by using If’s (and don’t forget to finish with a hard then to show Israel is a willing peace partner). “If Hamas reforms… If Hamas recognize our right to exist… If Hamas renounces terrorism… If Hamas supports international peace agreements… then we are willing to make peace today.”

How one-sided and daft can you get? Substitute Israel for Hamas.

Words that work

The manual sets out numerous examples of “words that work” – supposedly.

• “We know that the Palestinians deserve leaders who will care about the well being of their people, and who do not simply take hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance from America and Europe, put them in Swiss bank accounts, and use them to support terror instead of peace.”

No mention here of the billions of tax dollars Israel takes from the US and spends on munitions to obliterate and vaporize its neighbours.

• “Peace can only be made with adversaries who want to make peace with you. Terrorist organizations like Iran-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are, by definition, opposed to peaceful co-existence, and determined to prevent reconciliation. I ask you, how do you negotiate with those who want you dead?”

Hamas and Hezbollah are only regarded as terrorists by the White House and Tel Aviv and by US-Israeli stooges and flag-wavers in Westminster and elsewhere.

In Executive Order 13224 – "BLOCKING PROPERTY AND PROHIBITING TRANSACTIONS WITH PERSONS WHO COMMIT, THREATEN TO COMMIT, OR SUPPORT TERRORISM" – Bush used this definition: “The term “terrorism” means an activity that –

(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
(ii) appears to be intended —
(A) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(B) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(C) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.”

It describes the antics of the US and Israel perfectly.

• "There is NEVER, EVER, any justification for the deliberate slaughter of innocent women and children. NEVER… there is one fundamental principle that all peoples from all parts of the globe will agree on: civilized people do not target innocent women and children for death.”

Quite so. Where does that leave Israel, which recently killed 320 children in Gaza and 773 civilians, including 109 women? From 2000 (the start of the second Intifada – the Palestinian urising against the Israeli occupation) up to the end of last year Israel had slaughtered 4,936 Palestinians in their homeland, including 952 children, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. In the same period Palestinians killed 490 Israelis in Israel including only 84 children. So, Israel’s kill-rate is at least 10 to 1, and rising since the blitzkrieg on Gaza.

Iran-backed or US-backed – take your pick

• “Use humility. ‘I know that in trying to defend its children and citizens from terrorists that Israel has accidentally hurt innocent people. I know it, and I’m sorry for it. But what can Israel do to defend itself? If America had given up land for peace – and that land had been used for launching rockets at America, what would America do? Israel was attacked with thousands of rockets from Iran-backed Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. What should Israel have done to protect her children?’”

Palestinians too have a right to defend themselves. Hamas was the popular choice of Palestinians at the last election and is entitled under international law to take up arms against an illegal occupier and invader. If it is supported by Iran, so what? Israel is extravagantly funded and supplied by the US. Here’s part of their begging-bowl “Military Aid Speech”:

• “Israel makes the request for military assistance out of self-defense. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect our borders. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect their citizens.
  

• “Israel does not ask for US troops to protect itself. It does not ask for a single American soldier to protect its borders. It only asks for the funds for them to protect themselves. They need the equipment so that their own troops can ensure the safety of their civilian population through this gathering conflict with the enemies of democracy.
  

• “They didn’t ask to have our nation built in range of Iranian missiles. They didn’t ask that their nation be a focal point for religious extremists who have declared war on the West and on democracy.
  

• “But they are, and they need your help."

And here’s the rationale behind it:

• “Americans fundamentally believe that a democracy has a right to protect its people and its borders. And while Americans don’t want to increase foreign aid in a time of significant budgetary deficits and painful spending cuts, there is one and only one argument that will work for Israel (in four easy steps):
  

(1) As a democracy, Israel has the right and the responsibility to defend its borders and protect its people.

(2) Terrorist groups, including Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to pose a direct threat to Israeli security and have repeatedly taken innocent Israeli lives.

(3) Israel is America’s one and only true ally in the region. In these particularly unstable and dangerous times, Israel should not be forced to go it alone.

(4) With America’s financial assistance, Israel can defend its borders, protect its people, and provide invaluable assistance to the American effort against the war against terrorism.”

It’s evident that Americans don’t believe in democracy enough to allow Palestinian democracy to flourish.

• “When the terror ends, Israel will no longer need to have challenging checkpoints to inspect goods and people. When the terror ends we will no longer need a security fence.”

There are no rockets coming out of the West Bank, so why is the security fence still there – and still being built? Why are the occupation troops still there? Why are hundreds of checkpoints still there? Why is Israel still stealing land, demolishing Palestinian homes and building settlements there?

• "Remind people – again and again – that Israel wants peace.

Reason One: If Americans see no hope for peace – if they only see a continuation of a 2,000-year-long episode of “Family Feud” – Americans will not want their government to spend tax dollars or their president’s clout on helping Israel.

Reason Two: The speaker that is perceived as being most for PEACE will win the debate. Every time someone makes the plea for peace, the reaction is positive. If you want to regain the public relations advantage, peace should be at the core of whatever message you wish to convey."

Israel has never met its peace agreement obligations. It doesn't want peace – every action is directed at keeping the conflict going until the Israelis have stolen enough land and established enough 'facts on the ground' – Jews-only settlements, highways, disconnected Palestinian bantustans – to enable them to redraw the map to suit their expansionist agenda and make the occupation PERMANENT.

Gaza in a vice

• “Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process. Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.”

Israel never left. It still occupies Gazan airspace, coastal waters and airwaves, and controls all borders except Rafah where it nevertheless exerts a veto. Israel has Gaza in a vice, which is crushing the tiny enclave’s economy, starving its 1.5 million citizens and creating a huge humanitarian crisis in an attempt to bring the elected government to its knees.

• "Draw direct parallels between Israel and America – including the need to defend against terrorism… The more you focus on the similarities between Israel and America, the more likely you are to win the support of those who are neutral. Indeed, Israel is an important American ally in the war against terrorism, and faces many of the same challenges as America in protecting their citizens."

Note how Israel’s strategy is almost totally dependent on the false idea that they are victims of terror and Western nations need to huddle together with Israel for mutual protection. Fortunately, level-headed people are beginning to realize who the terrorists really are.

It must be blindingly obvious by now that allowing parallels to be drawn between Israel and America only serves to increase the world’s hatred of America. US citizens need to wake up to this, and British citizens should avoid falling into the same trap.

Inject with “core values” and repeat over and over again…

• "The language of Israel is the language of America: 'democracy', 'freedom', 'security', and 'peace'. These four words are at the core of the American political, economic, social and cultural systems, and they should be repeated as often as possible because they resonate with virtually every American."

If so fluent in this language, why doesn’t Israel acknowledge its neighbours’ rights to democracy, freedom, security and peace and end their military oppression?

• "A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say 'Hey – this person just might be saying something interesting to me!' But don’t confuse messages with facts…"

Never let facts get in the way of a good message!

• “How can the current Palestinian leadership honestly say it will pursue peace when previous leaders rejected an offer to create a Palestinian state just a few short years ago and now refuse to live up to their responsibilities as outlined in the Road Map?”

This must be a reference to Ehud Barak's so-called "generous offer”, another of the myths Israelis love to peddle. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip, seized by Israel in 1967 and occupied ever since, comprise just 22 per cent of pre-partition Palestine. When the Palestinians signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993 they agreed to accept the 22 per cent and to recognize Israel within “Green Line” borders (i.e. the 1949 armistice line established after the Arab-Israeli war). Conceding 78 per cent of the land that was originally theirs was an astonishing compromise on the part of the Palestinians.

But it wasn't enough for greedy Barak. His “generous offer” required the inclusion of 69 Israeli settlements within the 22 per cent remnant. It was plain to see on the map that these settlement blocs created impossible borders and already severely disrupted Palestinian life in the West Bank. Barak also demanded the Palestinian territories be placed under "temporary Israeli control", meaning Israeli military and administrative control indefinitely. The “generous offer” also gave Israel control over all the border crossings of the new Palestinian state. What nation in the world would accept that? The unacceptable reality of Barak’s offer, contained in the map, was hidden by propaganda spin.

Later, at Taba, Barak produced a revised map but withdrew it after his election defeat. Don’t take my word for it – the facts are well documented and explained by organizations such as Israel’s Gush Shalom.

• “Why is the world so silent about the written, vocal, stated aims of Hamas?”

And why is the world so silent about the written, stated aims of the racist regime and its political parties? Read their manifestoes.

• “Successful communications is not about being able to recite every fact from the long history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is about pointing out a few core principles of shared values – such as democracy and freedom – and repeating them over and over again… You need to start with empathy for both sides, remind your audience that Israel wants peace and then repeat the messages of democracy, freedom, and peace over and over again… we need to repeat the message, on average, 10 times to be effective.”

Is democracy a shared value? Israel is an ethnocracy not a democracy. Is freedom a shared value? The world is still waiting for Israel to allow the Palestinians their freedom.

• “The situation in the Middle East may be complicated, but all parties should adopt a simple approach: peace first, political boundaries second.”

Renounce resistance while still under Israel’s jackboot? The correct approach is for the international community to insist first that Israel complies with international law and the many UN resolutions it has contemptuously ignored. The boundaries are already defined. Whatever issues remain to be decided, Palestinians should not have to negotiate under occupation or duress.

Rockets, bombs and atrocities: the language of peace

• "Bottom line: What will happen if we fail to get the world to care about the fact that Israeli parents in southern Israel need to literally dodge rockets when they drive their children to kindergarten in the morning? What will happen if the world allows Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, to get nuclear weapons? What will Israel do if bad press causes American citizens to ask [their] government to turn its back on Israel? Why do I care so much about the success of your communications efforts? I care because I never want our children to live through what my family and yours lived through in the Holocaust."

Only one in 500 makeshift Qassam rockets causes a fatality, small beer compared to the devastation and carnage resulting from Israel’s state-of-the-art rocketry targeted on Gaza. How does it look when Palestinians are forced to pay the price for the Holocaust? And how much does Israel care about the Palestinian holocaust it has caused?

The manual then gives a long glossary of terms. Here’s a sample:

• “Deliberately firing rockets into civilian communities”: Combine terrorist motive with civilian visuals and you have the perfect illustration of what Israel faced in Gaza and Lebanon. Especially with regard to rocket attacks but useful for any kind of terrorist attack, deliberate is the right word to use to call out the intent behind the attacks. This is far more powerful than describing the attacks as “random”.

Israelis know all about bombarding civilian targets. And they are careful not to mention that Sderot, until recently the only Israeli township within range of Gazan rockets, is built on the ruins of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village whose inhabitants were forced from their homes by Jewish terrorists.

• “Economic Diplomacy”: This is a much more embracing and popular term than the current lexicon of “sanctions”. It has appeal across the political spectrum: the tough economic approach appeals to Republicans, and the diplomacy component satisfies Democrats.

We can all play this game. Israel is now beginning to suffer “economic diplomacy” in the form of worldwide boycotts.

• “Economic Prosperity”: Whenever Israel talks about the “economic prosperity” of the Palestinians, it puts Israel in the most positive light possible. After all, who can disagree?

What sort of prosperity is it when nothing can be imported or exported without Israel's approval and fisherman can't even put to sea in their own waters without having their boats shot up by the Israeli navy?

• “Human to Human”: “We know that the average Palestinian and the average Israeli want to come together and make peace. They want to live in peace. Israeli leaders have come together with Arab leaders to make peace in the past. But how do you make peace with Hamas and Hezbollah?”

Simple. You get off their land and stay off. There can be no peace under occupation. You have to be very stupid not to understand that.

• “Humanize Rockets”: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.

Would Israel care to tell the world how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited variety) its US-supplied F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats have poured into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza?

Still more advice…

• “Living together, side by side”. This is the best way to describe the ultimate vision of a two-state solution without using the phrase.

Sounds cute but is worn out. Who would want to live alongside bigots and extremists who have made your life a misery for 61 years?

• "When talking about a Palestinian partner, it is essential to distinguish between Hamas and everyone else. Only the most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian American expects Israel to negotiate with Hamas, so you have to be clear that you are seeking a 'moderate Palestinian partner'."

Where are the moderate Israeli partners?

• "The fight is over IDEOLOGY – not land; terror, not territory. Thus, you must avoid using Israel’s religious claims to land as a reason why Israel should not give up land. Such claims only make Israel look extremist to people who are not religious Christians or Jews.”

If the fight isn’t about land, why did Israel steal it at gunpoint? And why won’t they give it back when told to by the UN?

• "Think PRO-PALESTINIAN. While I have spoken about Israeli casualties, I want to recognize those Palestinians that have been killed or wounded, because they are suffering as well. I particularly want to reach out to Palestinian mothers who have lost their children. No parent should have to bury their child.”

Israel won’t even allow cement into Gaza to build the graves.

• "And so I say to my Palestinian colleagues … you can stop the bloodshed. You can stop the suicide bombings and rocket attacks. If you really want to, you can put an end to this cycle of violence. If you won’t do it for our children, do it for your children.”

Effective Israeli sound bite. Speechless.

• "I want to see a future where the Palestinians govern themselves. Israel does not want to govern a single Palestinian. Not one. We want them to govern themselves. We want them to have complete self-determination."

Is that why Israel tried to snuff out Palestine's democracy – and the people’s right to self-determination – immediately after the 2006 elections?

• "The big picture approach is this: You must isolate Hamas as:

– A critical cause of the delay in achieving a two-state solution

– The biggest source of harm to the Palestinian people, and

– The reason why Israel must defend its people from living in terror.

Read from the Hamas Charter. Now, here’s how to attack Hamas: indict them with their own indoctrination materials. Yes, people know Hamas is a terrorist organization – but they don’t know just how terrifying Hamas can be. The absolute best way to heighten their awareness is to read from the Hamas Charter itself. Don’t just “quote” from it. Read it. Out loud. Again and again. Hand it out to everyone."

At last Israel makes a good point. After three years of “government” Hamas must be mad to persist with its ill-advised charter. They have been severely tested. They have matured. They have earned credibility in many eyes. Israel’s behaviour makes Hamas look good. But all that will count for nothing if they don't rewrite their charter as a matter of urgency.

Regev’s pearls of wisdom. But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes?

• "It’s not just Israel who refuses to speak to Hamas. It’s the whole international community… Most of the democratic world refuses to have a relationship with Hamas because Hamas has refused to meet the most minimal benchmarks of international behaviour." – Mark Regev

Isn’t that a little cheeky, Mr Regev, coming from a regime widely condemned for war crimes, piracy and mega-lawlessness?

• "It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community…
  

That if Hamas reforms itself … – Mark Regev

If Hamas recognizes my country’s right to live in freedom…

If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…

If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.

Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

• "Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason. Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles. We only saw, last week, shooting a rocket to launch a so-called satellite into outer space and so forth. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.” – Mark Regev

Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Mr Regev? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel's 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Would you also like to comment on why Israel hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention? What proof do you have of Iran's nuclear weapons plans?

And why do you persist in misquoting Mr Ahmadinejad?

The Holy City is not up for grabs

• "The toughest issue to communicate will be the final resolution of Jerusalem. Americans overwhelmingly want Israel to be in charge of the religious holy sites and are frankly afraid of the consequences should Israel turn over control to the Palestinians. Consider:
  

– 71 per cent of Americans trust Israel most to protect the holy sites in Jerusalem, compared to 6.1 per cent who trust the Palestinian authority most. 8.5 per cent per cent trust neither.

– 54 per cent of Americans believe that ‘Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty’ while just 23.9 per cent believe that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into Israeli controlled and Palestinian controlled areas’.

Given the choice between the two, Americans of all political and demographic stripes trust Israel to protect and have sovereignty over Jerusalem."

Israel is in control right now and prevents Muslims and Christians from outside the city visiting the holy places. No way can Israel be trusted. The UN's partition plan decreed that Jerusalem should become a ”corpus separatum” under international management. It is unlikely that the UN would wish to see its resolutions torn up or international law rewritten for Israel’s sole benefit, regardless of America’s misinformed opinion.

Get the name-calling right

I’ll close with the following extract:

• “Many on the left see an ‘Israel vs. Palestinian’ crisis where Israel is Goliath and the Palestinians are David. It is critical that they understand that this is an Arab-Israeli crisis and that the force undermining peace is Iran and their proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You must not call Hamas just Hamas. Call them what they are: Iran-backed Hamas. Indeed, when they know that Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah, they are much more supportive of Israel.”

By the same token we must call the racist regime what it is – US-backed Israel.

Iran’s support for Hamas is difficult to quantify and probably less than we think. More funding has probably come from Sunni Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In any case, it is peanuts compared to America’s support for Israel.

Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhhod and was founded in 1987 during the first Intifada. Hezbollah came into being in 1982 in response to US-backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. So, the territorial ambitions of US-backed Israel provoked the rise of both. Israel’s problem is entirely self-inflicted and shouldn’t concern the rest of us.

Hamas’s election manifesto in 2006 called for maintaining the armed struggle against US-backed Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, which seems a perfectly valid aim.

Our obligation to respect and promote human rights

The Israel Project’s training manual is an unpleasant piece of work. It runs to 116 pages and I have only scratched the surface. It recycles many of the discredited techniques used by the advertising industry before standards of honesty, decency and truthfulness were brought in to protect the public.

And it serves to undermine with clever words the inalienable rights pledged by the UN and the world’s civilized nations to all peoples, including the Palestinians.

When you have to stoop this low you simply don’t have a case.

The Palestinian side urgently needs to strip away the deception and re-frame the Holy Land situation in truthful language. And it needs to debunk this Zionist handbook. If the PA and the PLO won’t do it, who will?

Everyone should bear in mind the following, written nearly 61 years ago:

“Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.”

It would seem that Israel has not read or understood the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which all nations signed up to. Attempts to wipe out the rights of people who happen to be in the way of the Zionist vision of a “Greater Israel” deserve no support whatever.

Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.
Source

The felonious Adam Malul commented on what Gadi Shamni, saying: “the GOC Gadi Shamni is trying to pretty up the picture; in fact he knows what's happening on the ground, but he chooses to stay in his ivory tower and keep his face clean. I am not ashamed of smacking the Palestinian; it was what I had to do. My commanders on the ground, my company commander, battalion commander and brigade commander backed me up, and I did what I was taught by my superiors”. He added: "in the territories. There are those that get dirty every day to defend the State's security".

On 29 July 2009, the Israeli military war criminal Central Command Chief Major General Gadi Shamni issued Military Order 1644 related to so-called “juveniles”. The order is a violation of the Fourth Geneva and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Israel itself had signed. The order is furthermore a grave crime against humanity, as it implements the stance often expressed by representatives of the “state of Israel”, according to which Palestinians have no human rights, what implies that we are not humans.

Shamni concludes his criminal military order by referring to paragraphs which clearly show bad faith, and the bad intentions of Shamni towards the Palestinian children detainees, as it is clearly intended by the Central Command GOC to circumvent the international laws and treaties related to children, and to “legalize” current criminal practices of Israel. See the English translation of the military order 1644 as PDF See the Arabic translation of the military order 1644 as PDF.

• Instructions of this order do not apply to cases in which the list of charges were made prior to the entry of this order into force. He means the 342 children who are currently incarcerated.
• The order enters into force sixty days from the date of issuance, and expires one year later. This means during this time, the troops of Shamni will catch some hundreds of Palestinian children among the peace protesters who throw stones at the Apartheid wall, and that they will be “found guilty” by military judges acting under Order 1644/2009 amendment number (109) issued by Shamni. It does not mean that less children are shot, murdered, tortured, abused or incarcerated – it just means that now these crimes are legalized.

Has anyone heard of any country in the world where children are tortured and incarcerated because of throwing stones at the concrete walls of the concentration camp where they live?

Has anyone heard that a state establish a military court to submit oppressed children to “trials”, because these children dared to express their anger over the violation of their rights by throwing stones at the concrete walls of the concentration camp in which they live?

Has anyone heard about any state which claims that the establishment of a military court was in response to the terms of international conventions on children rights?

Since when do the rights of children call for the establishment of military courts to more effectively prosecute them?

Since when have concrete walls needed armies and military courts to defend them?

This farce and the sanctimonious resolutions and crimes against humanity are taking place only in the zionist “state” called Israel. If this happened in any other country in the world, then the so-called, self-nominated democratic governments would issued a formal and explicit condemnation against that country. But rarely, if ever, do these countries issue such condemnations against Israel, which is governed by war criminals and psychopath military leaders.

Dozens of journalists from Israeli newspapers reported about this military order issued by the IDF Central Command GOC, the war criminal Gadi Shamni, as an achievement. If these wannabe-journalists had read the order issued by the Shamni, resolution 1644 on the establishment of a military court for “juveniles”, actually for Palestinian children, they would understand that the military order of Shamni is not only a crime against children, but against humanity, and against the present of Israel.

People acting as judges in these so-called military court for juveniles would be war criminals themselves. These “judges” of military courts are responsible for incarcerating thousands of Palestinian children during the past 42 years.

Currently there are 342 children incarcerated by these psychopaths among criminals, drugs dealers, sexual perverts, and these children are all subject to continuous sessions of torture to force them to become collaborators with the IDF military intelligence.

Shamni himself is directly responsible for the murders of 975 children by snipers over the past years and the currently incarcerated 342 Palestinian children in his jails. Before that, while Shamni was a colonel and the military commander of Hebron in the years between 1995 – 1997, he himself was involved in terrorizing, sniping and incarcerating many Palestinian children as well as adults, looting Palestinian agricultural lands, vandalizing Palestinian property lands and opening road for the jewish squatters.

Major General Gadi Shamni, the current IDF Central Command GOC, was the military occupation commander in my homeland, the city of Hebron. I know him in person. I know that he participated in and committed crimes against humanity and crimes of war against the civilian populations of Hebron, which all together amount to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

One of the most horrible military operations which Gadi Shamni lead in Hebron was with the “mistaravim” (“those who look like Arabs”), IDF paramilitary death squads, after the Hebron redeployment in 1997. These units wear civilian clothes and they hide their weapons under their long shirts. These units are manned with Druze soldiers who look like Palestinians, so that normal people going about their business are not aware of their presence. In one operation which I witnessed, which took place at the end of July 1997, Shamni sent these death squad units into the middle of Al-Shalala street in the (in name) Palestinian controlled area. It was later said that the undercover soldiers who took part in this incident were from the Duvdevan unit. The mission of these death squads was to catch and kill some children, young boys from the area under the purported control of the Palestinian Authority, and that is what they did.

Shamni himself was leading the mission. He was in the middle of the separation area in Al-Shalala Street, near the Al-Ja’abari pharmacy. His plan was to let his troops stationed on the rooftop of the Al-Said building in the same street throw an Israeli flag in the middle of the Palestinians going about their personal business, just for provocation. His death squads were ready to shoot, murder and arrest anyone. When the youths in the area started stepping on and burning the flag, the “mistaravim” started arresting these children and shooting in the middle of crowded street. A boy of age 9 in the crowd was killed next to me, and I was nearly shot. I witnessed several people in the crowd, some with bullet wounds, being dragged on the ground like sacks by the death squads to where Gadi had set up his command post. I remember being very scared and angry.

I went to the area where Colonel Gadi Shamni was standing and smiling of happiness after this incident. I told him in an angry voice that what he had done to catch some children aged under 15 years was a disgusting bloody game. Gadi did not pay attention to my words, he just continued smiling and expressing his “victories” of having snatched some  children, of shooting and the terrorizing innocent people in the street.

In the words of the lawyer of the Defence of Children International “DCI” human rights organization, Khalid Quzmar:

DCI-Palestine is of the view that children should not be tried in military courts with minimal fair trial guarantees and has a number of particular concerns regarding Military Order 1644 and the treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military legal system. DCI-Palestine’s concerns include the following:

Palestinian children are still being interrogated in the absence of a lawyer or family member. The overwhelming majority of these children report being mistreated and forced into providing confessions during interrogation. These interrogations are still not being video recorded, as recommended by the UN Committee Against Torture in May 2009.

Children as young as 12 can still be tried in the military courts, and are treated as adults as soon as they turn 16. This is in contrast to the Israeli domestic legal system that fixes the age of majority at 18, in accordance with generally accepted comparable principles of juvenile justice.

Military Order 1644 provides for the appointment of ‘juvenile judges’ by the Military Court of Appeal. These ‘juvenile judges’ are themselves, military court judges who ‘must be prepared to be competent for the post’. No further information is provided to shed light on how it is anticipated these military court judges are suitably qualified to adjudicate cases involving 12 year old children.

Military Order 1644 exempts all hearings to determine whether a child should be kept in pre-trial detention until the end of the legal proceedings from the requirement of having to be heard before a ‘juvenile judge’.

Much of the language used in Military Order 1644 is discretionary in nature, not mandatory. For example, the ‘juvenile military court’ must convene in separate rooms ‘as much as possible’ and children must not be brought to the court, or detained with adults, ‘as much as possible.’

It must be recalled that over 700 Palestinian children are prosecuted in Israeli military courts each year and the most common charge is throwing stones, including throwing stones at the Wall. The changes proposed by Military Order 1644 appear to lack substance.

As a minimum safeguard, DCI-Palestine continues to call upon the Israeli authorities to:

Ensure that no child is interrogated in the absence of a lawyer of their choice or family member;

Ensure that all interrogations of children are video recorded;

Ensure that all evidence suspected of being obtained through ill-treatment or torture be rejected by the military courts;

Ensure that all credible allegations of ill-treatment and torture be thoroughly and impartially investigated and those found responsible for such abuse be brought to justice.

I also strongly condemn and reject the interference of the Israeli military censorship, who tries to impose his dirty mission on newspapers, websites and blogs, published outside Israel with continued terror, bullying and intimidation done by many front organizations and individuals of lacking intellect, who call themselves “glorious” names “Fancy Titles” but who in fact work for Israel and the IDF censorship office in Beit Agron, and who also get paid by them.

I strongly condemn the military censorship imposed on my correspondence with my homeland Palestine, by Israeli military “security” in the post office, in the West part of occupied Jerusalem, people who open and empty my packages of it’s content, destroying my videos which shows the crimes of the military occupation in Palestine. (See a copy of a letter from the Post office informed me that my letter had arrived at their office opened and damages).

Yesterday I was forwarded an email been sent by one of these “Fancy Titles”  people, IDF fronts abroad, who tried bully a German website which translated and published my article into removing my article, thus de-facto imposing the IDF censorship in a foreign publication. See the e-mail attached as a PDF. This slanderous and menacing E-mail was sent to German government ministers in copy. The writers of this badly written E-mail questioned the validity of the information I mention in my article, and the validity of my sources. While the Email was sent to another website and only forwarded to me, I thought it appropriate to answer these small-time bullies because the article is mine. My response to the threat Email sent to LinkeZeitung as a PDF. I will translate both e-mails as soon as I can.

As a journalist I know how to get direct access to ministers and government offices; I have documented the crimes perpetrated by Israel since my family left their homeland in the north of Palestine, today called Israel, 61 years ago.

After the criticism of  the “Fancy Titles” people against my latest article body snatching by the IDF and their partners in crime at Abu Kabir, I have decided to publicize each crime with further details to show that Israel is a state of cutthroats and thieves next to being a criminal occupier.

I am also sure that all the governments know what happened to the Palestinians since 1948 until today, and that Israel is established on the destruction and genocide of the Palestinian nation. But while these governments are paralyzed and unable to do much about about the Israeli genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the violations of the international humanitarian laws because of their thorough infiltration by zionist elements, I have decided to go ahead with my work exposing further details about the Israeli crimes, whether the criminals and their allies and frontmen like what I write or not.

I will not start from the story of my relative murdered and autopsied. First I will start presenting the full details of the murder of three children and the abduction of their bodies and autopsy which I mentioned before. Here is the Press Release issued by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights concerning this crime.

here is the testimony in Arabic by the director of Al-Shifa’a hospital in Gaza as PD F.

(I was not able to translate it because of the horrible things which are described. Perhaps the people “Fancy Titles” and the IDF military censorship will be able to translate it)  I hope that the bullies from “Fancy Titles” people will enjoy it).

Below is a Press release which I received in 2002

Press Release

New evidence in case of three Palestinian children unlawfully killed by Israeli forces

Ref: 11/2002

Date: 30 January 2002

New evidence has been obtained demonstrating the excessive and disproportionate use of force by Israeli forces against three Palestinian children killed last month. According to recent statements made by the Israeli military commander of the northern Gaza Strip, Israeli forces used “Fletchette” shells (shells containing dart-like shrapnel which is fired over a large area upon impact) in the incident when the three children were killed.

PCHR, the legal representative of the victims’ families, expresses its serious concerns regarding this case and reiterates its call for the international community and the United Nations to initiate a full, independent and impartial investigation into the case, to bring to justice those responsible and to provide effective reparations, including adequate compensation for the families of the victims.

On Sunday, 30 December 2001, Israeli forces fired artillery shells at three Palestinian children north of Beit Lahia, killing them. The victims, all from Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood in Gaza, were:

• Ahmed Mohammed Banat, age of 15.
• Mohammed ‘Abdel-Rahman El-Madhoun, age of 16
• Mohammed Ahmed Lubbad, age of 17.

At approximately 17:40 on that day, an Israeli tank positioned in the vicinity of “Elli Sinai” settlement, north of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, fired four artillery shells at a Palestinian agricultural area, under full control of the Palestinian National Authority, approximately 1200m south of the settlement.

Then, Israeli forces opened fire at the area from heavy and medium machine guns. Approximately 30 minutes later, the Israeli forces issued a statement claiming that they had killed three gunmen who were attempting to enter “Elli Sinai” settlement. Later, the Israeli forces stated that the three children were attempting to plant bombs in the area. A later statement from the Israeli military asserted that the children were armed with knives.

The Israeli authorities did not immediately release the bodies of the three victims and did not issue information regarding their identities or ages. Three families from Sheikh Radwan neighborhood notified PCHR about the disappearance of three of their children while they were returning home from a visit to a friend in Beit Lahia.

This raised fears that the three children might be the victims killed by Israeli forces. On 2 January 2002, PCHR, through an Israeli lawyer, Andre Rosenthal, sent a message to the Israeli military legal advisor, requesting the recovery of the three bodies to the Palestinian National Authority in order to be identified, and called for an investigation into the case. The bodies were handed over to the Palestinian National Authority on the same day, but no investigation was initiated by the Israeli military.

PCHR has continued to follow up the case internationally and within Israel. On 8 January 2002, PCHR sent appeals to John Dugard, Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Arab Territories, including Palestine; Asma Jahangir, Special Rapporteur for Summary, Arbitrary, and Extra-Judicial Executions; and Olara Otunnu, Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children in Armed Conflict. PCHR requested that they take immediate steps to ensure a thorough, independent and impartial investigation into this incident is conducted, and that other cases of possible willful killings and excessive use of lethal force perpetrated in the Occupied Palestinian Territories be similarly investigated, with appropriate legal action taken.

In addition to following the case through its lawyer in Israel, PCHR coordinated with the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI), and Physicians for Human Rights, providing the two organizations with information, in order for them to pressure inside Israel for an investigation into the case. In its letter to the two organizations, PCHR stated its initial comments and conclusions regarding the incident:

 

• The children were fired at from a significant distance, when they had posed no threat to the lives of Israeli soldiers.
• The three children were extra-judicially killed since no efforts were made to arrest them.
• The victims were unarmed civilians under the age of 18.
• The bodies were taken to the Legal Medicine Institute in Abu Kabir without the approval of their families and without a court decision.
• An autopsy conducted by Palestinian officials indicated that the bodies had been mutilated and that one of the victims had been trampled by a large vehicle.

Following a request by Member of Knesset Tamar Jabotnisky, the Israeli parliamentary foreign and security committee held a session on 23 January 2002 to address this case. Representatives of the PCATI and Physicians for Human Rights attended the session.

In his statement before the committee, the Israeli military commander of the northern Gaza Strip revealed new information which supports the conclusion that the children were willfully killed.

His statement can be summed up in the following points:

• At approximately 17:48 on 30 December 2001, three suspects were noticed in the vicinity of “Elli Sinai” settlement. The officer in command of a tank fired four artillery shells at the three, killing them.
  
• One of the bodies was then run over by the tank. The tanks shells fired contained nails (flechettes) which were scattered as far as 100m away from the point of impact.

In his statement before the committee, Director of the Legal Medicine Institute (Abu Kabir) explained that the victims died having sustained injuries inflicted by the nails in the shells and that one of the bodies had then been run over by a tank. This information further supports the conclusion that the killings were willful and a violation of international human rights and humanitarian law.

The Israeli military representative also produced video footage before the committee showing that the victims were positioned at a significant distance from the Israeli military position. It is PCHR’s opinion that this information collectively indicates that the Israeli military extrajudicially killed the three, and used excessive and disproportionate force. All evidence indicated that the victims had not posed any threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers, that the soldiers had not resorted to less lethal force as required by international standards and had made no attempts to arrest the suspects prior to opening fire. The video footage also reaffirmed that the victims were unarmed contrary to claims made by the Israeli military.

The session was adjourned, to be reconvened later this week, pending receipt of the report of the Israeli Legal Medicine Institute on the case.

In light of these developments, PCHR asserts:

 

The killing of the three children was willful and extra-judicial in violation of international human rights and humanitarian law, and that Israeli forces have full legal responsibility for their deaths, including with respect to the provision of compensation to the victims families, in accordance with international law.

In immediately resorting to the use of artillery shells despite no threat having been posed to the lives of the soldiers, the Israeli forces employed excessive and disproportionate force.

It was not the first time that Israeli forces have employed “Fletchette” shells against Palestinian civilians. A number of Palestinian civilians have been killed or injured by such shells, including when no threat was posed to the lives of Israeli soldiers, according to PCHR’s investigations.

Despite all these facts, Israeli forces have not initiated a full and proper investigation into this case or many other similar cases. The autopsy of the bodies took place at the Israeli Legal Medicine Institute without the approval of the victims’ families and without a court decision – according to the director of the institute, the bodies of the victims were brought to the institute without having been identified in contravention of Israeli law.

The video footage showing the killing of the three children should be made public.

The international community and the United Nations must call for a thorough, independent and impartial investigation into this incident, and that other cases of possible wilful killings and excessive use of lethal force perpetrated in the Occupied Palestinian Territories be similarly investigated.

The use of such shells against a civilian population is unlawful under international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. The Israeli military commander also confirmed that an Israeli tank ran over the body of one of the victims.

SOURCE: http://www.kawther.info/wpr/2009/08/28/fancy-title-people-and-the-idf-against-journalists

The plan keeps the Israelis as occupiers, but with a few twists like in Oslo, such as political prisoners should be released. It seems to be asking Palestinians to sanction occupation instead of dismantling the system of the occupiers. Critics note that no one should be asked to trade freedom for political prisoners in exchange for accepting control of their air space, or any other type of control.

Legislative Council member Hassan Khreisheh told PNN Wednesday that he is among those who have obtained a copy of the draft plan which US President Barack Obama intends to announce during the next month.

The draft is in heavy circulation in Palestinian and Arab circles, and addresses a new American plan.

Media sources report that during his recent meetings in the US, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak also saw the American plan to be launched by Obama.

A spokesperson for the Egyptian president said the US administration is planning to announce a political plan with regard to Palestine and the Israelis at the beginning of the opening of the new session of the United Nations General Assembly in September.

The Israelis have yet to heed the dozens of United Nations resolutions, both from the General Assembly and the Security Council, on the issue. If Obama is looking for a new resolution it is expected that the Israelis will honor it only if it is clearly in their favor.

According to Khreisheh of the PLC, the draft plan includes ten basic points, including:

- An international presence in the Jordan Valley and other areas in the West Bank.

- Reducing the areas of East Jerusalem to be under Israeli control, with respect to the Islamic religious sanctities. It will be under the sovereignty of Arab and Islamic countries.

- Resolving the Palestinian organizations and turning them into political parties.

- Keeping the major settlement blocs in the West Bank, and negotiating on small settlements in three months.

- To keep other areas in the West Bank, demilitarized zones, with Israeli control of the skies.

- To intensify the Israeli-Palestinian security coordination in the West Bank.

- The Palestinian Authority to prevent the establishment of any military alliance with any regional state.

- An assurance by the United States for a Palestinian state in the summer of 2011.

- Agreed to accommodate the number of refugees in the Jordan Valley and other areas in the West Bank, and specifically between the towns of Nablus and Ramallah, and the establishment of an international fund to support the refugees.

- Israel begins release of Palestinian prisoners, with the start of the signing of this Convention, continue to release for a period of three years.

http://www.alhaq.org/pdfs/gaza-operation-cast-Lead-statistical-analysis%20.pdf

Al-Haq is an independent Palestinian non-governmental human rights organisation based in Ramallah, West Bank. Established in 1979 to protect and promote human rights and the rule of law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the organisation has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

Al-Haq documents violations of the individual and collective rights of Palestinians in the OPT, irrespective of the identity of the perpetrator, and seeks to end such breaches by way of advocacy before national and international mechanisms and by holding the violators accountable. The organisation conducts research; prepares reports, studies and interventions on breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law in the OPT; and undertakes advocacy before local, regional and international bodies. Al-Haq also cooperates with Palestinian civil society organisations and governmental institutions in order to ensure that international human rights standards are reflected in Palestinian law and policies. The organisation has a specialised international law library for the use of its staff and the local community.

(Introduction to the PDF)

On the morning of 27 December 2008, the Israeli occupying forces launched ‘Operation Cast Lead,’ a wide-ranging military offensive against the Gaza Strip. 80 warplanes carried out a devastating surprise airstrike campaign whose scale and intensity signalled Israel’s intention to inflict widespread destruction throughout the Gaza Strip.

After 22 days of unrelenting aerial attacks coupled with an intensive ground invasion that began on 3 January 2009, the death toll exceeded 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians including women and children. Over 5,000 more were wounded. Excessive civilian casualties were compounded by the unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure across the Gaza Strip including hospitals, schools, mosques, civilian homes, police stations and United Nations compounds.

During the offensive, Al-Haq’s fieldworkers, as well as those of its partner organisation, the Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, collected information and evidence relating to the ongoing attack throughout the Gaza Strip. Owing to the sheer volume of incidents that occurred over the 22-day assault, Al-Haq, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, recruited six additional temporary fieldworkers to assist its two permanent field workers in Gaza, who are supported by Diakonia. During the assault and in the months following it, the field workers set about comprehensively documenting the destruction wrought during the offensive. 30,000 copies of questionnaires were prepared in order to collect data on the damage inflicted during the attack, and the fieldworkers went from site to site meticulously documenting the details of each incident. Sworn affidavits were taken from witnesses and victims, as well as supportive visual evidence in the form of photographs and videos.

Medical reports were obtained from hospitals where relevant. Details were verified and cross-checked, and all the information was entered into a single database kept jointly with Al-Mezan.

This report presents a selection of the data collected, with tables illustrating the extent of the killing and the destruction perpetrated by the Israeli Occupying Forces during the offensive.

(Conclusion of the PDF)

On the basis of the data presented in this report, an analysis of the choice of targeted areas, methods of attack and the number of civilians killed and injured clearly indicates a reckless disregard for civilian life synonymous with intent. Further, it is clear that 'Operation Cast Lead' was not just an assault against the Palestinian population, but also against the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure and the livelihoods of its people, with factories, farms and other economic resources systematically targeted. Prima facie evidence exists of the commission of war crimes amounting to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, most notably wilful killing of civilians, including women and children; extensive destruction of property, both residential and commercial, public and private; and wilfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body or health. This is in addition to the fact that the resort to the use of force by Israel was unlawful in the first place.

The denial of access to foreign journalists during the siege and Israel’s refusal to cooperate with various international investigation mechanisms that have been established are testament to a desire to suppress the truth and full information regarding the scale of the destruction wrought by this unprecedented attack. The figures contained in this report are intended to contribute to a growing database of documentary evidence on 'Operation Cast Lead'.

More than six months after the end of operation, the Gaza Strip remains under siege. The continued border closures by Israel and the prevention of crucial supplies from entering Gaza, ensure that the humanitarian situation remains dire.

SEE ALSO: http://www.alhaq.org/index.php

http://ingaza.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/widespread-attacks-on-gaza-leave-at-least-227-dead-hundreds-seriously-injured/

UNITED NATIONS FACT FINDING MISSION ON THE GAZA CONFLICT

Fax: (41-22) 928 9003, Telephone: (41 22) 928 9205, E-mail: factfindinggaza@ohchr.org

Call for Submissions

            Pursuant to Resolution S-9/1 of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), adopted on 12 January 2009 at the conclusion of the 9th Special Session of the Council,  the President of the Human Rights Council established, on 3 April 2009, an International Independent Fact Finding Mission mandated “to investigate all violations of International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 whether before during or after”.

          The President of the Council, Ambassador Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, appointed the following as members of the Fact Finding Mission: Justice Richard J. Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and current Spinoza Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanity and Social Sciences; Professor Christine Chinkin, Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London; Ms. Hina Jilani, Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and former Special Representative of the Secretary General on Human Rights Defenders; and Colonel (retired from the Irish Armed Forces) Desmond Travers, member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI).

            The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict is pleased to invite all interested persons and organizations to submit relevant information and documentation that will assist in the implementation of the Mission's mandate.

            Submissions should focus on events and conduct that occurred in the context of the armed conflict that took place between 27 December 2008 and 19 January 2009. The Mission considers that, for the purposes of its mandate, events since June 2008 are particularly relevant to the conflict.

            The Mission would be grateful if submissions were presented as concisely as possible. 

            Due to time constraints the Mission would be grateful to receive submissions in English, but will also accept submissions in Arabic or Hebrew.

             Unless otherwise indicated by the author, the Mission will assume that submissions can be made public. Please indicate whether you wish parts or whole submissions to be treated as confidential.      

             Any information submitted to the Mission in writing should be sent to the Secretariat of the Fact-Finding Mission c/o OHCHR, G. Motta 48, Geneva, or at the email: factfindinggaza@ohchr.org, no later than 30 June 2009.

 8 June 2009

THAT was the formal calling, and I hope many are able to contribute.

THIS is what was written about the Chairman of the Commission:

by Alexander Higgins/Associated Press

Sunday April 19, 2009, 10:16 PM

GENEVA — The Palestinian human rights debate has taken a new turn with the appointment of Richard Goldstone, a Jew with close ties to Israel, to head a U.N. investigation into atrocities allegedly committed in Israel's recent war with Hamas.

Goldstone, who played a prominent role in the campaign against apartheid in his native South Africa, rose to global prominence in 1994 when he became U.N. chief prosecutor for war crimes.

On the initiative of several research centres, associations and socio-political movements, The Beirut International Forum was held on 16, 17 and 18 January 2009, attended by Arab and international delegations and authorities from five continents (66 countries).

This Forum, in which South America, Asia and Near East were massively represented, embodied the spirit of the Tricontinental centre.

Two major topics characterised the Forum. On one hand, the heroic resistance by the Palestinian people of Gaza and their ability to confront an intense violence and unprecedented barbarity. On the other, capitalism’s global crisis, which is not only financial but also on economic, social, cultural and moral fronts, thus posing a threat to the survival of humanity itself.
Principles and rights

The Forum declares that:

- All Peoples have the right to resist. This right must be inalienable, supported by the entire international community and recognised as such within international law;

- The resistance’s fight against colonialism can’t be detached from the struggle carried out by world revolutionaries and free individuals when facing global capitalism, imperialism, militarisation and destruction of social achievements. These have been the product of the working classes’ tenacious struggles for two hundred years;

- Peoples have the right to sovereignty over their own natural resources. Rights to nourishment, health and education prevail over all commercial stakes;

- Every culture has to be able to help build humanity’s common good with respect for nature, the supremacy of human needs and a democratic management of societies;

- The right to democratic participation must be exerted not only on a political level but also on an economic one and it applies to men and women alike;

- The right to cultural differentiation and freedom of worship without any cultural or racial stigmatisation.

Campaigns and resolutions
Concerning Gaza:

The Forum’s attendees declare their support of the Palestinian people’s resistance of Gaza. They condemn the terrorism, crimes, violations of the rule of law and disregard for human value, which Israel has inflicted on these populations.

Moreover, they call for:
1-     Applying severe sanctions against Israel, such as: calling off relations and covenants and forbidding any sale of weapons to this country;
2-     Legal proceedings against states and companies selling weapons to Israel;
3-     Urging the EU to put an end to all economic, political and cultural relations with Israel and to cancel all the covenants and agreements linking it with this country;
4-     Holding an international conference in order to judge war crimes and crimes against humanity inflicted upon Gaza’ s population, as well as economic and environmental crimes, and to bring to court the persons accountable for these actions, as well as for those committed in Lebanon in 2006;
5-     Restoring UN Resolution 3379 which classifies Zionism as racism, and ousting Israel from the UN;
6-     Launching an international campaign for rebuilding Gaza, lifting the blockade and having political prisoners released

Concerning the anti-imperialistic and anti-colonialist struggle
1-     The Forum participants expressed their support for both the Palestinian and Lebanese resistances against Israeli occupation, as well as to the Iraqis’ fight against American occupation. In addition, they back the Iraqi people’s endeavours to preserve their territorial unity.
2-     The participants declare their support for self-determination for the Afghan people and to their struggle against the American and Atlantic occupation.
3-     The participants salute Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales for their support to the peoples’ resistance. They express total endorsement of their fight against US’s interference in South America.
4-     They call for lifting the embargo on Cuba and the release of Cuban prisoners detained in US’ prisons.
5-     They demand the establishment of an international league of Parliamentary members in order to uphold the peoples’ right to resistance and self-determination, in order to restore accords relevant to the defence of civilian populations.
6-     They urge the creation of an international media network that may expose the mendacious propaganda concerning Israel’s character and crimes.
7-     Carrying on the moral imperative to judge war crimes, namely bringing to court the people responsible for the war crimes committed in Lebanon in 2006.
8-     Launching a campaign to enforce the consultative advice by the International Court of Justice concerning the wall’s ethnic segregation in Palestine.
9-     Setting up an international network with the aim of coordination between local delegations during crises and wars.
10-          Refusing threats and provocations by the US against Iran with regard to its right to develop its nuclear program for civil purposes within the context of international laws. Refusing, likewise, the threats of war by the US towards Syria and Sudan.
11-          Opposing American attempts to make international and humanitarian laws ineffective under the pretext of the war on terror.

The participants suggest the following as alternatives to the market’s blackmail:
1-     Excluding agriculture and feeding-related sectors from the international negotiations contemplating the privitisation of markets (GATT, OMC…)
2-     Turning down accords and international policies that allow corporations to control living organisms thus jeopardizing biodiversity.
3-     Setting up a Mediterranean Common Market based on fair trade between customers and producers, from the north and the south of the basin as well as within each country. All this is to be performed within a process for building an area linking Mediterranean basin with Mesopotamia (leaving out Israel until the colonial question in Palestine is settled), in opposition to Sarkozy’s neo-liberal project.
4-     Fighting the excessive exploitation carried out by industrial fishing in favour of artisan fishery.
5-     Preserving the common asset of humanity and the fundamental resources for living. Developing organic agriculture and using renewable energy sources.

The Center for Studies and Documentation in Beirut, International Campaign against American and Zionist Occupation (the Cairo Conference), the National Gathering to Support the Choice of Resistance (Lebanon), The International Anti-Imperialist and Peoples’ Solidarity Forum (the Calcutta- India Conference), Stop The War Campaign (London), L’union de la jeunesse démocratique (Liban), Réseau des organisations de la jeunesse Palestinienne, The Party of Dignity (Egypt), The Popular Campaign to Break the Siege on Gaza, KIFAYA (le mouvement egyptien pour le changement), Union of Democratic Youth (Lebanon), Egyptian Women Issues Association, Palestinian Youth Organizations Network (Palestine), Fédération des Syndicats marocains, AMCI (The Mediterranean Agency for International Cooperation (Morocco), Arab Youth Council- and the wWalk to the aArab pParliament (Morocco), Data and Strategic Studies Center (Syria), El Badil Regroupement Anti Globalisation (Syria), Campaign Genoa 2001 Greece, l’altra Lambardia-Sulatesta, Anti- Imperialist Camp (Grèce),  Socialist Thinking Forum (Jordan), Organisation des socialistes révolutionnaires (Egypt), To be continued…

TRANSLATED BY DIEGO TRAVERSA AND REVISED BY SAJA RAOOF, MEMBERS OF TLAXCALA. www.tlaxcala.es

I have decided to publish some names and photos of the Israeli military personnel who participated in the so-called “Operation Cast Lead”, the offensive launched by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on the Gaza Strip between 27 December and 18 January 2009. The names of these criminals called my attention since the first day of their criminal attack against the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. I consider each person who took part in this IOF and each one whose name appears in this report as a war criminal who should be requested by an international court of justice, just like all other war criminals who were persecuted before…

The criminal intentions of Menechem Mazuz, namely helping to cover up war crimes of the State of Israel by giving an advice to the military, and by opening a “formal and internal investigations” is a clear fraud planned by the Israeli ministry of justice. Such a behavior is not that of a state, it is the behavior of a criminal organization trying to escape their well deserved punishment.

The military censor of Israel is preventing the media from identifying officers who participated in the Gaza Strip IOF, and divulging information about them which could be used in legal proceedings against them in courts of justice abroad. There is great concern at the defense and the justice ministries that Israeli officers will be singled out in a massive wave of suits for human rights violations.

In recent days the censor has forbidden publishing the full names and photographs of officers from the level of battalion commander down. It is assumed that the identity of brigade commanders has already been made known. The censor also forbids any reports tying a particular officer of battlefield command rank (lieutenant to lieutenant colonel) to destruction inflicted in a particular area.

The Israeli war criminal number one, Ehud Barak, stated that the State of Israel bears the responsibility for sending IOF troops on missions in Gaza, as well as for defending civilians, and as such it is obligated to grant its full support to these officers and soldiers who participated in the IOF in Gaza. Barak said that no harm should come to officers and soldiers as a result of their involvement in the operation.

The war criminal Barak ordered the IOF to set up a team of intelligence and legal experts to collect evidence related to operations in Gaza that could be used to defend military commanders against future lawsuits abroad.

Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, a war criminal, Commander of Israeli air forces which lead all the operation of destruction with tons of phosphorus bombs.

Colonel Ron Ashrov, a war criminal, Commander of the Northern Gaza, deputy to the Givati Brigade.

Brigadier-General Eyal Eisenberg - Commander of all the IOF war criminal forces of “Operation Cast Lead” were under his command in Gaza Division. He personally participated in the war. He commanded the operations, in which Armored and Engineering corps units, as well as infantry soldiers were taking part. Eisenberg also commanded a division during the Second Lebanon War.

Colonel Yigal Slovik, commander of 401st Armored Corps Brigade convoy, entered Gaza in a Merkava tank from Netzarim and he did not stop until it reached the coast. He murdered the Palestinian civilians who raised the white flags, and he destroyed many houses over the head of the people. The brigade units also conducted numerous raids targeting public infrastructure.

Sho’alay Marom, Brigadier (res.), razed to the ground hundreds of houses in Rafah, and in Jabalia.

Lt. Col. Yoav Mordechai, he served as a commander of the criminal Golani infantry brigade’s 13th Battalion in Gaza and in the “second Lebanon war”. He attacked the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, where hundreds of Palestinian residents who had fled on foot were murdered under his instructions. In one well-known incident, about more 150 Palestinian civilians were gathered by the IOF in a house, and then the house was bombed and shelled. Lt. Col. Yoav Mordechai is a friend of the PA, and it is known that he coordinated his crimes with the PA.

Lt. Col. Oren Cohen, a war criminal, commander of Battalion 13 in the Golani Brigade, who led on night his troops into eastern of Gaza City, they murdered over hundred Palestinian. He was moderately wounded by the Israeli war criminal friends. Cohen and his soldiers operated during the second Lebanon war.

Lt. Col. Avi Blot, a war criminal, commander of the 101st Battalion in the Paratrooper Brigade.

Lieutenant-Colonel Yehuda Cohen, battalion commander in Givati infantry Brigade’s Rotem Regiment, a war criminal in the second war in Lebanon, and a war criminal in Gaza.

Lieutenant-Colonel Ronen Dagmi, deputy commander of the 401st Armored Brigade which operated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Col. Avi Peled, a war criminal, a commander brigade in Battalion 51 who operated in Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead”, and he was operated during the second war of Lebanon.

Brig.-Gen. ( res.) Zvika Fogel, a war criminal, a former deputy OC Southern Command in charge of artillery fire for Operation Cast Lead. Zvika and his son Zivi Fogel participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.
Brigadier-General Yuval Halamish, Chief IOF Intelligence Officer, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Col. Hertzi Halevy, brigade commander, a former Sayeret Matkal, commander of the Israel Paratroopers’ Brigade in Gaza, committed war crimes in Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead”.

Col. Tomer Tsiter, a Givati squad commander from Ra’anana, participated in the massacre in Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead”, and previously he participated in the massacre “Operation Defensive Shield” in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002.

Gur Rosenblatt, infantry reserve officer, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Guy Ohaion, infantry reserve officer, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Lt. Col. Erez, armored corps, tank commander, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Maj. Nimrod Aloni, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Shlomo Saban, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Capt. Ron Vardi, a war criminal, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, IOF Chief of Staff, whose father was a holocaust survivor from Bulgaria and whose mother was born in Syria. This moral degenerate is the engineer of this new  holocaust in Gaza. He committed war crimes in south of Lebanon. Three of his soldiers were captured by the Hizbullah resistance after they illegally crossed into Lebanon as a provocation ordered by him.

Major-General Yoav Galant, southern command chief. He was the chief commander in charge of “Operation Cast Lead”. He personally participated in the massacre against civilians in Gaza.

Richard Awizrat, Senior Warrant Officer, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza, and he also participated in the massacre in Jenin of 2002, during “Operation Defensive Shield”.

Major General Amos Yadlin, Military Intelligence chief, participated in “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

Ehud Olmert, the corrupt Israeli Prime Minster legitimized the War in Gaza together with his cabinet.

Ehud Barak, Israeli War Minister, planned “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza in order to improve his chances during the next elections.

Tzipi Livni, Foreign Minister of Israel, who leads the Israeli propaganda to legitimize the massacre and destruction in Gaza, planned and coordinated “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza in order to improve her chances during the next elections

The names of many other war criminals from the infantry, tanks, combat engineers, artillery, and intelligence who participated in the war crimes in Gaza are still unknown. They should not feel safe either. War crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are proscribed and prosecuted in all countries of the world in one way or other, and there exists no statute of limitations for such crimes. The “protection” offered by Mazuz and his cronies is weak, first of all because the fact that such “protection” is offered is a implicit admission of guilt, and because national and international statutes specifically address the issue of sham “proceedings which are instituted to protect the guilty”, and because since the Nuremberg proceedings against the German army, following orders is no excuse and does not absolve of culpability. We and others will continue doing whatever is possible to find out the names of as many of the criminals who participated in Gaza as possible, and any information which will put them behind bars.

Read and See more Photos About the Israeli War Criminals here.

Yuval Diskin, Shin Bet security service chief, the organizer of the war in Gaza. Due to his personal recommendation, the IAF bombed the hospitals and the medical centers of Gaza.

Brig Gen Jonathan Locker, head of Israeli air forces which operated in Gaza.

My decision is a challenge to the State of Israel, to the Israeli attorney general Mazuz and the military headquarters, who forbade the media from publishing the names of the Israeli officers who lead “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza, murdering 1310, and wounding over 5600, over 90% of these casualties being civilians, destroying public and the private property in many parts of towns and cities, and completely razing several areas completely to the ground.

Translated by Diego Traversa and revised by Mary Rizzo for www.tlaxcala.es  

Like any fact risking being spread to the extent of undermining world peace, it’s necessary to see who should be considered accountable for what’s happening in Palestine.

In fact, the western media accept all too easily, for reasons that cannot be analyzed here, the Israeli version according to which the operation “Cast Lead” is supposed to be nothing but a retaliation against Hamas launching several dozen rockets towards Israeli-populated areas close to the Gaza Strip.

First of all, it’s worth stating that Hamas’ military strength is by far lesser than the Jewish State’s. Against about 15 thousand armed militants reported as being Hamas members, Israel can deploy some 3,630 heavy tanks (1,350 of which are new models), 6,870 armoured, 896 pieces of heavy artillery, 250 mortars, 48 multiple launchers of 227-mm missiles, 520 crafts and 180 fighting helicopters, 13 warships and 3 submarines, 630 thousand soldiers (reservists included), 500 thousand of which belong to the army, as well as 7,650 men from the border police. Moreover, the Jewish State is presumably thought to have 150 nuclear bombs, some of which can possibly be launched by submarines.

At the end of the day, the sheer quantitative relation between the victims of the conflict has for years presented figures totally unfavourable to the Palestinians: as matter of fact, since 28 September 2000, that’s the beginning of the Second Intifada, 5,302 Palestinians and 1,082 Israelis died, that makes it a 5-to-1 ratio (source: “Internazionale”, issue 775, December 2008).

This blood-curdling body count isn’t uncalled for since these quantitative relations are highly held into account by the Israeli military officers when reckoning the outcomes of this typical low-intensity conflict: this is proved by the fact that the Israeli Shin Bet’s chief Yuval Duskin set forth, in January 2008, the “results” achieved by its organization just by claiming 810 Palestinians killed during the last two years (G. Levy, “Strong in numbers”, Haaretz, 21 January 2008).

For more details over the ghastly facts that have produced this bloodshed between 2007 and 2008, we refer you, without any pretension of completeness, to the chronology of events in the appendix.

Hence it’s reasonable to state that there is no strictly military reason that may account for the Israeli attack against the Gaza Strip, since Israel proved to be pretty able to handle, with satisfactory results, this kind of conflict that the experts define “asymmetrical”.

Even as regards the second element of “blame” placed on Hamas, namely its liability for breaking the truce, a simple and unbiased reconstruction of the events in the last months, provided that it is depending on facts, actually shows Israel’s blatant responsibilities that originate from a clear, wanton and lasting strategy.

As has been observed by authoritative Israeli figures (interview with the Israeli general Shlomo Gazit, “The aim? It’s political, not military”, Il Messaggero daily, 29 December 2008), the Israeli attack’s reasons are merely political, leaving out of consideration the level of military intensity and the risks of a still possible extension of the conflict that might come in the future.

The truce between Hamas and Israel was reached on 19 June 2008 by virtue of Egyptian mediation: the aim was that of favouring an agreement between Al Fatah and Hamas, as a result of the internecine clash that had been going on for months, as indispensable promise to achieve an accord with the Jewish State, according to the expectations of Egypt and Saudi Arabia who are lined up with the western countries in demanding a partition, albeit unequal, of Palestine between Israel and Palestinians.

What is clear is that the truce was necessary to Hamas which had just taken over the control of the Gaza Strip, having to cope with, on one side, the Israeli army’s pressure and, on the other, the sealed Egyptian border and the civil conflict with Al-Fatah. After all, this is maintained, without mincing his words, by what today seems to be the Israeli strong man, Minister of Defence and former chief of staff of the Jewish State, Ehud Barak. To the Italian correspondent who interviewed him, during the truce, by asking: “The Israeli government has agreed on a truce with Hamas. Does this mean the failure of the political/economic embargo policy?”, he clearly replies: “Quite the contrary. Hamas demanded the ceasefire due to the embargo’s pressure and the military operations against the Qassam rocket launches. We won’t negotiate with Hamas, we are only dealing for having the kidnapped soldier released (translator’s note, Gilad Shalit). And we won’t negotiate until they accept the Quartet’s conditions: the recognition of Israel, acknowledgment of previous agreements and the giving up on violence. In short, until Hamas stops being Hamas.” (Corriere della Sera, 7 August 2008).

As gesture meant to prove its good will, on 30 October Hamas released all of the 19 Al-Fatah members it had been keeping in detention, in consideration of the opening of direct talks, which were to start on 8 November in Cairo. On Monday 3 November, Hamas dispatched beforehand a delegation to study Egypt’s and Al-Fatah’s proposals.

Wednesday 5 November an Israeli paratrooper unit carried out a “targeted” attack over the little town of Deir-al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, reportedly at the aim of destroying a tunnel used for introducing men and materials in Palestinian territory: a Palestinian fighter died during the operation. Hamas’ answer was a mortar shell towards Israeli territory. Israel then launched an air attack during which a further five Hamas fighters died.

Under the pretext of the rocket launches following the killing of the six militants, at that point Israel started closing all the border crossings thanks to which all the food, fuel and medicines could enter to bring relief to the 1.5 million Gazans.

“The attack comes shortly before a key meeting this Sunday in Cairo when Hamas and its political rival Al-Fatah will hold talks on reconciling their differences and creating a single, unified government. It will be the first time the two sides have met at this level since fighting a near civil war more than a year ago”, is the comment by Rory McCarthy, Jerusalem-based correspondent from the Guardian.

According to the Associated Press, the decision of the attack came directly from the Minister of Defence Ehud Barak: hence, not a mere routine operation but a military one which was politically motivated, since it infringed the truce standing since June 2008 and just at a time when the Palestinians had the first serious chance, after a year, of re-establishing a unified government to negotiate, in a united way, with Israel.

Yet, the importance of the attack didn’t only lie in making a détente between the 13 Palestinian fighting factions impossible: the political stakes for Israel were much higher, by investing a strategic element, preventing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from getting internationalized and to keep handling the negotiations within the Jewish State.

As a matter of fact, on 9 November in Sharm-al-Sheik, Egypt, a meeting of the so-called Quartet composed of US, EU, Russia and UN was expected to take place. Their main task was to keep the Annapolis peace process alive, after it had been started without any outstanding result by the American President Bush. The target, announced in November 2007, was in fact that of reaching an agreement between Israel and Al-Fatah within 2008, in order to avoid the definitive failure of the peace process. 

Actually, the 9 November 2008 talks do nothing but bring about an outright empasse: considered that the US and Israel have a change of leadership ahead of them, the only new fact might just be a re-uninified Palestinian leadership that might exert a strong international pressure in favour of the peace process, since only the Palestinians had a concrete interest in reaching an agreement by the end of the year, well aware that otherwise Israel would settle the question on its own.

Therefore, the Israeli attack warded off this risk as well. Actually, Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni would later say unmistakably: “We have taken steps so as to assure that the [peace] process will go on being bilateral and that the world won’t interfere with the contents of the talks but will back them without trying to impose solutions or to come up with frail ones”. Putting the international initiative off until an unspecified time, maybe to spring 2009 in Moscow, Israel therefore won again enough political manoeuvring room to take up the initiative in Palestine without any international interference.

On 11 November, the Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert claimed the inevitability of a clash with Hamas and, the following day, Israel carried out a raid provoking the death of further 4 Hamas militants in order to make the message clear both to Hamas itself and to the international community.

On 23 November, Hamas, urged once again by Egypt, stopped launching rockets and decided to resume talks with Al-Fatah, on condition that Israel would open the crossings in Gaza.

On 8 and 9 December, Israel achieved another fundamental international result, in which the role of the EU (under France’s Presidency) assumed particularly serious importance, considered the context in which it was acting, after the vain Sharm-el-Sheik talks and the Israeli breakdown operations in Gaza. As a matter of fact, EU Foreign Ministers passed a statement entitled “ Council Conclusions Strengthening of EU bilateral relations with its Mediterranean partners – upgrade with Israel”.

Actually, the aspect of particular interest of this statement is that the document was passed by the EU Ministers without taking into account the fact that a few days before, on 5 December, the European parliament, in spite of the personal intervention by Tzipi Livni, pronounced itself against the strengthening of relations with Israel precisely because of the complicated situation in Gaza (“Israël devra attendre", Le Monde, La valise diplomatique, 5 December 2008).

Yet, what was worth noting were the guidelines of the annex of the document, in which the main activities ensuing from the strengthening of the political dialogue with Israel were specified: holding regular joint summits between EU and Israeli Heads of State and Government, a privilege until then granted only to the US, China and Russia; Israeli experts joining EU committees dealing with issues such as the peace process, human rights, combating terrorism and organized crime; informal talks over strategic problems and exchanges dealing with matters of human rights and anti-Semitism; involving Israel in the EU common foreign and security-defence policies (CFSP-ESDP), including also Israeli experts into EU’s extra-European missions, such as in Africa and elsewhere. Moreover, since Israel can’t join the activities by Asia Group within the institutional system of the UN, the EU would seek to get the Jewish State joining the WEOG (“Western European and other Groups”), so that Israel, pursuing its old aspirations, could take part in several UN Councils, amongst which the Security Council!

Thus, thanks to France’s initiatives, Israel attains an extraordinarily important result on a strategic level, since in this way it gets the maximum from an unusual privileged relation with the EU, with huge implications for its international consequences in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. Along with the Sharm-el-Sheik failure, in a few days Israel had therefore achieved an extremely favourable international situation that grants it carte blanche as regards handling the Hamas matter and the Occupied Territories on the whole. This is proved by the fact that on 14 December the Jewish State could afford to stop at Tel Aviv airport and send back, in the general silence by the media, Prof. Richard Falk, Special Rapporteur of the UN, on behalf of which he had drawn up a highly severe report over Israel’s infringements of international law performed in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (scroll down this page for the document: http://www.clarissa.it/documenti/scarica.php?id=44&file=20090101174903FALK_SR_Report_GA_Palestine.pdf).

In consideration of the information he had gathered between January and July 2008, Falk accordingly claimed “the evidence of persisting and deliberate violations by Israel, in its occupation of Palestinian territory,” of the 4th Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of civilians in wartime and of the 1977 Protocol Annex to the 1949 Geneva Convention relating to Protection of victims in armed conflicts, which are fundamental international laws concerning human rights of civilian populations during armed conflicts.

On 17 December, just on the eve of the truce’s expiration, Israel launched another air strike against Gaza to which Hamas responded by firing eight rockets and five mortar shells against small Jewish towns in the south. At the same time, Hamas’ official spokesman Ayman Taha stated that, as Israel had been no longer complying with the truce since November, Hamas wasn’t going to prolong the truce beyond its expiration term, at 6 a.m. of 19 December.

In the meantime, since 4 November, Israel had killed in different operations at least 18 Palestinians altogether, mainly but not only fighters, while Hamas had launched about 200 between rockets and mortar shells, claiming no lives.

Just on 17 December, owing to the renewed hostilities, Israel again closed the crossings preventing the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees) from delivering food to the approximately 750 thousand Palestinians looked after in the Gaza Strip.

In spite of the truce not being prolonged after the expiration date of 19 December, on 20 December Hamas, still on Egyptian proposal, claimed its willingness to concede a further extension of 24 hours, provided that Israel would again open the crossings in order to let humanitarian aid in, while seeming to be willing to reconsider drawing out the truce. 

Israel replied by closing the crossings and launched several air attacks against different posts in the Strip: on December 20, during the strike against Beith Lahiya, it killed a Palestinian militant, Ali Hijazi, while wounding four civilians, two of which were children.

On 21 December Italy itself was dragged into question since the Israeli authorities stopped the distribution by the PNA of Italy-raised funds for 20 million euros in favour of 47 thousand Palestinian families, with 9.36 million destined to the poorest ones. The Israeli-blocked funds were needed to pay social grants allotted to the Gaza population, grants distributed by the EU and financed by the Italian government in favour of 24 thousand poor families who should get their own monthly subsidy (Il Messaggero daily, 22 December 2008).

As far as we know, it doesn’t seem that the Italian government raised any protest against this clear violation of the international accords.

On 22 December, upon Egyptian suggestion, Hamas, please take note, unilaterally decided a 24-hour truce and didn’t any longer launch rockets against Israel in expectation of a meeting between Mubarak and Mahmud Abbas, due to take place on 23 December, as well as with Tzipi Livni, expected in Cairo for 25 December. In the meantime, the Israelis went on keeping the borders shut, worsening the problem of the Gazan population’s survival.

Yet, according to the press, at this date, the outgoing Premier Olmert, Defence Minister Barak and Foreign Minister Livni “were said to have already agreed on timing and methods for an eventual escalation that will be preceded by diplomatic and media campaign on international scale.” (Il Messaggero daily, 23 December 2008).

The same day, a Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, released to the Israeli TV station “Channel 10” a statement according to which Hamas was set to restore the truce with Israel, since “this is the price to pay for the Palestinians’ lives”, while demanding in return that food and electricity supplies be allowed in and the military operations in Gaza and West Bank be stopped (Associated Press, 23 December 2008). The following day these statements would be repeated to other press agencies, for instance by Zahar himself to the authoritative France Press (23 December 2008) and by another Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, to the BBC (23 December 2008).

Meanwhile, Israel went on carrying out manoeuvres with heavy weapons at the borders of Gaza Strip, started on 22 December. Then, on 23 December Israel killed, in other raids over the Strip, three Hamas militants and a fourth one on 24 December, the 23 year old Yahi Al-Shaaher, hit along with another three Palestinians in Rafah, while the Palestinian mortar shells and rockets started again being launched against Sderot. In this way, the chance for a new truce and a development of any negotiation was definitively torpedoed.

The talks in Cairo with Tzipi Livni on 25 December were of no other use but to repeat the accusations against Hamas, while on 26 December Olmert told the TV station Al-Arabya that “I will not hesitate to use Israel's strength to strike at Hamas and Islamic Jihad”.

Through international coverage duly set in the meantime, there was enough room to carry out the military operation, for which the Israeli government and “its” international press sources had the internal and world public opinion gradually prepared, placing the “blame” for the new offensive on Hamas, as imparted by the Jewish State’s Foreign Ministry to all its world diplomatic branches.

Yet, as any other good military operation, the great deal of information, spread through the media and the diplomatic talks underway, carefully preserved some kind of margin for a surprise attack operation: indeed, according to the Israeli site Debka which is specialized in strategy matters and linked Israeli military circles, it seems that Hamas leaders felt reassured due at least to two elements:

First, on Friday 26 December the press news from official Jerusalem sources gave the impression that the military operation approved of by the Israeli government was momentarily being called off, at least until the government held a new meeting for an update about the situation.

Second, Egypt led Hamas astray by reporting, from the “horse’s mouth”, the news according to which Israel wouldn’t attack on Saturday.

Well, these are the bare facts clearly stressing that the Jewish State, 60 years from its foundation and in a very delicate international situation, has simply decided to start a new bloody military operation in Palestine so as to settle the question represented by the Hamas hostile entity, carrying on a long-standing power strategy in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean area that in the next months might bring even more devastating effects on the international euqilibrium: as a matter of fact, it’s hard to think that Israel, in planning its showdown, hasn’t taken Iran into account.
 

Chronology of the major bloody events in the Palestinians territories occupied by Israel 

The record includes the whole of 2007 and 2008 until the truce between Hamas and Israel (June 2008), since the following facts are discussed in the text above.

The news is drawn from press sources and may therefore be incomplete and be characterized by inaccuracies and mistakes. The reported facts mainly bear on Gaza Strip, even though also the main events that occurred in the West Bank have been recalled. Political facts have been reported only as far as they help understand the facts: in this respect, the chronology has no claim to completeness.  

2007 

4 January: clashes between Hamas and Al-Fatah go on in the Gaza Strip

15 Jan: two members from the Popular Resistance Committees killed by the Israeli army in the Strip

24 Jan: an unarmed Palestinian killed in Kissufim, at the border post between the Strip and Israel

25 Jan: at least 35 dead during clashes in Gaza between Hamas and Al-Fatah. On the day following the proclamation of a truce, a Hamas member, Hussein al Shubassi, is killed

4 February: after the break of the truce between Hamas and Al-Fatah, 28 Palestinians die during the 5 day-long clashes in Gaza

8 Feb: through Saudi Arabia’s mediation, Hamas and Al-Fatah reach an agreement in Mecca over a national unity government. Premier Olmert threatens to boycott the new executive unless it will comply with the Quartet’s demands

21 Feb: the Israeli army kills the leader of Islamic Jihad’s military wing in Jenin, Mahmud Qassem Abu Obeid

Three activists of the Islamic Jihad killed by Israeli soldiers in Jenin

12 March: the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston is kidnapped in the Gaza Strip

(15 April: the kidnapping is claimed by an unknown Palestinian group)

14 Mar: Hamas and Al-Fatah agree on the new national unity government (with 9 ministries to Hamas and 6 to Al-Fatah). Israel repeats its position

17 Mar: the new Haniyeh-led government takes office. Israel proclaims a total boycott until Hamas openly recognizes the Jewish State

21 Mar: an armed commando kidnaps Adham al Sufi, professor at the Islamic university of Gaza

27 Mar: two militants from Al Aqsa Brigades killed in Nablus by the Israeli army

4 April: Israeli strike against Beit Hanoun in the Strip: an Islamic Jihad member, Ramez Awad al Zaanin, is killed

7 Apr: Israeli air raid over Gaza Strip kills a member from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fuad Nabil Maaruf

15 Apr: two Palestinians died during fights between rival factions in Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza Strip

17 Apr: an Al Aqsa Brigade member, Ashraf Hanaysha, is killed by the Israeli army near Jenin, in the northern West Bank

21 Apr: three Palestinian militants, a policeman and a 17 year old girl are killed by the Israeli army in Jenin, West Bank. An Islamic Jihad militant killed in Jabalya, in the Gaza Strip

22 Apr: two members of Al Aqsa Brigades killed in Nablus, West Bank

24 Apr: due to the Israeli operations in Gaza and in the West Bank that have provoked 9 dead amongst the Palestinians, the Ezzedin al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed organization, call off the ceasefire being in force since November 2006 and claim the rocket launches against southern Israel

28 Apr: three militants from Ezzedin al Qassam Brigades killed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip

16 May: at least 38 Palestinians died in the clashes in Gaza between Hamas and Al-Fatah; the fights burst following an agreement between Mahmud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh over a security plan in the Occupied Territories. Qassam rockets fired against the town of Sderot. Three Palestinians died after two Israeli strikes in Gaza Strip

19 May: the Palestinian factions reach a truce after 9 day-long fights that caused 50 dead in the Gaza Strip

23 May: 36 dead Palestinians in the Gaza Strip following a series of Israeli air raids against Hamas. An Israeli woman from Sderot is killed by the rocket launches by Palestinian groups

24 May: the Israeli armed forces arrest 30 members from Hamas in the West Bank, amongst which there is the Minister of Education Nasser al Shaer and some members of Parliament

27 May: the Israeli government has ordered further air strikes against the Gaza Strip: since May 16, 50 dead Palestinians and 2 dead Israelis in Sderot due to rocket launches

1 June: two Palestinians, aged 12 and 13, killed by the Israeli army near the former Jewish settlement of Dugit, northern Gaza Strip

9 June: a Palestinian dies in an attack against a military post in Israeli territory near the Gaza Strip

13 June: 67 Palestinians died in clashes between Hamas and Al-Fatah in the Strip

18 June: Hamas takes over control in Gaza Strip

27 June: 9 dead Palestinians and at least 40 wounded during Israel’s military operations in northern Gaza Strip; amongst the dead, there is Raed Fanuna, one of the Islamic Jihad organization’s leaders

 30 June: two Israeli air raids cause the death of 7 Palestinians, amongst which Ziad al Ghanam, one of the chiefs from Al Quds Brigades, Islamic Jihad’s military arm

5 July: a set of Israeli air raids over Gaza Strip kills 11 Palestinian militants, amongst which 6 Hamas members

20 August: six Hamas militants killed in an Israeli raid in Gaza

21 Aug: two children killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza Strip

22 Aug: two Hamas’ and two Islamic Jihad’s members killed in Israeli raids against Gaza Strip

25 Aug: two Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip are killed during an attack in Israeli territory; four Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip (one Palestinian and one Israeli-Arab in the WB)

29 Aug: two Palestinian children killed by the Israeli Armed Forces in Jabalya, Gaza

6 September: 6 Palestinian militants killed by IAF soldiers during the attack against an Israeli military outpost in the Gaza Strip

11 Sept: 69 Israeli soldiers wounded in the blast provoked by a Qassam rocket against the base of Zikim, near Ashkelon

19 Sept: the Israeli government declares the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip a “hostile entity”

26 Sept: 7 Palestinians killed by the IAF in northern Gaza Strip

17 October: an Israeli soldier and a Hamas member die during fights in the south of the Gaza Strip

18 Oct: 4 dead Palestinians during clashes in Gaza between Hamas’ security forces and Al-Fatah’s supporters

25 Oct: the Israeli government sharpens sanctions against Gaza Strip’s population; cuts on fuel and electricity supplies are broken off on demand by Jewish State’s Attorney General Menachem Mazuz

12 November: Hamas’ police fires at the crowd gathered in Gaza during an Al-Fatah-called demonstration: seven dead and over two hundred arrested

20 Nov: 3 Palestinian militants killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip

27 Nov: Annapolis conference, during which Ehud Olmert and Mahmud Abbas commit themselves to reaching a peace accord by the end of 2008

27 Nov: in Hebron, West Bank, Al-Fatah’s police stifles a demonstration against Annapolis conference. One dead and 35 wounded

4 December: three Hamas militants killed during an Israeli air strike over the Gaza Strip

11 Dec: six Hamas militants died in a series of Israeli raids in the Gaza Strip

18 Dec: 13 Palestinian militants died in various Israeli raids in the Gaza Strip, amongst which there is Islamic Jihad’s military chief Majed al Harazin 

2008 

1 January: 8 Palestinians killed during clashes between Hamas and Al-Fatah supporters in the Gaza Strip

3 Jan: Israeli air raids and destruction of houses in northern Gaza Strip: 11 dead Palestinians, among which two women

15 Jan: 17 Palestinians killed during an Israeli air raid over Al Zeitoun in the Gaza Strip; Hamas launches rockets and mortar shells against Sderot provoking four light wounded amongst Israeli civilians; two Palestinians killed after Israeli air raid over Beit Hanoun

16 Jan: Islamic Jihad’s leader Walid Obeidi is killed by the IAF near Jenin, West Bank

17 Jan: the Israeli government enjoins to close all the borders around Gaza Strip

20 Jan: Gaza’s power plant shut down due to lack of fuel

23 and 25 Jan: the dividing fence between Gaza Strip and Egypt is partly pulled down to let tens of thousands of Palestinians take supplies in Egypt and then go back to the Strip

27 February: five members from Hamas’ military wing are killed during air raid over Khan Yunis in Gaza Strip. A Qassam rocket launched from Gaza Strip kills an Israeli in Sderot

3 March: in response to the Israeli killed in Sderot, an Israeli offensive starts against Gaza Strip: 123 dead Palestinians altogether, among which at least half of them are civilians; it’s the bloodiest offensive in the last eight years

12 Mar: Hamas’ leader Ismail Haniyeh proposes a cease-fire to Israel, on condition that the Jewish State will stop economic sanctions and open the borders again

4 April: two Israelis and two Palestinians die during an attack at the border post of Nahal Oz in the Gaza Strip

9 Apr: five Palestinians killed in retaliation by the IAF; an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian died during an IAF’s raid in southern Gaza Strip

16 Apr: three Israeli soldiers killed near Nahal Oz border post; during the Israeli air force’s retaliation at least nine are killed, amongst which there are some children and a cameraman from Reuters press agency

18 Apr: 3 Hamas militants killed in the attack against the border post of Kerem Shalom in the Gaza Strip

23 Apr: the Israeli government let a million litres of fuel be delivered to Gaza’s power plant, by now run out of supplies; the UN claim that they will have to suspend the humanitarian activities underway in Gaza due to lack of provisions

27 Apr: a Palestinian woman and her four children are killed during an Israeli raid in Gaza Strip

14 Apr: a rocket launched by Hamas from Gaza causes dozens of wounded in a shopping center of Ashkelon

5 June: an Israeli is killed in the kibbutz of Nir Oz by a Qassam rocket launched from the Gaza Strip; in the following retaliation, the IAF kill a 4 year old little girl; Premier Olmert threatens a large scale offensive 

http://www.clarissa.it/editoriale_int.php?id=240&tema=Divulgazione  

This section of the site will host essays, proposals, documents and analysis that regard they type of concrete and active resistance that Palestinians may employ. We will publish essays and proposals by groups and individuals and we hope that in doing so, Palestinians and their supporters will be provided with a series of useful tools to frame the issues, some concrete intitiatives and stimulus in order to resist Zionist military occupation of Palestine, to encourage affirmative and propositive action within Palestinian society and to understand the mechanisms and projects that are underway in a society that is wide awake and willing to take its own future in its hands.

Today's paper is written by Dr. John Jennings and it is entitled: Palestinian Resistance, Getting the Mix Right.

We welcome comments, discussion and further proposals. Let us make this section useful, interesting and dynamic. We need your help to do so.

Please visit the page at this link, or at any time from the Top Menu of the site. We plan on updating and increasing the page contents on a regular basis. In the coming days, we will finally (!!) begin to insert links to our many friends and sites we love. Don't hesitate to send us your link if you would like it here and if it is appropriate to the site.

Uncovering the Israeli-Republican-Evangelical Networks behind the “Obsession” DVD

Something strange has been showing up inside the Sunday newspapers of millions of Americans the past few weeks. The material being included alongside comics, coupons, and advertisement for local stores is a controversial DVD called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” Some 28 million copies of this DVD have been distributed for free so far in this fashion. In some ways the scale of this campaign, and its ideological venom, are unprecedented: many newspapers state that they had never previously distributed free DVDs as inserts, certainly nothing with such a charged content. The copies were distributed not randomly across the country, but in the “swing states” (Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, etc.) that are seen as a toss-up in the November Presidential elections between McCain and Obama. Obviously, someone is trying to influence the American electorate by playing on fear-mongering and hate-mongering themes. But who? Who is behind this massive, multi-million dollar campaign?

Answering that question proved harder than one might think, as the groups behind this DVD have worked hard to hide their tracks. The connections, which are partially concealed in the DVD and the distribution campaign, take one from groups in Israel, to pro-Israel lobby organizations in the United States, to Christian evangelical groups, and to Neoconservative think-tanks.

The “facts” presented by Obsession have already been refuted in several detailed presentations. For example, see the work of Obsessionwithhate.com and that of Sheila Musaji, as well as Altmuslim.com. Therefore, I am not going to make a point by point refutation of the contents of the DVD. My intention is to explore the networks that are behind the production and distribution of this DVD, with their clear goal of influencing the 2008 Presidential elections towards John McCain.

***

All politics is local, as well as global. That is particularly the case here. The distribution of the DVD affected me and my family at an intimate local level: up to 160,000 copies of this propaganda piece were distributed through our local community in North Carolina. The newspaper of the nearby city of Charlotte, distributed another 200,000 copies.

Upon contacting the local newspaper, the Raleigh-based News and Observer, and asking why such a hateful piece of propaganda was being distributed for free to all the subscribers, the response of the paper was less than impressive. Jim McClure, vice president of display advertising for The News and Observer, said: "Obviously, we have distributed other product samples, whether it's cereal or toothpaste."

Really? Is this where we are? That a DVD which includes 77 minutes of propaganda footage slicing together videos of violent Muslims with those of Nazis, suggesting that Muslims are out to destroy Western civilization, is comparable to cereal and toothpaste? Puhleeze…

The claims of the DVD, which claims to be an educational product and part of a non-profit production, are as follows:

*That the world stands today as it did in 1938. Radical Islam is as great, if not greater, of a threat than the Nazis presented to the world. And action [not specified] must be taken.

*That the attacks in Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, and Iran present a global Muslim conspiracy against Israel and “The West.”

*A distinctive feature of the DVD is in fact the linking together of threat of radical Islam with passionate defense of Israel. Most of the figures who are paraded in the DVD, whether they are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, are all passionate pro-Israel speakers who have a long legacy of speaking against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in general. The list includes such luminaries as:

• “Former PLO Terrorist Who Speaks Out For Israel”, Walid Shoebat, who claims to have been a “former Islamic terrorist” turned Christian Evangelical Zionist. Never mind that the Jerusalem Post has already dismissed the factuality of his claims.

• Nonie Darwish, with the tell-all website: http://www.arabsforisrael.com/ “Arabs for Israel”? Darwish also neglects to mention that she is another ex-Muslim turned both Christian and ardent supporter of Israel. In a world when virtually all Arabs and most Muslims view the Palestinian/Israeli tragedy as the burning political and moral issue of our time, how many Arabs in the world can be claimed as being passionate supporters of Israel?

• Carline Glick, a member of Israel On Campus Coalition.

• Daniel Pipes. If the Pro-Israel/Neo-conservative unholy alliance had a poster-child, Pipes would be it. Pipes is the most noted Islamophobe operating in the US. Pipes is also the Director of a Pro-Israel entity called “The Middle East Forum.” As for his one-sided commitment to Israel credentials, suffice it to say that he is the 2006 recipient of the “Guardian of Zion” award.

One could go on and on, but the above should give some indication that contrary to what the Clarion Fund claims on its website, the “experts” paraded on TV are not impartial and objective. They have a definite point of view, a passionate defense of Israel at all cost, even if that cost happens to be truth and facts.

Who Made this DVD?

Let’s come back to the claim of the local newspaper, that the distribution of this product is qualitatively no different than putting a free sample of toothpaste in the Sunday paper. For the sake of argument, let us take that analogy and go with it. How many of us would receive an unmarked package of toothpaste, and brush our teeth with it if it carries no label, no description of who has made it, and no account of whether any agency has vouched for its safety? If we do not take unmarked material to our teeth, why would we take a product like Obsession which refuses to disclose the network behind it into our hearts, into our schools, synagogues, mosques, churches, and civic institutions?

The Obsession DVD states that it is made by “Clarion Fund”. What does the Clarion Fund stand for? And who exactly are they? Their intentions are made a bit clearer through the use of their registered website: www.radicalislam.org. What exactly does “radical Islam” constitute? Who stands for it, and who opposes it? We are not told, aside from this: “Radical Islam poses a significant threat to the Western way of life. The Islamists’ ultimate aim is conversion and domination of the West, which they see as the root of all evil that must be eradicated.” This type of labeling without defining is as unhelpful as accusations of “Communist” in the 1950’s, or “unpatriotic” and “un-American” more recently. It is a catch-all, bogey man argument that is masquerading as analysis.

Who has produced the Obsession DVD? On the Obsession The Movie website, the producer is identified as Raphael Shore, who “is a documentary producer and founder of Clarion Fund, Inc., a new non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about national security threats.” Very well. So Raphael Shore is the founder of Clarion Fund, and the producer of Obsession. But who is Raphael Shore? This required a good bit of background research:

Raphael Shore and Aish HaTorah

Raphael Shore is part of a missionary Israeli “Jewish penitent” (baal teshuva) group, called Aish HaTorah (“Fire of the Torah”), whose mission has been to call “assimilated” Jews back to Judaism. They have been given 40% of the land in front of the “Western Wall” in Jerusalem by the Israeli government. In other words, they are very good terms with the Israeli regime, which is responsible for the demolishing of homes, non-issuing of building permits, and occupation in Palestine. Their founder, Rabbi Noah Weinberg has received recognition from the mayor of Jerusalem.

When we dig a bit deeper, it turns out that Raphael Shore, a Canadian rabbi, is also the director of the International wing of Aish HaTorah. His business card is available as a PDF on line:

Rabbi Raphael Shore
Director, Aish HaTorah International
Outreach Programs

One Western Wall Plaza
Old City, Jerusalem
Israel, 97500

So does this Obsession DVD fall within the purview of Aish HaTorah’s “outreach”? Given the intertwined nature of the political and the religious in Israel, it seems that Aish HaTorah has gone from evangelizing to Jews to waging a global propaganda campaign against Islam and Muslims, while also working hard to cover its tracks, as we shall see.

The connections between Aish HaTorah and Clarion Fund go even deeper. According to the paperwork filed with the Delaware state authorities, Clarion uses the same address as Aish HaTorah in New York. In 2006, the two directors of the Clarion Fund were Rabbi Shore and Jacob Fetman, who was also Aish HaTorah’s Chief Financial Officer. In 2007, it had three directors: Rabbi Shore, Rabbi Harris (who is the educational director for Aish HaTorah), and Rebecca Kabat, another Aish HaTorah employee.

The Israeli paper Haaretz noted that the Obsession DVD “has a largely Jewish and pro-Israel distribution network, though Shore is trying to expand the film's appeal.” As we shall see, this he accomplished by reaching out to Neoconservatives and Christian Zionists, but first some more on the film’s Pro-Israel distribution network.

Hasbara Fellowship and Honestreporting.com

Raphael Shore is also the director of Hasbara Fellowships, a group with the transparent website: http://www.israelactivism.com/ Here there is another connection to Aish HaTorah, as Hasbara is part of the Aish HaTorah network. And their activism on behalf of Israel is worn like a badge of honor.

The pattern is beginning to become clearer: how is it that a group with the stated goal of “Israel activism” is placing 28 million copies of a DVD warning Americans about the danger of “radical Islam”? In many of the screenings of this DVD, the audience was required to sign up for receiving material from the israelactivism.com website. How come 70 US newspapers accepted this DVD without doing the basic research to uncover the source (and prejudice) of this propaganda?

Hasbara Fellowship’s own websites includes the following pieces of information about their genealogy and mission. All of the following are direct quotes:
• “Hasbara Fellowships, a program spearheaded by Aish International, educates and trains university students to be effective pro-Israel activists on their campuses.”
>in other words, they freely acknowledge the link to Aish HoTorah International.

• “Started in 2001 in conjunction with Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hasbara Fellowships brings hundreds of students to Israel every summer and winter.”
>This is perhaps the most intriguing connection and startling confession, that Hasbara has a direct connection to the Israeli regime’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which acts as the official and national propaganda center for the Israeli state. To recapitulate, there is a direct link between the Obsession DVD and the Israeli state through Hasbara Fellowship.

• ”So far, Hasbara Fellowships has trained over 1,400 students on over 250 campuses, providing its participants with the information, tools, resources, and confidence to return to their campuses as leaders in the fight for Israel's image.”
>This points to the acknowledgement that the struggle over Palestine/Israel is going to be fought—rhetorically, one hopes—on college campuses. In fact, college campuses formed the primary site of the distribution of the Obsession DVD before the newspaper campaign. The primary audience on college campuses have been Jewish organizations (like Hillel) and College Republicans. We will come back to this connection between Jewish groups and Republicans later. Shore himself has stated that: “The evangelical Christians and the Jews tend to be the softest market…”.

Raphael Shore has previously written at length about his passionate advocacy on behalf of Israel on the pages of Aish HaTorah’s newsletter. His earlier works had been produced alongside an entity called “Honestreporting.com”, with a self-description as follows: “Israel is in the midst of a battle for public opinion – waged primarily via the media. To ensure Israel is represented fairly and accurately 'HonestReporting' monitors the media, exposes cases of bias, promotes balance, and effects change through education and action.” In other words, Honestreporting.com sees itself as a media advocacy organization on behalf of Israel, with the requisite “Fair and Balanced” claims. Honestreporting.com has worked with Clarion Fund and Aish HaTorah in producing more pro-Israel material. And it is a family affair: the founder of Honestreporting is Rabbi Raphael Shore’s twin brother, Ephraim Shore. [Ironically, Raphael was so concerned that his brother had become involved with Aish HaTorah that in 1992 he went to Israel to “rescue” his brother from he seems to have regarded as a “big hoax”, and a cult-like milieu. Instead, Raphael too became part of Aish HaTorah!]

Haaretz reported that “Obsession” is described as “Honest Reporting's newest documentary film.” Honestreporting.com’s own website confirms this: “HonestReporting is proud to have been a former marketing partner during the initial production of this award-winning documentary.”

Shore, recognizing that the credibility of his propaganda would be undermined if its correction to Israeli-spin organizations were revealed, told Haaretz (in an unusually frank slip) that they “have told Honest Reporting to take it off their site ‘a dozen times.’” The connections between Obsession and Israeli groups like Aish HaTorah and Jewish advocacy groups on behalf of Israel like Hasbara Fellowship and Honestyreporting.com is beyond dispute. The producers of the documentary just don’t want you to know about it.

One of the other elements that the producers of the Obsession DVD may not want you to know about is their political agenda. The article read: "McCain's policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while [Barack] Obama's, although intending to do the same, could in fact make the situation facing the West even worse."

The spokesperson for the Clarion Fund, Gregory Ross, did not deny that this article had appeared on their site, he was only upset that they had been caught with it! The Clarion Fund has been established as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. These types of non-profit organizations are not to endorse one political candidate over another, precisely what Clarion seems to have done, and is now busy hiding its track records. NPR reported on this, and the possibility of a forthcoming FEC probe.

Who is paying for the “Obsession Project”?

We do not know for sure, and the Clarion Fund people are not saying. They admit that the names they give for the funders on their material are bogus aliases. Shore states that 80% of the funding for the Obsession DVD has come from one source, a “Peter Mier”. Yet he goes on to say that these are just aliases! In other words, it is hard to know for sure who is paying for the production and even more importantly the distribution of what the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), the main distributor for Obsession, refers to as the “Obsession Project.”

Given that EMET estimates that this project cost tens of millions of dollars, the signs seem to point to none other than Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish Republican billionaire, discussed below.

Who Distributes the DVD?

According the New York Times, when Shore and Co. could not find any traditional distributor for their propaganda, they formulated a strategy of working with Neo-Conservative organizations like Heritage, College Republicans, and above all, Jewish organizations.

NPR has reported that an organization called Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), is also responsible for distribution of the Obsession DVD. Like Honestreporting.com, the “Middle East Truth” being bandied about here is yet another self-described Zionist/pro-Israel understanding of the reality whose policies are in line with Likud militant expansionism, with the stated mission of support for Israel, and opposing any “concessions” from Israel as part of a peace agreement with Palestinians, even the withdrawal from the occupied territory of Gaza. The positions of EMET are the positions of Likud party in Israel, and that of the illegal Settler movement. It was EMET that on March 25th, 2008 sponsored a showing of Obsession on Capitol Hill.

Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET),, the distributor for Obsession, also has an open connection to the Republican Party, which they flaunt on their website: “EMET was also requested to help the Republican Policy Committee with a Sense of the Congress resolution talking about Israel’s inherent right to defend itself…” In other words, Clarion Fund claims to be non-political, but uses a pro-Israel ally of Republicans to distribute its product.

Leading the work of this Endowment has been Sarah Stern, who formerly worked as the National Policy Coordinator for the Zionist Organization of America and later on served as the Director of the Office of Legislative and Governmental Affairs of the AJC (American Jewish Congress).

In short, the distributors of the Obsession DVD are the most ardent and fanatical supporters of Israeli Likud militant expansionism, a fact that the Obsession DVD conveniently omits, and the newspapers who spread the 28 million copies of this DVD like a virus never looked into. EMET also has a cozy relationship with the right-wing Jewish billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson, who has a proven track record of using his wealth to push both Israeli Likud-type and Republican agendas. Adelson has a long-standing and public relationship with the arch-Likud Netanyahu that Haaretz has reported on previously. A recent investigative piece in the New Yorker proved many details of Adelson’s political agenda in both the United States and Israel. Adelson, who owns many casinos in Las Vegas, has been a longtime contributor to the Zionist Organization of America, Sarah Stern’s former employer. Now that Stern is at EMET, she has sponsored lecture series and seminars on Capital Hill in name of Adelson, to extend his influence into the Congress.

Adelson is usually listed as by Forbes as the third richest American, and the sixth richest person in the world. His personal wealth is estimated as exceeding $20 billion. The Washington Post reports that he has already given over 200 million dollars to Jewish and Israeli causes, including the Birthright program, to which he makes a $25 million annual contribution.

To place Adelson on the political spectrum, it is good to recall that he has described himself as a critic of AIPAC—from the far right! In other words, he feels that AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has been too soft on Palestinians. (!) Adelson has been a longtime contributor to Jewish and Republican causes, including the campaigns of George W. Bush. Initially, he had designs of spending $250 million dollars to set up an organization called Freedom Watch to keep Obama out of the White House. Freedom Watch, conceived of as the Right’s answer to Moveon.org, has been a meeting ground between Jewish Republicans and former officials of the George W. Bush administration. Such is the agenda of Adelson, the person whose influence is behind the EMET folks distributing the Obsession DVD.

Who else serves on the board of EMET (Endowment for Middle East), the Pro-Israeli lobby group? A who’s who of Israeli officials and ultra-Zionists in the United States:

• Ambassador Yossi Ben-Aharon: Formerly, the Chief of Staff for Ytzak Shamir, and Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

• Ambassador Yoram Ettinger. “Minister for Congressional Affairs at Israel's Embassy in Washington (with a rank of an ambassador), Israel's Consul General in Houston and Director of Israel's Government Press Office.”

• Lenny Ben-David: “Israel's Deputy Chief of Mission (number two diplomat) in Washington after being appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”, who in addition has “held senior posts in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for 25 years, in both Washington and Israel.”

In addition to Israeli officials, the EMET Board also includes:
• Neo-Conservatives such as R. James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney (another Neo-Con who has received awards from the Zionist Organization of America), Ariel Cohen (from the Neo-Conservative bastion Heritage), David Dalin (from the Neo-Con Hoover Institute and also Heritage).

• Ardent pro-Israel lobbyists such as: Daniel Pipes, Caroline Glick (deputy managing editor of Jerusalem Post), Meyrav Wurmser (the former director of the highly biased MEMRI, a propaganda organization founded by members of the Israeli Defense Force), Also serving on the Board of EMET are many of the “talking heads” would-be experts of Obsession, such as Walid Shoebat.

• Christian Zionists: EMET also reaches out to Christians—or one should specify, Christian Zionists—by featuring Rev. James. M. Hutchens, who founded an organization called The Jerusalem Connection International.

There are many more connections to pro-Israel organizations responsible for the distribution of Obsession:
• The producer, Raphael Shore, used Karyn Leffel from Hasbara Fellowship to establish links on college campuses. Yes, the same Hasbara of Pro-Israel media advocacy.
• The producers of Obsession also worked with the most lunatic fringes of the Christian evangelical movement to distribute their propaganda. This included above all else Christians United For Israel (CUFI), who mailed out many copies of the DVD from their mailing center. And the Founder and National Director of Christians United For Israel? None other than the same pastor John Hagee that McCain had initially sought an endorsement from. The same John Hagee who routinely describes Islam as evil, and sees the restoration of Israel as a necessary step towards the return of Christ. Hagee is one of the leading Christian Zionists in America today, and those who know about the tortured history of this variety of Zionism know how easily it has veered towards anti-Semitism, even justifying Hitler as being God’s hunters to drive Jews out of Europe to Israel, so that the Israeli state could be established (thus anticipating Christ’s return).
• Clarion Fund has also worked with other Republican groups to distribute their propaganda. NPR reported that a political consultant named Joe Wierzbicki was screening the film on 9/11 in Dearborn, MI. Who is paying for the screening and hiring Wierzbicki? Interestingly enough, Wierzbicki is the PAC coordinator for an organization called “Our Country Deserves Better”, with one specific goal: to defeat Barack Obama. Their website states: “Our Country Deserves Better than Barack Obama – and with your help we can ensure that Barack Obama is defeated on November 4th.”

The lines of connection between the makers of the allegedly impartial and non-profit Obsession and politically partial Republican groups and pro-Israeli expansionist Jewish organizations continues to grow…

• The last of the verified connections so far is between the producers of Obsession and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). The RJC worked hand in hand with Christians United For Israel to mail out copies of a book titled Standing With Israel to a large number of American Rabbis and leaders of the Jewish community. The package also included a copy of the Obsession DVD, and an approving letter from a former Israeli ambassador to Jews, encouraging them to strengthen connections with Christian Zionists.

The Republican Jewish Coalition is yet another group that the Clarion Fund and the Endowment for Middle Eastern Truth has worked which has taken a partial political position for the forthcoming election. On their website, the Republican Jewish Coalition states that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and their supporters “have handed Ahmadenijad [sic] a big win.”

***

Islam or Radical Islam?

Perhaps a word should be added here about the distinction between Islam and Radical Islam. In the last few years, we have indeed seen a number of terrorist acts around the world which have resulted in the death of thousands. While the bulk of these have not emanated from Islamic organizations, many have. (Of course the majority of the victims of acts of terrorism even in these latter cases have been other Muslims.) No doubt, a critical look at the ideology of terrorist groups is more than called for in today’s political climate. What many would object to, however, is painting all Muslims and all of Islam with the same brush.

The Obsession DVD opens by making a sharp distinction between Islam and Radical Islam. The producers of the documentary state, adamantly, that they are not anti-islam or anti-Muslim, but that they are only against “Radical Islam.” Leaving aside for a moment the debates over what constitutes “radical Islam”, and how pervasive it actually is, there is an uncomfortable disconnect between this claim on their website and the claims made inside the DVD: the people paraded as would-be experts do not in fact share this neat dichotomy between Islam and “Radical Islam.” The many speakers paraded here have a documented history of making blanket statements against Islam—all of Islam—and all of Muslims.

Let’s take one example, the very first speaker shown on camera: Walid Shoebat.

Shoebat’s claim to fame is that he claims to be an ex-“Islamic terrorist”, turned Christian and lover of Zion. If he claims to have produced bombs to kill citizens, why is he not in prison? Muslims are routinely jailed for much less and indirect accusations. Nevertheless, let us examine Shoebat’s track record regarding some of his more audacious claims about Islam (not just “radical Islam”):

• That Obama is a Muslim. Yes, that old myth again. Sadly, some 13% of American citizens believe this to the case, in spite of the fact that Obama is a committed Christian. Who knows how many more people are moved against Obama due to this rumor, which both Hillary and the Republicans have spread against him.

• “The Arabic speaking communities in America, however, do indeed support Osama bin Ladin and Hamas.” [For some reason, Afghans and Iranians do not, he states.] Shoebat goes on to say: “The less they know about Islam the more peaceful they are.” In other words, the Islamophobic assertions that peaceful Muslims are not peaceful because of Islam, but in spite of Islam; where as “radical Muslims” are precisely radical and violent because of Islam. Something about that logic seems flawed, since it deprives human beings of the agency to actually interpret their own tradition in both beautiful and hideous ways.

• He has been even more forceful in asserting that Islam is evil. His exact words: "Islam is not the religion of God — Islam is the devil." Let us be explicit here: The Obsession DVD claims that it is not targeting Islam, it is targeting “Radical Islam.” The first person featured in the DVD sings a different tune, literally demonizing all of Islam.

• Shoebat’s solution to Palestine/Israel, as told to the right-wing “Religious Zionist” Israel National News (the voice of the illegal Settler movement in West Bank and Gaza) is as follows: tear down the Dome of the Rock, and reestablish the Solomon’s Temple on the Temple Mount. The Settler radio embraced him as “the former terrorist turned lover of Zion.” The question is whether this is the kind of person that one should take impartial advice from. It makes as much sense as taking advice about Judaism or African-American history from David Duke.

For one other example, we could look at another of the talking heads in the documentary, the Lebanese Christian Brigitte Gabriel, who appeared before the Christians United For Israel conference on July 27th 2007 (sponsored by Pastor Hagee) and opined:

The difference, my dear Christian friends, between Israel and the Arab world is quite simply the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil and this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic and Islamic world. I am angry. They have no SOUL! They are dead set on killing and destruction. And in the name of something they call “Allah,” which is very different from the God we believe in, because our God is the God of love.

No fair-minded person would take Gabriel’s hateful words as authoritative teachings of the Christian tradition, or as exemplifying Christian love. And yet the producers of Obsession want the viewers to take Gabriel as an authoritative expert on Islam and Muslims. Somehow when Gabriel describes the whole “Islamic world” as having “no soul”, I suspect that we are no longer in the realm of “we are not talking about Islam, we are talking about Islamic radicals” position that the producers of Obsession hide behind. No wonder that the NY Times described her as a “radical Islamophobe.”

Christ reminded us that by their fruits (and words) you shall know them. And the words of these hate-filled so-called experts speak for themselves.

Conclusion

The massive scale of the Obsession campaign raises a number of disturbing questions: it does point to the ease with which foreign groups from Israel have established non-profit organizations in the United States to sway US elections by working with fringe from the pro-Israel lobby, Republican, and Evangelical community. While their ideology is marginal, their wealth and influence is anything but marginal. Non-profit organizations seeking to exert a political influence is not illegal, but non-profits seeking to endorse political candidates and swaying elections is, and this is precisely what the network behind the Obsession DVD seeks to do.

The “Obsession Project” also does point to the eroding standards of journalism. Why has mainstream American journalism been so slow to pick up on these networks, all of which are publicly available, with some investigation?

The Obsession Project also points to the ever-increasingly poisonous political climate in our country, where demonizing an entire ethnic or religious community seems to be becoming more and more commonplace. We have seen African-Americans, Hispanic, Muslims, Gays and Lesbians, and others characterized in such a fashion. Perhaps no community in the West has been the victims of millennia-long persecution and “Other-ing” campaigns as has the Jewish community. That makes it all the more devastating, and disappointing, that centrally-situated and powerful Jewish organizations from both Israel and the United States are now deploying the same Other-ing strategies against other minority groups, with hardly a voice of dissent being heard from other Jewish organizations. Indeed, Obsession is already tearing down bridges of dialogue between Muslim and Jewish groups across the country that had taken years to establish.

It is readily admitted that Israel remains both a rallying cry and a source of tension for many American Jewish organizations and American Jews. There are important fissures in the American Jewish community over all issues, including that of Israel. No one group speaks for all American Jews, who have often had an exemplary legacy of peace and justice activism. Indeed, one can point to many American Jews who have taken the lead in criticism of Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians. One important question that has yet to be answered is whether propaganda like Obsession will be met with silence by the Jewish community, or if it will be spoken against by all (Muslims, Jews, Christians, etc.) who are committed to peace and social justice.

Lastly, we do note from historical experience that campaigns like this tend to increasingly lower the bar of what is acceptable speech as opposed to “hate speech.” Make no mistake about it: there will be follow up projects. The Clarion Fund has already declared that its next project is a documentary titled The Third Jihad. The synopsis is as follows: “How is radical Islam operating inside the West? Is a subversive ‘cultural jihad’ underway? How does radical Islam plan to bring America to its knees? What is the endgame?” This documentary is set for an October 2008 release date. In other words, if Obsession was about the danger of Radical Islam “over there”, Third Jihad will make the case that this same threat exists “over here.” One shudders at the thought of the hate these pieces of propaganda are producing against members of the American Muslim community.

We can either keep going down this slippery slope of accusations and blanket generalizations, or we can bond together and rise up to say Enough! The point is not only that Muslims are being targeted, it is the very poisoning of our cultural discourse, and our hopes for a pluralistic American society that can welcome and embrace pluralism. To quote Martin Luther King, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” What we need now is less of the hateful heat of Obsession (and its networks), and more light from all of us who are committed to a just and pluralistic future for all of us.

Towards that day, starting today….

Omid Safi
Professor of Religious Studies
University of North Carolina

Chair for the Study of Islam Section
American Academy of Religion*

Contact: omid@email.unc.edu
*The opinions here are the personal opinions of the author, and do not reflect University of North Carolina or the American Academy of Religion.

See list of endorsements as of 9 July 2008

See list of individuals

See list of organisations

SIGN!!!

One year after the historic Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which found Israel's Wall built on occupied Palestinian territory to be illegal; Israel continues its construction of the colonial Wall with total disregard to the Court's decision. Thirty eight years into Israel's occupation of the Palestinian West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights, Israel continues to expand Jewish colonies. It has unilaterally annexed occupied East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and is now de facto annexing large parts of the West Bank by means of the Wall. Israel is also preparing – in the shadow of its lanned redeployment from the Gaza Strip – to build and expand colonies in the West Bank. Fifty seven years fter the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners, a majority of Palestinians are refugees, most of whom are stateless. Moreover, Israel's entrenched system of racial discrimination against its own Arab-Palestinian citizens remains intact.

In light of Israel's persistent violations of international law; and

Given that, since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel's colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies; and

Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine; and

In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions; and

Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression;

We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.

These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;

2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

Endorsed by:

The Palestinian political parties, unions, associations, coalitions and organizations below represent the three integral parts of the people of Palestine: Palestinian refugees, Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Unions, Associations, Campaigns

• Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine (Coordinating body for the major political parties in the Occupied Palestinian Territory)

• Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizen's Rights (PICCR)

• Union of Arab Community Based Associations (ITTIJAH), Haifa

• Forum of Palestinian NGOs in Lebanon

• Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU)

• General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW)

• General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT)

• Federation of Unions of Palestinian Universities' Professors and Employees

• Consortium of Professional Associations

• Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC)

• Health Work Committees – West Bank

• Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC)

• Union of Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC)

• Union of Health Work Committees – Gaza (UHWC)

• Union of Palestinian Farmers

• Occupied Palestine and Syrian Golan Heights Advocacy Initiative (OPGAI)

• General Union of Disabled Palestinians

• Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees (PFWAC)

• Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

• Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign

• Union of Teachers of Private Schools

• Union of Women's Work Committees, Tulkarem (UWWC)

• Dentists' Association – Jerusalem Center

• Palestinian Engineers Association

• Lawyers' Association

• Network for the Eradication of Illiteracy and Adult Education, Ramallah

• Coordinating Committee of Rehabilitation Centers – West Bank

• Coalition of Lebanese Civil Society Organizations (150 organizations)

• Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), Network of Student-based Canadian University Associations

Refugee Rights Associations/Organizations

1. Al-Ard Committees for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria

2. Al-Awda Charitable Society, Beit Jala

3. Al Awda – Palestine Right-to-Return Coalition, U.S.A

4. Al-Awda Toronto
5. Aidun Group – Lebanon
6. Aidun Group – Syria

7. Alrowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Center, Aida refugee camp

8. Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID), Nazareth

9. BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, Bethlehem

10. Committee for Definite Return, Syria

11. Committee for the Defense of Palestinian Refugee Rights, Nablus

12. Consortium of the Displaced Inhabitants of Destroyed Palestinian Villages and Towns

13. Filastinuna – Commission for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria

14. Handala Center, 'Azza (Beit Jibreen) refugee camp, Bethlehem

15. High Committee for the Defense of the Right of Return, Jordan

(including personal endorsement of 71 members of parliament, political parties and unions in Jordan)

1. High National Committee for the Defense of the Right of Return , Ramallah

2. International Right of Return Congress (RORC)

3. Jermana Youth Forum for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria

4. Laji Center, Aida camp, Bethlehem

5. Local Committee for Rehabilitation, Qalandia refugee camp, Jerusalem

6. Local Committee for Rehabilitation of the Disabled, Deheishe refugee camp, Bethlehem

7. Palestinian National Committee for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria

8. Palestinian Return Association, Syria
9. Palestinian Return Forum, Syria

10. Palestine Right-of-Return Coalition (Palestine, Arab host countries, Europe, North America)

11. Palestine Right-of-Return Confederation-Europe (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden)

12. Palestinian Youth Forum for the Right of Return, Syria

13. PLO Popular Committees – West Bank refugee camps

14. PLO Popular Committees – Gaza Strip refugee camps

15. Popular Committee – al-'Azza (Beit Jibreen) refugee camp, Bethlehem

16. Popular Committee – Deheishe refugee camp, Bethlehem

17. Shaml – Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Center, Ramallah

18. Union of Women's Activity Centers – West Bank Refugee Camps

19. Union of Youth Activity Centers – Palestine Refugee Camps, West Bank and Gaza

20. Women's Activity Center – Deheishe refugee camp, Bethlehem

21. Yafa Cultural Center, Balata refugee camp, Nablus

Organizations

1. Abna' al-Balad Society, Nablus

2. Addameer Center for Human Rights, Gaza

3. Addameer Prisoners' Support and Human Rights Association, Ramallah

4. Alanqa' Cultural Association, Hebron

5. Al-Awda Palestinian Folklore Society, Hebron

6. Al-Doha Children's Cultural Center, Bethlehem

7. Al-Huda Islamic Center, Bethlehem

8. Al-Jeel al-Jadid Society, Haifa

9. Al-Karameh Cultural Society, Um al-Fahm

10. Al-Maghazi Cultural Center, Gaza

11. Al-Marsad Al-Arabi, occupied Syrian Golan Heights

12. Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Gaza

13. Al-Nahda Cultural Forum, Hebron

14. Al-Taghrid Society for Culture and Arts, Gaza

15. Alternative Tourism Group, Beit Sahour (ATG)
16. Al-Wafa' Charitable Society, Gaza

17. Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ)

18. Arab Association for Human Rights, Nazareth (HRA)

19. Arab Center for Agricultural Development (ACAD)

20. Arab Center for Agricultural Development-Gaza

21. Arab Educational Institute – Open Windows (affiliated with Pax Christie International)

22. Arab Orthodox Charitable Society – Beit Sahour

23. Arab Orthodox Charity – Beit Jala
24. Arab Orthodox Club – Beit Jala
25. Arab Orthodox Club – Beit Sahour

26. Arab Students' Collective, University of Toronto

27. Arab Thought Forum, Jerusalem (AFT)

28. Association for Cultural Exchange Hebron – France

29. Association Najdeh, Lebanon
30. Authority for Environmental Quality, Jenin

31. Bader Society for Development and Reconstruction, Gaza

32. Canadian Palestine Foundation of Quebec, Montreal

33. Center for the Defense of Freedoms, Ramallah

34. Center for Science and Culture, Gaza

35. Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Ramallah- Al-Bireh District

36. Child Development and Entertainment Center, Tulkarem

37. Committee for Popular Participation, Tulkarem

38. Defense for Children International-Palestine Section, Ramallah (DCI/PS)

39. El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe

40. Ensan Center for Democracy and Human Rights, Bethlehem

41. Environmental Education Center, Bethlehem

42. FARAH – Palestinian Center for Children, Syria

43. Ghassan Kanafani Society for Development, Gaza

44. Ghassan Kanafani Forum, Syria

45. Gaza Community Mental Health Program, Gaza (GCMHP)

46. Golan for Development, occupied Syrian Golan Heights

47. Halhoul Cultural Forum, Hebron

48. Himayeh Society for Human Rights, Um al-Fahm

49. Holy Land Trust – Bethlehem

50. Home of Saint Nicholas for Old Ages – Beit Jala

51. Human Rights Protection Center, Lebanon
52. In'ash al-Usrah Society, Ramallah
53. International Center of Bethlehem (Dar An-Nadweh)
54. Islah Charitable Society-Bethlehem
55. Jafra Youth Center, Syria

56. Jander Center, al-Azza (Beit Jibreen) refugee camp, Bethlehem

57. Jerusalem Center for Women, Jerusalem (JCW)

58. Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC )

59. Khalil Al Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah

60. Land Research Center, Jerusalem (LRC)

61. Liberated Prisoners' Society, Palestine

62. Local Committee for Social Development, Nablus

63. Local Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled, Nablus

64. MA'AN TV Network, Bethlehem
65. Medical Aid for Palestine, Canada

66. MIFTAH-Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, Ramallah

67. Muwatin-The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy

68. National Forum of Martyr's Families, Palestine

69. Near East Council of Churches Committee for Refugee Work – Gaza Area

70. Network of Christian Organizations – Bethlehem (NCOB)

71. Palestinian Council for Justice and Peace, Jerusalem

72. Palestinian Counseling Center, Jerusalem (PCC)

73. Palestinian Democratic Youth Union, Lebanon
74. Palestinian Farmers' Society, Gaza

75. Palestinian Hydrology Group for Water and Environment Resources Development-Gaza

76. Palestinian Prisoners' Society-West Bank

77. Palestinian Society for Consumer Protection, Gaza

78. Palestinian University Students' Forum for Peace and Democracy, Hebron

79. Palestinian Women's Struggle Committees

80. Palestinian Working Women Society for Development (PWWSD)

81. Popular Art Centre, Al-Bireh

82. Prisoner's Friends Association – Ansar Al-Sajeen, Majd al-Krum

83. Public Aid Association, Gaza

84. Ramallah Center for Human Rights Studies

85. Saint Afram Association – Bethlehem
86. Saint Vincent De Paule – Beit Jala
87. Senior Citizen Society – Beit Jala
88. Social Development Center, Nablus
89. Society for Self-Development, Hebron
90. Society for Social Work, Tulkarem

91. Society for Voluntary Work and Culture, Um al-Fahm

92. Society of Friends of Prisoners and Detainees, Um al-Fahm

93. Sumoud-Political Prisoners Solidarity Group, Toronto

94. Tamer Institute for Community Education, Ramallah

95. TCC – Teacher's Creativity Center, Ramallah
96. Wi'am Center, Bethlehem

97. Women's Affairs Technical Committee, Ramallah and Gaza (WATC)

98. Women's Studies Center, Jerusalem (WSC)

99. Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counseling, Jerusalem (WCLAC)

100. Yafa for Education and Culture, Nablus

101. Yazour Charitable Society, Nablus
102. YMCA-East Jerusalem
103. Youth Cooperation Forum, Hebron
104. YWCA-Palestine
105. Zakat Committee-al-Khader, Bethlehen
106. Zakat Committee-Deheishe camp, Bethlehem

On 11 June 2008, 6 people, who had occupied the offices of Raytheon in Derry and destroyed computers, were acquitted of criminal damage by a Belfast jury. Raytheon is a huge US arms manufacturer, with sales of $20 billion in 2006 and over 70,000 employees worldwide. It makes Patriot, Tomahawk, Cruise and Sidewinder missiles, and much more besides.

The action which gave rise to the criminal charges took place on 9 August 2006 during Israel’s war on Lebanon, in which well over 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli bombing and shelling. On 30 July 2006, an Israeli aircraft targeted a residential building in Qana in southern Lebanon with a Raytheon-supplied “bunker buster” bomb. As a result, 28 civilians, from two extended families, the Hashems and the Shaloubs, were killed. The dead included 14 children.

This event led to 9 members of the Derry Anti War Coalition occupying Raytheon’s offices in Derry ten days later. They remained there until forcibly removed by police in riot gear about 8 hours later. Substantial damage was done to Raytheon property:

“Documents found on the premises were thrown from the windows to supporters outside. After our supporters were moved away by the police, computers, already damaged, were hurled out. Our main target was the mainframe: we knew that putting this out of action would disrupt Raytheon’s ordering system and thus hamper production, including production of missiles. The mainframe was decommissioned with a fire-extinguisher.”

This account is taken from The Raytheon 9: Resisting war crimes is not a crime, an excellent pamphlet about the affair by Eamonn McCann, who took part in the occupation.

The action eventually led to 6 of the participants appearing before a judge and jury in Belfast in May 2008, charged with criminal damage and affray. On 4 June 2008, after the prosecution had put its case, the judge expressed the opinion that there was no case to answer on either charge. However, the prosecution appealed to a higher court and won with respect to the criminal damage charge, which then had to be put the jury. A few days later, the jury found all the accused not guilty on the criminal damage charge. The charge of affray was dismissed by the judge without it being put to the jury.

The trial went largely unreported in the local Northern Ireland media, and in the Dublin and London media. The same is true of the verdict, even though it has sensational implications. The defence argued that the accused had undertaken their action in order to prevent war crimes being perpetrated in Lebanon by Israel using Raytheon-supplied weapons. In the words of Eamonn McCann in a statement afterwards, by finding the accused not guilty:

“The jury has accepted that we were reasonable in our belief that: the Israel Defence Forces were guilty of war crimes in Lebanon in the summer of 2006; that the Raytheon company, including its facility in Derry, was aiding and abetting the commission of these crimes; and that the action we took was intended to have, and did have, the effect of hampering or delaying the commission of war crimes.” [1]

In other words, in the opinion of the jury, having heard the evidence, it was reasonable of the defendants to believe that Raytheon was engaged in criminal activity by supplying Israel with armaments and that they were justified in perpetrating criminal damage on Raytheon property in order to hamper this criminal activity. In his statement, Eamonn McCann called

“on the office of the Attorney General and the Crown Prosecution Service, in light of this verdict, to institute an investigation into the activities of Raytheon at its various plants across the UK, with a view to determining whether Raytheon is, as we say it is, a criminal enterprise.”

Gagging order

The Raytheon trial would normally have taken place in Derry, where the offences alleged were committed. However, on 14 September 2007, the prosecution requested a change of venue, on the grounds that protests outside the court might intimidate jurors, and coverage in the local media might prejudice them.

At this time, the presiding judge, the Derry recorder, Corinne Philpott, banned publicity about the case, but in such general terms that journalists present didn’t know what they were allowed to report and what was banned.

There was no reporting of the application for a change of venue. On 10 December 2007, Judge Philpott imposed a blanket ban on reporting in Northern Ireland of any matter relating to the trial, including anything at all relating to Raytheon. The objective seems to have been to prevent publicity in Northern Ireland about Raytheon’s arms business, which might make a jury incline to the view that damaging its computers was a good idea.

There was no attempt by mainstream media organisations in Northern Ireland or elsewhere to have this extraordinary gagging order lifted or modified, despite the fact that their work was being hampered by the ban. For example, the Village magazine reported on 29 February 2008:

“Suzanne Breen (formerly of Village, now writing for the Sunday Tribune) has been referred to the Attorney General for possible contempt in an article published on 18 November in the Sunday Tribune. She had mentioned possible witnesses from the USA and Lebanon, and that, if convicted, defendants could face lengthy jail sentences.

“Also RTE has ordered Belfast independent production company Below the Radar to delete sections on Raytheon from a film about Ireland and the arms trade transmitted on 14 January. The effect of the ban is that all discussion of Raytheon’s presence in Derry has been shut down.” [2]

However, a legal challenge to the order was launched by Shane O’Curry of the Foyle Ethical Investment Campaign. As a result, the Belfast recorder, Judge Burgess, modified the order in late February 2008 to limit the ban to the usual one on pre-trial reporting of material directly relevant to the trial. It could then be reported for the first time that the Derry recorder had acceded to the prosecution’s request to move the trial from Derry to Belfast.

David Morrison

Irish Political Review
15 June 2008

References:

[1] www.ukwatch.net/article/raytheon9_acquitted

[2] www.village.ie/Ireland/Northern_Ireland/Media_gag_over_Derry_arms_factory_occupation/

The civilians are subjected to different forms of manipulations to use them as human shields during operations to acquire control of the houses, detaining inhabitants in one place (often in one room of the house) and turning the houses into military barracks, and using the occupants as human shields to deter any counter-attacks. They then force them to perform acts and chores on behalf of the soldiers like opening outlets in the walls or removing the floor tiles to use as barriers to protect the soldiers near the windows.

All of that happens during the time the occupation forces would open machine gun fire by its snipers from these houses to shoot at anything moving in the area.

The occupation forces arrest civilians and force them to walk in front of its soldiers at gunpoint, aiming to protect its soldiers by using the civilians as human shields.

Other methods include arresting one or more civilians and forcing them to perform tasks during military operations, such as knocking on the doors of other citizens to inform them that they are wanted and to order them to surrender, or to force them to conduct inspections on behalf of the soldiers to check suspicious objects.

The occupation forces continue to repeat the worst violations of human rights and norms of international law by using the civilians as human shields: especially children, which shows the disrespect and carelessness of those officers when it comes to civilians lives and the indifferent attitude towards risking the lives of innocent people to provide protection to its own military forces, who usually need protection while carrying out their attacks.

The young Palestinian child Rana Alnabaheen is a good example of how Israeli forces exhibit disregard for the lives of children. She was used as a human shield by a group of Israeli soldiers, exposing her to the shooting of other soldiers in the area. The soldier who used her as a human shield never even cared to inform the other soldiers accompanying him that he was using the child, and that she was moving upon his own orders.

Sameh Amira is another child subjected to being used as a human shield. He was escorted by heavily armed Israeli soldiers on a door-to-door sweep in Nablus, providing some of the strongest evidence to date that the Israeli army is still using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Israeli soldiers were filmed using Sameh Amira as a human shield on February 25, during a week-long raid into the West Bank city of Nablus. He was made to search homes in the city's casbah, ( the old city), during a search for wanted men and bomb-making laboratories.

Amira's cousin, 15-year-old Amid Amira, was also forced by the soldiers to search three houses, making him enter rooms, empty cupboards and open windows.

Israeli human rights group Yesh Din has reported that the Israeli army used peaceful Palestinian villages to carry out training exercises. The group said that the villagers were harassed and scared as two battalions of reservists acted out a battle in their midst for three hours. The exercises were carried out without warning in the early morning in the villages of Beit Lid and Safarin February 2007.

11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush, said that soldiers took her from her home three days later, on February 28, forcing her to open the door of a neighboring apartment and enter ahead of them. The soldiers then returned her to her home.

In August 2002, a 19-year-old Palestinian student, Nidal Daraghmeh, was killed when troops in the West Bank town of Tubas forced him to knock on the door of a neighbouring building where a Hamas fugitive was hiding. Gunfire erupted and Daraghmeh was killed.

The reports show the violations of Israeli forces to the sanctity of homes and residential areas, and how they convert civilians’ homes into military barracks, risking the lives of many innocent people and putting them in the line of fire. And most important of all is terrifying children and subjecting them to the most inhumane experiences ever.

References:

The Mezan Center for Human Rights

The Guardian newspaper

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem.

http://www.btselem.org/english/human_shields/20060720_human_shields_in_beit_hanun.asp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/09/israel

Public Committee against Torture in Israel

Yesh Din for human rights

BBC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXq57XK2L0A

Human Rights News website

See also Lawrence of Cyberia

The number of the Palestinian population has increased seven fold since the Nakba in 1948 despite the plight and the tragic circumstances as stated by the Head of Palestinian Statistics Dr. Lwai Shabana.

The Palestinian plight is a dark stage in modern history. The Palestinian population was expelled from its homeland, the people deprived of their lands, homes and properties. They were forced to seek refuge all over the world, facing all kinds of suffering and woes.

Since The Catastrophe (Nakba) in 1948 Israel has occupied more than three quarters of Palestine, and has destroyed 531 groupings of population. The occupation of Palestine has lead to the expulsion and displacement of 85% of the Palestinian population.

Nakba means Catastrophe = ethnic cleansing

The expression "Catastrophe" is supposed to be a term used to describe natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes.

While the plight of Palestinians or the 'catastrophe' was not the result of natural causes, but precisely an act of ethnic cleansing, destruction and expulsion of unarmed people from their lands. It is a displacement of a nation for the purpose of bringing another group of people to occupy their homeland.

Such horror has not been caused by nature’s cruelty; it has come as a result of human-induced military schemes and collusion between states.

1.4 million Palestinians were living in 1,300 villages, towns and cities in Palestine in 1948.

800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland by Israel, forced to beg for a place in neighbouring countries and other parts of the world.

The data documented on "in memory of Palestine" website reveals that since the Nakba Israel has taken over and dominated 774 Palestinian villages, towns and cities, and destroyed 531 others. The Israeli forces committed more than 70 massacres against the Palestinians, and led to the martyrdom of more than 15,000 Palestinians since 1948.

Demographic facts:

The demographic reality is: After 60 years of the Nakba 'Catastrophe' The Palestinian population has increased more than seven fold.

The Palestinian population was 1.4 million 1948, while the estimates of 2008 are 10.5 million. 5.0 million are still living in Palestine according to statistics from the end of 2007. While the continuous efforts of importing Jews from all over the world to house them in place of the expelled Palestinians has reached 5.5 million, and the process of building settlements on stolen Palestinian lands for those newcomers is still going on.

According to estimates and statistics, the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews will have an equal number of populations in Palestine by 2016.

According to the Refugees Relief Agency data towards the end of 2007, the total number of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories is almost 4.6 million. 42% of them are in Jordan, 10% in Syria, 9% in Lebanon, 16% in the West Bank, 23% in the Gaza Strip.

One third of the Palestinian refugees live in 59 camps, and that includes 10 camps in Jordan, 10 in Syria, 12 camps in Lebanon, 19 camps in the West Bank and 8 camps in the Gaza Strip. The average size of the Palestinian family in Jordan is about 5.1 people while the average in Syria is 4.1 and 3.8 in Lebanon.

These are the minimum estimated figures obtained for the registered Palestinian refugees only. This does not include the Palestinians who were expelled after 1949 – or after the occupation of 1967. And it does not include the Palestinians who were forced to evacuate or were evacuated by force from the West Bank in 1967 because of the war (those who were not refugees from 1948 areas).

The number of Palestinian residents who Israel failed to force into leaving their homeland in 1948 is estimated to be 154,000 citizens. The estimated number in the sixtieth anniversary of the plight revealed their number grew to become 1.2 million (their ratio is 103.7 males per hundred females).

The average Palestinian family size is 4.7 persons. 40.2% of the population is younger than 15, While 3.2% of the population is over 65.
Palestine's Nakba transformed the Gaza Strip to the most densely populated area in the world

The density of the population in Palestine in 1948 was 73 persons / km 2, compared with 389 persons / km² in 2007.

The total population density in the Palestinian territories at the end of 2007 became 625 person / km². In the West Bank it was 415 persons / km 2, and in Gaza strip it has risen to 3881 persons / km².

While in Israel, the total population density of both Arabs and Jews in 2007 was 317 person / km².
Most Jewish settlers are being settled in Jerusalem in an attempt to transform the city totally into a Jewish city.

By the end of 2007 the number of Jewish settlements in the West Bank reached 144. The number of settlers rose to half a million. 54.6 % were housed in Jerusalem, 42 % are living on confiscated (stolen) Arab Palestinian land of Jerusalem by force, after Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967.

References:
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics
Wael R. Ennab, Ph.D. Director, Academic Program for the Study of Involuntary Migration (APSM)
An Najah National University, West Bank
Justin McCarthy, Ph.D. Professor of History
University of Louisville, Kentucky

[*In which he states that his wartime reports from that era "will soon appear in English."]

Avnery views the first Arab-Israeli war as two wars: that waged by Zionist forces against the Palestinians (from the UN partition resolution of 29/11/47 until the proclamation of the state of Israel on 14/5/48), and that waged by Zionist forces against Arab military intervention after 15/5/08. He misrepresents the first as an "ethnic war" of the kind that wracked the Balkans in the 1990s. In doing so he overlooks the fact that the great bulk of the Jewish community in Palestine had only entered the country over the previous 30 years, under British imperial sponsorship and protection, and against the wishes and interests of its indigenous Arab inhabitants.

Although both the Palestine and Balkan conflicts are characterised by acts of ethnic cleansing, the latter clearly lacked the colonial context that pertains in Palestine, which is more accurately described, from 1948 to the present, as a war between a colonial-settler movement and an indigenous population.

Avnery writes, "At the time, I hoped until the last moment that [the war] could be avoided… " Really? Avnery played an active part in a movement which expressly aimed to create an exclusively Jewish state in a land inhabited by a non-Jewish majority, and he hoped that the inevitable clash "could be avoided"? Did he really expect the Palestinians to just stand by as their homeland was carved up by the Bushs and Blairs of the day? And this despite their violent opposition to an even earlier partition proposal in the 30s? Avnery then writes, "In retrospect it is clear to me that it was already too late." One is compelled to ask, why only "in retrospect"?

Avnery continues, "The Arab side was determined to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in the country which they (rightly) considered an Arab country. That's why the Arabs started the war." Hello? What is this talk of "the Arabs [starting] the war"?

That it was already too late by 1948, Avnery implies that, at some earlier point, war could have been avoided. If so, when? He doesn't say. Could it be that the Zionist idea itself, with its goal of creating a Jewish state in a non-Jewish land, is to blame for the 1948 war? When In hoping that the war could have been avoided, but realising in retrospect Yusuf Diya-uddin Pasha al-Khalidi, the mayor of Jerusalem in 1899, wrote to Zadok Khan, the chief rabbi of France, advising that, since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists should "in the name of God let Palestine be left alone," maybe Herzl, who was shown the letter, should have taken his advice. In retrospect, would that not have been the better course? But Avnery doesn't go there, presumably because blaming the war of 1948 on the Zionist project itself would only undermine his faith in that project. Hence his glib talk of "the Arabs starting the war."

And can he be serious about the following? "When I enlisted at the beginning of the war, we were totally convinced that we were faced with the danger of annihilation." Annihilation? Surely not at the hands of the Palestinians? Hillel Cohen, in his 2008 study of Palestinian collaborators, wrote of a pervasive "unwillingness to do battle" on the part of the Palestinians and claimed that "Senior figures in the Shai and Jewish Agency concluded that the Arabs of Palestine were not interested in fighting. They also deduced that Jewish offensive actions had increased the ranks of Palestinian fighters." (Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, pp 232 & 234). The leadership of the Haganah, in a 25/3/46 memorandum to the Anglo-American Committee, exhibited no such fear: "As far as the strength of the Arabs of Palestine is concerned, we are in possession of well-founded information. There is no doubt that the Jewish force is superior in organization, training, planning and equipment, and that we ourselves will be able to handle any attack or rebellion from the Arab side without calling for any assistance from the British or Americans. If you accept the Zionist solution [partition and a Jewish state in the greater part of Palestine] but are unable or unwilling to enforce it, please do not interfere, and we ourselves will secure its implementation." (Quoted in Before Their Diaspora, Walid Khalidi, p 306)

At the hands of the Arab armies then? Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has written: "In public, the leaders of the Jewish community portrayed doomsday scenarios and warned their audiences of an imminent 'second Holocaust'. In private, however, they never used this discourse. They were fully aware that the Arab war rhetoric was in no way matched by any serious preparations on the ground… they were well informed about the poor equipment of these armies and their lack of battlefield experience and… training… The Zionist leaders were confidant that they had the upper hand militarily and could drive through most of their ambitious plans. And they were right." (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p 46) The Arab states' lack of enthusiasm for war was also evident in their failure to intervene before May 15, 1948, by which time the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, including areas of the UN-proposed Arab state, was well under way. It is difficult to imagine how the Avnery we know today could have fallen back then for propaganda about "annihilation."

Avnery's refusal to acknowledge that ethnic cleansing was perpetrated by Zionist forces prior to the Arab military intervention in May, 1948, is astonishing. He writes, "The hundreds of Arab villages throughout the country dominated the main arteries that were crucial to our survival… In the middle of May, when the expected intervention of the Arab armies was approaching, we were already in possession of a contiguous territory. This was not yet 'ethnic cleansing' but a by-product of the war. Our side was preparing for the massive attack of the Arab armies and we could not possibly leave a large hostile population at our rear. This military necessity was, of course, intertwined with the more or less conscious desire to create a homogenous Jewish territory. In the course of the years, opponents of Israel have created a conspiracy myth about 'Plan D[alet]', as if it had been the mother of ethnic cleansing. In reality that was a military plan for creating a contiguous territory under our control in preparation for the crucial confrontation with the Arab armies." Benny Morris has said much the same thing: "There was no Zionist 'plan'… of evicting the Arab population, or of 'ethnic cleansing'. Plan D… was the master plan of the Haganah… to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state." (Quoted in my 11/5/08 post, Benny Unhinged)

For both Avnery and Morris, it seems, as long as there's a war going on, moving the civilian population on with a spot of shock and aware is justified and cannot be described as ethnic cleansing. Yet wasn't World War 1, for example, the context for the ethnic cleansing/genocide of the Armenians by the Turks? After the Turkish defeat at Sarikarmis, and during the Allied assault at Gallipoli, the Turkish leadership, fearing an attack on Anatolia itself and viewing the Armenians as a potential fifth column (Avnery's "large hostile population at our rear"), moved in earnest to eliminate them. (See A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide & the Question of Turkish Responsibility, chapter 4,

Both Avnery and Morris play down the significance of Plan D, which provided for the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants: yes, they admit, there was a plan, but it wasn't The Plan. Avnery slips the following in almost as an afterthought: "The military necessity was, of course, intertwined with the more or less conscious desire to create a homogenous Jewish territory." More, I would suggest, rather than less. Ilan Pappe's coupling of Plan D with the desire to create an Arabrein Jewish state is surely more accurate: "Plan Dalet was not created in a vacuum. It emerged as the ultimate scheme in response to the way events gradually unfolded on the ground, through a kind of ad-hoc policy that crystallized with time. But that response was always inexorably grounded in the Zionist ideology and the purely Jewish state that was its goal. Thus, the main objective was clear from the beginning – the de-Arabisation of Palestine – whereas the means to achieve this most effectively evolved in tandem with the actual military occupation of the Palestinian territories that were to become the new Jewish state of Israel." (Quoted in my 11/5/08 post, Benny Unhinged)

Without any reference to the manifest injustice of the UN partition plan for Palestine*, Benny Morris has written propagandistically of the Palestinian Arabs "defying the will of the international community, as embodied in the UNGA Resolution of November 29, 1947 (No 181)" (Quoted in my 7/5/08 post, Bend It Like Benny). Avnery's reference to it is not much better: "The Arab spokesmen… demanded the withdrawal of the partition resolution. The Jewish side stuck to [it wanting] to prove that it was possible." The latter assertion is simply not true. Zionist forces did not stop at the 54% of Palestine assigned to the Jews by the partition resolution, but went on to overrun a further 24%, conducting operations in the UN-proposed Arab state from April to May, 1948. Nor did they 'stick to' the partition plan's recommendation that Jerusalem be separate from both the Jewish and Arab states.

[* See my 14/3/08 post, The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3.]

Both Avnery and Morris fudge the issue of responsibility for the Nakba. Here's Avnery: "But the reality of the war itself caused the mass exodus." And here's Morris: "Most of Palestine's 700,000 'refugees' fled their homes because of the flail of war…" (Quoted in my 7/5/08 post, Bend It Like Benny). The reality of war/the flail of war, take your pick. It's euphemisms all round, folks. Anything to avoid acknowledging the ugly reality of Zionist ethnic cleansing.

Avnery does, however, concede as much in his discussion of war No. 2: "[A]fter the advance of the Arab armies was halted, a deliberate policy of expelling the Arabs became a war aim on its own." But even that is heavily qualified by the rider, "For truth's sake, it must be remembered that this was not one-sided. Not many Arabs remained in the territories that were conquered by our side, but, also, no Jew remained in the territories that were conquered by the Arabs, such as the Etzion Bloc kibbutzim and the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Jewish inhabitants were killed or expelled. The difference was quantitative: while the Jewish side conquered large stretches of land, the Arab side succeeded in conquering only small areas." Avnery sounds not unlike your average Zionist propagandist here: the massive violence of the perpetrator is balanced, even cancelled, by the counter-violence of the victim; the overwhelming, state-of-the-art firepower of the IDF by the homemade Qassems of Hamas; the million odd Israeli cluster bombs in south Lebanon by the two Type-81 cluster strikes of Hezbollah (See Lebanon/Israel: Hezbollah Hit Israel with Cluster Munitions During Conflict, www.hrw.org), and so on.

Avnery writes that "The real decision was taken after the war: not to allow the 750,000 Arab refugees to return to their homes." Ah yes, the real decision. Does he really believe, tooth-fairy style, that only after "we had received orders to kill every Arab who tried to return home" (See his account below of his wartime experiences), not to mention the wholesale destruction and theft of the refugees' villages, homes, lands, and businesses during the war, that such a decision was made? One longs for the honesty of a ? "Yeshayahu Ben Porat was a member of the Haganah during this period. He noted that while he had been in the Zionist youth movement, he 'was trained to despise the Arab population'. He was taught that he must one day struggle for a Zionist state that would be goyim rein. 'They did not educate us in the perspective that there will be a Jewish state here where Arabs and Jews will live together. The hidden thought and sometimes the overt thought was: they will go away and we shall stay'. Ben Porat later recalled that on the eve of the conflict most Jews believed, 'we needed a war with the Arabs. In the kibbutzim they looked at the Arab villages in the vicinity and they divided up their land in their thoughts." (The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland, Michael Palumbo, p 37)

Avnery writes of his war record thus: "When the war broke out, I immediately joined a combat brigade (Givati)… the place of every decent and fit young man at such a time was in the combat units… At the beginning of the war I was a private soldier in the infantry and fought around the road to Jerusalem [ in the UN-proposed Arab state?], and in the second half I served in the Samson's Foxes motorized commando unit on the Egyptian front… Throughout the war I wrote up my experiences… I reported that we had received orders to kill every Arab who tried to return home." And did he carry them out? He doesn't say.

Israeli activist, author, and one-time political ally of Avnery Uri Davis has commented that: "[T]o my knowledge [Avnery] has yet to account for his activities, possibly war crimes, in the 1948-49 war as a soldier with the Giv'ati battalion commando unit 'Samson's Foxes' directed… by such criminal 'orders of the day' as were issued in the daily battle sheets of the political commissar of the Giv'ati battalion, Abba Kobner, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Europe and the Kobna Ghetto rebellion, who turned to Nazi rhetoric himself, issuing such battle sheets as Battle Sheet dated 12.7.1948 entitled 'Aju al-Yahud (The Jews Have Come): The Night of Raid and Purge: 'Indeed we broke the spirit of the enemy and also rent their bodies open. But the enemy strength is still there. It is an enemy. It is an army. Though we are confidant that the dung of the corpses of the invaders [will fertilize] our fields into blossom…' After all, Uri Avnery is reported to have taken part in the Samson's Foxes operation in the Palestinian Arab village of 'Ibdis, subsequently destroyed and razed to the ground… and to have participated in operations where the Samson's Foxes were ordered to move from Arab village to Arab village and 'shoot at anything that moved, man, woman, child, camel or donkey'* as well as to have taken part in operations in the south where the Samson's Foxes commandos 'raced with their jeeps after all those [Arabs] like hunters hunting rabbits' (Yair Lev, The Subject: Uri Avnery, Guerilla Pictures, 2002). Uri Avnery does not deny his participation in these operations – but claims that he did not shoot." (Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, pp 147-148)

[*In his essay, Avnery writes of the modus operandi of Samson's Foxes: "In general, things happened this way: in the course of the fighting, an Arab village came under heavy fire. Its inhabitants - men, women and children - fled, of course, to the next village. Then we fired on the next village, and they fled to the next one, and so forth, until the armistace came into force..."]

I leave the last word to Uri Davis: "Uri Avnery and Gush Shalom are aware that the laws on war crimes are not subject to the statute of limitations and perpetrators can be brought to trial anywhere, anytime. They have joined their voices to those inside Israel and abroad condemning the war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well as cautioned against the prospects of Israeli attempts to orchestrate the mass expulsions of Palestinians from the post-1967 occupied territories under the cover of the US-led illegal attack on Iraq. Yet, given Avnery's own failure and the failure of his camp to engage in self-critical assessment of their political choices in 1948, condemn the war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli army in the course of the 1948-49 war, and motivate prosecution for these war crimes, their peace advocacy today is tainted in that it betrays the rights of those most victimized by the political Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine, the 1948 Palestine refugees and their descendents, some 4 million people today." (p 148)