By Jeff Gates *

In unconventional warfare, manipulated beliefs are used to displace inconvenient facts. When waging war by way of deception, false beliefs are an oft-deployed weapon.

Recall Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda? Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories? Iraqi meetings in Prague with Al Qaeda? Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium from Niger?

All these claims were reported as true. All were later proven false or, worse, fabricated. Yet all were widely believed. Only the yellowcake uranium was conceded as bogus before the invasion of Iraq. As the U.S. crafted its response to the provocation of a mass murder on U.S. soil, those widely shared beliefs shaped a consensus to wage war on a nation that had no hand in it.

A similar deception-traceable to the same source-is now working to expand this war to Iran. Based on fast-emerging events, the next conflict could include Pakistan.

The modern battlefield has shifted. Ground warfare is now secondary. Likewise air strikes, combat troops, naval support and even covert operations. Those physical operations are all downstream of information operations. Manipulated beliefs come first. Psyops precede bombs and bullets. Hardware ranks a distant third.

First and foremost are the consensus shapers and thought manipulators who target perceptions and opinions until a critical mass of agreement is reached. Then comes war. Those skilled at such duplicity induced coalition troops to war in Iraq. Knowledge was their target. Manipulate thought and all else was downstream.

Unconventional warfare is waged "upstream" with the assistance of those with the means, motive and opportunity to massage consensus opinion. Where are modern-day battles fought? Not on the ground nor in the air nor on the seas.

The mindset is the primary theater of operations. The first battlefield is the public's shared field of consciousness. The death and destruction come later.

Deceit is not new to warfare. What's new is the reach of the technologies-including modern media technologies-that now enable deception on a global scale.

Military action remains subordinate to politics. Politics, in turn, are subordinate to those skilled at inducing consensus beliefs. Regardless whether command is civilian or military, decision-making is no better than the information on which decisions depend. That's why the Israel lobby has long targeted U.S. lawmakers as a strategic force-multiplier by the Israel lobby. [See: "How Israel Controls U.S." http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=124829&d=24&m=7&y=2009]

With lawmaking dependent on information, those skilled at the manipulation of knowledge can operate atop the chain of command. As a system of law reliant on informed choice, democracy can be dislodged in plain sight by those skilled at inducing a shared mindset-a consensus-by manipulating thought, belief and emotion.

Thus the strategic motivation for media dominance by the Masters of Deceit in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Germany, India and other key nations that comprise the "coalition of the willing" induced to invade Iraq. Overlay media ownership with member states of this coalition and a common undisclosed bias becomes apparent.

When coordinated across four key areas, such "Information Operations" can displace informed decision-making with an undisclosed agenda. In retrospect, that systemic duplicity explains how the U.S. was deceived to lead this coalition to war in the Middle East. Here's a brief look at each area: geopolitical, strategic, operational and tactical.

Duplicity in Plain Sight

The geopolitical realm is where the "framing" of future conflicts often first emerges. The Clash of Civilizations appeared in 1993 as an article in Foreign Affairs. When this premise was published as a book in 1996, more than 100 non-governmental organizations were prepared to promote its thematic conflict-of-opposites.

That agreed-to consensus facilitated the seamless transition from the Cold War to a perpetual Global War on Terrorism. Thus the fate of the post-Cold War "peace dividend."

This widely shared mindset emerged just as A Clean Break appeared in print with its proposal for removing Saddam Hussein as part of a Colonial Zionist strategy for "securing the realm"-an expanded Greater Israel. Richard Perle, then a member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, led the All-Ashkenazi team who prepared that 1996 report for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 2001, Perle became chairman of the Pentagon's policy board. Strategically, that's a good example of working "upstream" to frame U.S national security issues around a preset agenda-for a foreign nation. Perle left the Board in February 2004 after 17 years of wielding insider influence. When your numbers are small but your ambitions large, what choice do you have but to wage war by way of deception?

Strategically, to evoke a new global war required a plausible Evil Doer linked to a credible provocation. The branding of the Taliban did not emerge in the "field" until March 2001 with their destruction of the ancient Buddhas at Bamiyan. Widely portrayed in mainstream media as a "cultural Holocaust," that high-profile deed put Afghanistan's previously obscure Taliban on a global Top-Ten list as certifiably evil.

The missing piece in marketing The Clash premise: the mass murder of September 11, 2001. Strongly provoked emotions, as with 9-11, facilitate the displacement of facts with what a targeted mindset can be induced to believe. That process was enhanced by the presence of a pre-staged Evil Doer and pre-staged intelligence that was flawed, false or outright fixed-but nevertheless widely reported as fact by mainstream media.

The capacity to succeed with such an operation is enhanced by the combined presence of: (a) evocation (images of religious extremism), (b) provocation (a mass murder), (c) association (a Doer of Evil), and (d) manipulation-as mainstream media parroted phony intelligence with virtually no investigative journalism.

This psyops campaign was facilitated by plausibly credible political leaders who dutifully read their lines from fear-evoking scripts written by this same insider network of agenda-shapers. That emotional manipulation included not only the "Axis of Evil" framing but also a widely broadcast WMD sound bite: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Mainstream media even reported as credible false accounts of "high-level links" between the secular Iraqi government and the religious fundamentalists of Al Qaeda. Yet anyone familiar with the region knew they despised each other. Truth was not the point. Nor facts. Informed consent was only an obstacle to overcome.

Deception on such a scale required a capacity to sustain a veneer of plausibility and credibility – i.e., believability. Thus the critical role played by mainstream media.

The Power of Association

When waging war on the public's shared mindset, the power of association is one of the most effective weapons. Thus the potent imagery of the peaceful Buddhas at Bamiyan when associated with destruction, violence and religious extremism.

Thus the ease with which evil doing Al Qaeda extremists were associated in the American mindset with the Taliban – and the evil of 9-11 with known Evil Doer Saddam Hussein even though the intelligence was proven false.

Thus too the associative impact of Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 testimony before the U.N. Security Council. His credibility as a globally recognizable military leader (the Powell "brand") was deployed-as a weapon-to lend the appearance of truth to lies about Iraq's possession of mobile biological weapons.

Akin to showcasing the celebrity endorsement of a consumer product, this testimonial by a trusted military leader was broadcast worldwide in the lead-up to war. Powell was not the only "mark" in this operation. So were the U.N., the U.S. military and a global public. Both aggressor and aggrieved became casualties of this duplicitous "field-based" warfare. Meanwhile the source of this deception once again faded into the background.

Operationally, by the time the U.S. was induced to invade Iraq, 100-plus Israeli Mossad agents had been operating in Mosul for more than a decade. Soon after the invasion, several moderate clerics were murdered. Their elimination enhanced the capacity to provoke a conflict-of-opposites between long-warring Shias and Sunnis.

That conflict-within-a-conflict helped catalyze an insurgency that converted a clash into a quagmire. That result was mathematically model-able by an Israeli cadre of game theory war-planners. [See: "How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare." http://intifada-palestine.com/2009/08/20/how-israel-wages-game-theory-warfare/ ]

As Information Operations proceed at the geopolitical, strategic and operational level, tactical deceit and misdirection provide essential support akin to reserve forces deployed on an as-needed basis. Serial provocations are required to sustain the serial conflicts essential to maintain the faux plausibility of the mega-theme: The Clash.

The recurring use of crises to catalyze and maintain instability should be of immediate concern to Islamabad. A long-standing Indo-Israel alliance may well be coordinating the frequency of violent incidents that continue to strain relationships between nuclear-armed Pakistan and its neighbor Iran.

Reflecting similar tactics, the most recent Israeli assault on Gaza was scheduled between Christmas 2008 and the January 2009 inauguration of a new U.S. commander-in-chief elected on a platform of hope and a promise of change. The timing of that murderous incursion minimized the capacity to criticize. President-elect Obama said nothing.

Meanwhile this serial agent provocateur set the stage with that assault for another delayed reaction from those brutalized by six decades of occupation. And from those in the broader Muslim community outraged at the U.S. for enabling this behavior.

When that reaction emerges-as it will-Tel Aviv will again assert the moral high ground as a perennial victim living in a hostile anti-Semitic neighborhood. By deploying U.S. weaponry, Israeli aggression will again make Americans appear guilty by association-endangering the U.S. while enhancing the plausibility of the narrative: The Clash of Civilizations.

The uncomfortable truth is that the U.S. is guilty-for continuing to condone this treachery-to its own detriment. Meanwhile the only change is in the presidency with no substantive change in U.S.-Israeli policies. And no hope for those most affected by this duplicity-including both the U.S. military and those it was induced to target.

As critics of Israeli policy in Gaza emerged in academia, the Anti-Defamation League and its international network mounted an intimidation campaign to silence a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. By advertising that campaign widely, the ADL silenced thoughtful academics worldwide. [See: "Treason in Plain Sight?" http://criminalstate.com/2009/07/treason-in-plain-sight/ and "Education: The Ultimate Battlefield" http://criminalstate.com/2009/08/education-–-the-ultimate-battlefield/]

By Way of Deception

To succeed, Information Operations require both deceit and denial of access to the facts required for informed consent. How else can anyone explain the enduring perception that Israel is a democracy? Even now, a majority of Americans believe that Israel is an ally despite more than six decades of nonstop deceit, spying, treachery and ongoing treason.

Any observer of recent events in Pakistan should be concerned at the duplicitous history of those who have an "existential" stake in sustaining The Clash storyline. With any semblance of stability, an investigation will confirm that the intelligence fixed to induce the U.S. to war originated with a transnational network of pro-Israeli operatives.

Democracy assumes that all of us collectively are smarter than any of us individually. Thus the need for an educated electorate informed by an unbiased media providing the facts required to reason together.

Thus too the strategic need to dominate mainstream media by those with an undisclosed bias who are skilled at waging war by way of deception. We now see portrayed in that opinion-shaping domain a world turned inside out where the victim is cast as aggressor and the predator as prey.

The facts in the recent Goldstone Report confirm a need to investigate dozens of Israeli war crimes in Gaza as well as crimes against humanity. Instead of following the facts wherever they lead-consistent with the rule of law-on November 3rd, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 334-36 in favor of a resolution describing the report as "irredeemably biased" and opposing any further consideration.

That resolution was proposed by Howard Berman, Ashkenazim chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, senior Republican on the panel and also Ashkenazim. Meanwhile Nita Lowey, the Ashkenazim chairwoman of the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee warned, by implication, that her colleagues in the Congress would jeopardize funding for their projects if "further consideration" was given to the Goldstone Report.

The House vote came one day before the U.N. General Assembly discussed the report. A day later, on November 5th, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, a Muslim, killed 13 and wounded 42 preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. Within 24 hours, more than 250 media personnel appeared at Fort Hood, the nation's largest military base, to report on the event.

Many of them framed the event as confirming The Clash premise and even the on-base presence of "Islamo-fascism." Suggesting the act of a "home-grown terrorist," Jewish-Zionist Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, called for Congressional hearings into whether the U.S. military could have prevented it.

Interviewed in Palestine, the grandfather of U.S.-born and educated psychiatrist Nidal Hasan spoke of his grandson's love of the U.S. and said simply, "America made him what he is." While that comment hardly excuses this conduct, that poignant statement includes a point that Americans find difficult to contemplate. Yet we also found it uncomfortable to consider that the U.S.-Israeli relationship was a key motivation behind 9-11 and other attacks on Americans and American facilities.

The Goldstone Report called for an investigation of facts suggesting criminal conduct both by Israelis and Palestinians. Written by an eminent South African Jewish jurist, Richard Goldstone's daughter conceded that her father's findings would have been far harsher had he not been a Zionist.

Yet even the possibility that unfavorable facts could seep into the "field" required that the Israel lobby unleash its compliant Congressional forces in a litmus test of legislative loyalty-regardless of the facts. Or, indeed, because of the facts. It's difficult to imagine a vote more clearly indicative of how a pro-Israeli bias has corrupted the rule of law.

Other disturbing facts also posed a danger of gaining traction, including a November 5th report that the International Atomic Energy Agency found "nothing to be worried about" in Iran's recently revealed uranium enrichment site. That fact was preemptively displaced from the "field" the day before with reports of a well-timed Israeli boarding of a ship in international waters where weapons were found that were allegedly bound for Iran-supported Hezbollah.

When waging field-based warfare, timing is everything. That's particularly the case when, as here, a belief-manipulating adversary is faced with the greatest danger of its six decade life: facts that conflict with the narrative required to sustain The Clash storyline.

Best Story Wins

With consensus beliefs the upstream target, democracy becomes the downstream casualty. When manipulated beliefs displace facts, the rule of law degenerates into a faith-based parody of self-governance. To protect the informed consent essential to freedom requires that those waging war on the public's shared mindset become transparent so that those complicit can be made apparent.

How old is this form or warfare? Answer: How long has behavior been manipulated with beliefs? How long has faith been deployed to displace facts? The form of warfare is ancient; only the means are modern.

Upstream warfare and strategic deceit are only "unconventional" for the target. For Jewish extremists, such duplicity is business-as-usual.

This analysis describes how warfare is waged in plain sight in the Information Age. Without the complicity of mainstream media, this deceit could not have succeeded on such a scale.

In the Information Age, duplicity is how treason can be taken to scale-in plain view and, to date, with legal impunity-both in the U.S. and in the coalition member nations whose citizens were also targeted by those chronicled in this account.

The common source of this deceit remains little known either to the American public or the people in those nations the U.S. led to war. Here in the U.S., the tattered remnants of our system of informed consent are held hostage by this media-induced duplicity-and by legislators more inclined to protect their personal interests than the national interest.

There lies the strategic role for online media free of conspiracy theories that obscure the analytical clarity required to wage this battle with confidence. What's described here is warfare being waged on knowledge by an enemy within. Liberty faces no greater danger than those targeting its foundation of informed consent.

What has been made of the U.S. due to our "special relationship" with this extremist enclave is not the form of governance to which our civilian and military leaders swore their allegiance. With our civilian leadership compromised by the Israel lobby, to whom do U.S. military leaders owe their allegiance-to this latest in a series of corrupted presidencies or to the people whose freedom they took an oath to protect from all enemies, both foreign and domestic?

Despite appearances, it is not America that is at war in the Middle East but Americans loyal to this nation who were sent to war by a foreign government imbedded inside what remains of "our" government.

With trans-generational premeditation, Ashkenazim elites and extremists lured the U.S. into an entangled alliance in order to manipulate Americans to wage their expansionist wars and to secure their "realm." Only as the common source of this treason became transparent could those complicit now be held accountable.

For Americans to restore the fact-based rule of law requires sustained pressure from abroad. Our true allies will hold us accountable for what we allowed these extremists to do in our name. As the how of this treason becomes transparent, we Americans will see as our true enemies those who enabled this duplicity-to our long-term detriment. The best way to befriend us is to hold us true to the values we espouse.

* Jeff Gates is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, investment banker, educator and consultant to government, corporate and union leaders worldwide; an adviser to policy-makers worldwide; former counsel to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee; and author of numerous articles and books including his latest book Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution. See www.criminalstate.com

Illustration by Khalil Bendib

His statement was a damning indictment of 344 of his colleagues. The following is the full text of it (my emphasis added).

Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist.
Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking, the eternal prison of the dark heart of the totalitarian.

The resolution before us today, which would reject all attempts of the Goldstone Report to fix responsibility of all parties to war crimes, including both Hamas and Israel, may as well be called the "Down is Up, Night is Day, Wrong is Right" resolution.

Because if this Congress votes to condemn a report it has not read, concerning events it has totally ignored, about violations of law of which it is unaware, it will have brought shame to this great institution.

How can we ever expect there to be peace in the Middle East if we tacitly approve of violations of international law and international human rights, if we look the other way, or if we close our eyes to the heartbreak of people on both sides by white-washing a legitimate investigation?

How can we protect the people of Israel from existential threats if we hold no concern for the protection of the Palestinians, for their physical security, their right to land, their right to their own homes, their right to water, their right to sustenance, their right to freedom of movement, their right to the human security of jobs, education and health care?

We will have peace only when the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis is brought before this House and given equal consideration in recognition of that principle that all people on this planet have a right to survive and thrive, and it is our responsibility, our duty to see that no individual, no group, no people are barred from this humble human claim.

See and hear Kucinich delivering that statement on:
http://pulsemedia.org/2009/11/04/rep-dennis-kucinich-blasts-operation-cast-doubt/

The only slight quarrel I have with it is the possible implication that it's the first time Zionism's stooges in Congress have brought shame upon the institution. They've been doing that with knee-jerk and monotonous regularity since the creation of Greater Israel, by a war of aggression not self-defence, in 1967.

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews: The False Messiah (Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews). He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

Israeli officials are right to worry. Gazans too. Yet Americans should worry even more.

Israel's "legitimacy" will not last. Of course, that assumes its legitimacy was deserved. That issue also is now called into question in light of the consistency of Israeli behavior over the past six decades. The emerging issues are these:

When and how will the recognition of Israel's nation-state status be withdrawn? How will Tel Aviv behave in the interim?

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza. The threat to Israel is not the 1.5 million Gazans who reside in the world's largest open-air prison.

The threat is the fast-growing global outrage at the abuse inflicted on Palestinians, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of 400-plus villages six decades ago.

Not since 1948 has this enclave of extremists mounted such a public relations offensive. Christian Zionist President Harry Truman trusted Jewish Zionist lobbyists when he solicited assurances that they would not become what they immediately became: a racist theocratic state with an expansionist agenda destined to create serial crises in the region.

The merciless global agenda pursued by Colonial Zionists is the single greatest threat to world peace, as confirmed yet again by Lieberman's warning. As the primary remaining ally of these Jewish nationalists, the risks to the U.S. increase with each passing day as Tel Aviv works behind the scenes to catalyze yet another conflict.

This entangled alliance was destined to provoke resentments that would eventually endanger their super power ally and foremost arms provider. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the mass murder of 9-11, conceded that the motivation for that attack was to focus "the American people…on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people and America's self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further exploitation of the Arab Muslim people."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Truman 61 years ago that this militant enclave meant to establish Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East. Familiar with the duplicity for which Israel has since become infamous, the Pentagon chiefs warned: "All stages of this program are equally sacred to the fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders."

Nuclear-Armed Fanatics

With each passing year, Tel Aviv adds a new chapter to the agent provocateur handbook on How To Succeed as a Victim.

Israel's strategic success traces directly to its capacity to radicalize and enrage-as those residing in the Occupied Territories endure a third generation of deprivation, degradation and periodic starvation. Thus the in-depth planning that preceded Israel's brutal "defensive" assault on Gaza between Christmas 2008 and the inauguration of Barack Obama-who said nothing about the attack throughout its 28-day duration.

That silence continues even now after Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist, issued a report describing dozens of Israeli war crimes and evidence of crimes against humanity. In the lead-up to the report's release, a U.S. president gave Tel Aviv a rhetorical gift when, in a U.N. speech, the nation's first Black president used the code phrase "Jewish state" as an implied endorsement of the apartheid policies of this racist enclave. Even Truman did not go that far. But then his administration was not as thoroughly staffed with Zionists and pro-Israelis.

In addition to killing some 1400 Palestinians, one-third of them women and children, Israel destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza including farmlands, factories and schools as well as its water supply and sanitation works. The facts in the Goldstone Report were further confirmed by "Breaking the Silence"-the personal testimony by thirty members of the Israel Defense Forces who described a murderous policy meant to teach the people of Gaza a lesson for their support of Hamas-which came to power in 2006 elections that were universally appraised as free and fair.

As Israel's protector and apologist, the U.S. bears the brunt of the anger as Israeli extremism continues to enrage Muslims and radicalize the Islamic body politic. A systematic assassination campaign ensured that Tel Aviv had "no one to talk to" except known collaborators with the occupation authorities in Tel Aviv and their arms suppliers in Washington. Meanwhile, the steady expansion of Israeli settlements made a Palestinian state impossible-unless indigenous Arabs are happy to reside in an archipelago of isolated ghettos ringed by Israeli checkpoints.

To suggest that the U.S. is culpable only states the obvious. Yet Israeli extremism continues unabated even as Tel Aviv insists that its neighbors accept it as a "Jewish state" even before its borders are fixed and resolution of the occupied territories is known. After six decades of nonstop deceit, Arab states are understandably reluctant to further appease this "state." For Americans endangered by the behavior of Jewish fanatics, the lesson is uncomfortable but inescapable: we enabled this.

By our continued appeasement, Barack Obama is inviting another violent reaction to Israel's serial provocations. By failing to endorse the Goldstone Report, our commander-in-chief is putting U.S. forces at risk. By implying that Israel is above the law, he only emboldens Tel Aviv. By suggesting that Israeli conduct is consistent with the values of a "Jewish state," he endangers the broader Jewish community. That includes those moderate Jews who anticipated this extremist behavior when in May 1948 Truman overruled the strategic objections of Secretary of State George C. Marshall and enabled this fanaticism by extending nation-state recognition.

Small in numbers but large in ambition, this extremist enclave had no choice but to wage war by way of deception. The most insidious deceit was targeted, from within, at its purported ally to induce the U.S. military to lead an invasion of Iraq for its Greater Israel strategy. Absent an Israeli strategy able to sustain serial crises, a long-deceived public will awaken to the common source of the fixed intelligence that led us into the last war-and now seeks to induce the next.

As Americans awaken to how this duplicity proceeds in plain sight, they will see for themselves who and why. That knowledge is the threat that Tel Aviv most fears. As the facts become known, Israeli legitimacy will no longer be an issue. The only issue will be how best to dis-arm these extremists and how to hold accountable those lawmakers who enable this ongoing treason.

* Jeff Gates is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, investment banker, educator and consultant to government, corporate and union leaders worldwide; an adviser to policy-makers worldwide; former counsel to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee; and author of numerous articles and books including his latest book Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution. See www.criminalstate.com

Gaza City – Song by Johnny Punish:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVcHmdx7pkE

Illustration By Carlos Latuff

President Obama got the leaders of Israel and Palestine to shake hands this week. But a meeting in Midtown does not a Palestinian deal make. Here’s why.

By Zahi Khouri *

"Economic Peace Is Possible."

No. Neither sustainable economic development nor peace is possible without political freedom.

The idea of "economic peace" suggests an economic conflict, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is certainly not that. Although economic issues do figure into Palestinian concerns, they are not nearly as important as addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees, terminating Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, and establishing a viable, independent, and sovereign Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. To suggest that economics are what this is about would be to sideline history and to willfully ignore the reality of Israel's occupation. This conflict is political and it calls for a solution that is political.

Besides, even if economic growth were issue No. 1, the greatest impediment to economic development and opportunity for Palestinians is not the absence of industrial parks as advocated by the Israeli government under its model of "economic peace." Rather, it is the denial of basic freedoms and rights to Palestinians under occupation and the myriad restrictions Israel imposes on the free movement of Palestinian goods and people within, and in and out of, the occupied Palestinian territory. It is the inability of Palestinians to access the 60 percent of the occupied West Bank under Area C (Israeli control), including the 40 percent that Israel claims for its settlement enterprise. And it is the forced isolation of occupied East Jerusalem, long the economic heart of the Palestinian economy, from the rest of the West Bank. All these economic constraints are fundamental to the architecture of Israel's occupation.

In short, "economic peace" is a slogan designed to give the appearance of positive movement while distracting from the real issues and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. It does not mean, nor does it promise, an end to Israel's occupation. Rather, it offers economic crumbs in an effort to normalize and better manage the occupation.

"As with Gaza, a West Bank Withdrawal Endangers Israel."

Wrong. Israel argues that its withdrawal from Gaza was rewarded with rocket attacks by Hamas. The attraction of such an argument lies in its simplicity. But just as "economic peace" is designed to divert attention away from the real issues, the argument that a Gaza withdrawal was dangerous for the Israelis is designed to mask the reality that Israel never stopped occupying the Gaza Strip.

Contrary to popular belief, Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 did not bring about an end to the occupation. Yes, Israel removed its settlers (who, in many cases, relocated to settlements in the West Bank). And yes, Israel withdrew its troops — though only as far as the border. From that close distance, Israel has imposed a medieval-style siege on Gaza that continues to this day. Israel remains an occupying power under international law because it retains effective control over Gaza's borders and its land, sea, and airspace, allowing it to suffocate and starve Gaza as it is doing today.

The scale of the humanitarian crisis that Israel has created in Gaza is hard to convey. Even before the election of Hamas in 2006, there were severe restrictions on the amount of food, water, fuel, and other essentials allowed to enter the Gaza Strip. In 2006, then-senior Israeli government advisor Dov Weisglass callously claimed that "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger." The result was that by the end of 2007, well over 80 percent of Gaza's population lived below the poverty line. Authorities have also clamped down on Gaza's imports and exports, suffocating the Palestinian economy. By November 2007, the U.N. World Food Program was already warning that less than half of Gaza's food import needs were being met. Following the election of Hamas, Israel tightened these economic restrictions further to enforce a complete closure, further compounding the humanitarian crisis. It is within this context that Israel's disengagement from Gaza must be judged.

Of course, rocket attacks from Gaza are not a proper response to Israel's harsh policies. Palestine is a just cause fought for in the name of rights, universal principles, and international law; its actions must be faithful to that. The lesson that should be drawn from Gaza is that the only guarantee of security for Israel is a full end to its occupation and domination — not just an end in name. The only form of withdrawal carrying the promise of peace is a full withdrawal — from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with Gaza — that allows for the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

"Arab Intransigence Blocks Peace."

Four words: the Arab Peace Initiative. First proposed by Saudi Arabia in 2002 and subsequently endorsed by 57 Arab and Islamic states, the Arab Peace Initiative offers full normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for Israel's full withdrawal from all territory occupied in 1967, as well as a just and agreed upon solution for Palestinian refugees in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194. That resolution, in essence, says to Israel: Do what is required of you under international law and U.N. resolutions, and the Arab and Islamic world will normalize relations in return. Israel's response so far has been to ignore the Arab Peace Initiative, squandering what is a historic opportunity.

As for the Palestinians, President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are the most accommodating Palestinian leaders ever to hold office. Yet Israel is frittering away their time at the helm; Israeli leaders evidently feel no urgency to negotiate. Eventually, this window of opportunity will close. As settlers flock to the territories, Palestinians will determine that a Palestinian state is no longer viable. When the debated solution turns from two states to one state with equal rights for all, Israel may well regret it did not seize multiple opportunities to return all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as part of a peace deal.

"Settlements Are Not the Issue."

They are crucial. Israeli settlement activity is precisely the undertaking that is foreclosing the possibility of a Palestinian state. Recent U.S. efforts to restart meaningful negotiations have faltered around Israel's refusal to implement a comprehensive settlement freeze in keeping with obligations under both international law and the "road map." Israel's refusal to comply has undermined the credibility of the peace process and eroded Palestinian public confidence in the ability of negotiations to bring tangible results.

Rather than favoring Palestinians or Israelis, a credible peace process holds both accountable to commitments made in the name of peace. The true test of meaningful negotiations, as distinct from negotiations for their own sake, is what happens on the ground. The faux freeze Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now proposing — build units already in the pipeline and then implement a brief six-month freeze, all the while continuing pell-mell with construction in East Jerusalem — is powerful on-the-ground evidence that Netanyahu and his coalition intend to build greater Israel at the expense of Palestinians.

Israeli settlements pose the greatest threat to the two-state solution. Settlements and their related infrastructure, like settler bypass roads, account for more than 40 percent of the West Bank, fragmenting the territory, monopolizing freshwater resources, and confining Palestinians to a series of disconnected cantons where unemployment, poverty, and hopelessness have reached endemic levels. Settlements run counter to the very principle of "land for peace" on which the Middle East peace process is built, and they make a viable and sovereign Palestinian state a physical impossibility. Without a viable and sovereign Palestinian state, there is no two-state solution.

"Israel's Occupation Is Not Apartheid."

It is. In fact, it would be most accurate to call it occupation, colonialism, and apartheid all rolled into one. This is the conclusion reached in a recent report commissioned by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, titled "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?", that brought together a team of international scholars and legal experts to assess Israel's occupation vis-à-vis international law.

On apartheid, the report identifies a series of discriminatory laws, standards, and practices that Israel applies exclusively to Palestinians living under occupation — laws, standards, and practices which do not apply to Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank and that are intended to "maintain [Israel's] domination over Palestinians in the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] and to suppress opposition of any form."

In particular, the report identifies three pillars of apartheid as it existed in South Africa, noting that they also exist in the occupied Palestinian territory today. The first pillar consists of laws and policies that "establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews." The ramifications of this include the massive disparity in terms of the rights and privileges enjoyed by Israeli settlers compared with Palestinians, such as the denial of the right of return for Palestinian refugees compared with the 1950 Law of Return allowing all Jews to immigrate to Israel or, since 1967, the occupied Palestinian territory.

The second pillar concerns Israeli policies intended to segregate the population along racial lines. These policies center on the confinement of Palestinians to areas that resemble "Bantustans" (the largest being Israel's complete closure on Gaza), policed by Israel using a network of walls, roadblocks, checkpoints, and a special permit regime. Meanwhile, the Israelis construct settlements and a separate road system to service them, all built on confiscated Palestinian land that Palestinians can no longer access.

The final pillar focuses on repressive measures initiated under the rubric of "security." For example, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary arrest, administrative detention, extrajudicial killings, torture, and an oppressive code of military laws and military courts that fall short of international standards for a fair trial. These measures are reinforced by restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly, association, movement, and so on, which are ultimately designed to suppress Palestinian dissent while reinforcing Israeli control.

In short, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who grew up in the Jim Crow South, has it right when he uses the term apartheid to describe Israel's policies in the occupied Palestinian territory. And the facts are increasingly on the table. Whether the Barack Obama administration, already saddled with a brutal fight over health care, has the courage to challenge Israel's "economic peace," siege of Gaza, intransigence, settlements, and apartheid remains to be seen.

* Zahi Khouri is chief executive of the Palestinian National Beverage Co. (a Coca-Cola franchisee), chairman of the Palestinian Tourism Investment Co., and chairman of the board of the NGO Development Center, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization.

The attached photo is from the slideshow entitled "Fervent Believers" which accompanies this New York Times article:

Resolve of West Bank Settlers May Have Limits

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/world/middleeast/14settlers.html

The photo captions reads:

A settler tosses wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron. The approach of some settlers towards neighboring Palestinians, especially around Nablus in the north and Hebron in the south, has often been one of contempt and violence. Photo: Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

This is another example of the Racism in the Apartheid State of Zionist Jews.

Just imagine someone doing similar thing to a Jew somewhere around the world. What would Israel do?

If the Jews have the "right" to do all of this and more, why don't we practice the same "rights"? Simply because we are not ZIONIST-JEWS.

The International Middle East Media Center's website leaked the alleged draft of Obama's peace plan given to them by Palestinian Legislator Hasan Khreisha. Khreisha added that the draft has been widely distributed among Palestinian and Arab leaders and the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, recently discussed the plan during his visit to the White House.

According to Khreisha, the draft includes ten main points detailed as follows:

1. International presence in the Jordan Valley, Palestinian Plains area, and other areas in the West Bank.

2. Annexing some parts of East Jerusalem to remain under Israeli control, while Muslim holy site would be under Arab control.

3. All Palestinian factions would be dissolved and transformed into political parties.

4. Large settlement blocs in the West Bank would remain under Israeli control, while negotiations would be conducted within three months of the plan agreement?, to discuss the future of smaller settlements.

5. Several areas in the West Bank would be disarmed, and Israeli would maintain aerial control.

6. Intensifying the Palestinian-Israeli security coordination.

7. The Palestinian Authority would not be allowed to have military alliances with regional countries.

8. The United States would guarantee the establishment of a Palestinian State in the summer of 2011.

9. Allowing an agreed upon number of refugees to return, and to be settled in the Plains area and other areas in the West Bank, particularly in the cities of Ramallah and Nablus. A special fund for supporting the refugees would also be established.

10. Israel starts releasing the Palestinian political detainees immediately after the peace deal is signed. Three years would be allocated for the release of the detainees.

No one can be sure this is the final draft of the Obama peace plan, but it has the resonance of credibility.

Besides its many flaws, the peace plan should have begun with ending the US/Israel siege of Gaza. That would have been a signal that the US and Israel are really serious about peace in the Holy Land. The plan fails to address boarders, water, trade and the apartheid wall.

The 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel will be released over a period of "three years", longer than Guantanamo Bay. The question we want to ask is: will Marwan Barghoutti be released in time to partake in the negotiations? The answer to this is obviously, no.

US expect Israel to accept these terms on the premise that the Obama Administration adopts a stronger position towards halting Iran's nuclear ambitions. The same nuclear program that US chief of intelligence has confirmed in his findings in a 2007 report, did not exist.

Even if Abbas and Arab administration accept this plan (which will not be accepted by majority of Palestinian people and millions of their supporters around the world), Israel will again fool US Administration to fulfill their part toward Iran but in return Israel will not move one step towards peace.

Another four to eight years – the age of Obama Administration in office – will pass, nothing will change on ground more than more Palestinian lands will be stolen by Israel and more Palestinians and innocents in both sides will be killed.

In the Cellcom advert, IOF soldiers on patrol along the Wall stop their army jeep when it is hit by a soccer ball from the Palestinian side of the Wall. A game ensues, back and forth with the unseen Palestinians after a soldier dials up "reinforcements," including two smiling women in uniform, to come and play.

The advertisement made by McCann Erickson, part of U.S. Interpublic Group, ends with the upbeat voiceover: "After all, what are we all after? Just a little fun."

The advert has been extensively criticized for making light of the Palestinian suffering inflicted by the West Bank Apartheid Wall.

The Palestinians put controversial ad to test. A video recently posted on YouTube has tried to reenact the game in reality, and found that the result could not be further removed from the situation on the ground: when the Palestinians kick the ball to the other side of the Wall, what they get in return is a salvo of tear gas grenades and bullets.

Protesters in Bilin tested the "fun" claimed by Cellcom to find that it "smells" and can "kill you" if you play it with Israelis.

One of the activists in Bil'in said: "We wanted to show everyone how the soldiers really behave, contrary to what was shown in the ad. This is a message from the protestors on what really goes on at the separation fence – this is what we get from the soldiers, tear gas."

The Israeli ad prompted Arab lawmakers in Israel to demand it be taken off air. MK Ahmed Tibi called to scrap this television commercial.

What the Israelis sees as "Just a little fun" is actually an Apartheid Wall that separates families and prevents children from reaching schools and clinics, yet the advertisement presents the Wall as though it were just a garden fence in Tel Aviv.

Cellcom, however, has remained defiant and stood by the commercial.

"We are a communications company that facilitates human interaction," they said. "We don't deal with politics. We've had very positive feedback about the advert. There was absolutely no cynical intention behind it."

The ad went out during the same week as Palestinians marked the fifth anniversary of a World Court ruling that Israel's walls and fences in the West Bank were illegal.

Hagai Matar, an Israeli activist, said that the violent atmosphere near the fence was far from resembling the pastoral, pleasant atmosphere reflected in the Cellcom advert.

"While the people of Bilin suffer from frequent and repeated harassments by the army, while the residents are subjected to nightly arrests, violence and tear gas, not only during rallies but also in their yards, the people of Bilin continue to use amusing and creative ways to protest the separation fence," he said.

I got really too nauseous watching the ad. You see the Israeli occupation forces playing with ?!… the people that they are incarcerating behind the Apartheid Wall. But the most grotesque and disgusting part of this TV ad is the fact that the Palestinians basically aren't seen. Why? Because they are not there waiting for the football, but for … This ad correctly portray the occupation as monsters or aliens … This is the alienation that Israeli society feels toward the Palestinian people. In reality, if a Palestinian comes close to the Apartheid Wall to return a football … he is likely to get shot.

Cellcom should take this racist commercial off the air immediately and appologies for the Palestinian people. Refusing to do so only confirms the fact that racism is a culture that is widely adopted, believed and practiced in Israel.

The release of the report came just days after an article was published in The Independent newspaper reporting the testimonies of two Israeli soldiers which detail the deliberate abuse of Palestinian children. One soldier is reported as saying that in an incident that occurred in a Palestinian village in March, he saw a lot of soldiers 'just knee (Palestinians) because it's boring, because you stand there for 10 hours, you're not doing anything, so they beat people up.'

The report published contains the testimonies of 33 children, one as young as 10 years old, who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation.

Most of these children were arrested from villages near the Wall and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There is evidence that many children are painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand.

Following are some excerpts from this chill-shocking report. It is a must-read report and worth saving for your reference in the future. It can be downloaded from here and here (both PDF format):

Executive summary

The Israeli military court system in the Occupied Palestinian Territory has operated for over 42 years almost devoid of international scrutiny. Each year an average of 9,000 Palestinians are prosecuted in two Israeli military courts operating in the West Bank, including 700 children.

From the moment of arrest, Palestinian children encounter ill-treatment and in some cases torture, at the hands of Israeli soldiers, policemen and interrogators. Children are commonly arrested from the family home in the hours before dawn by heavily armed soldiers. The child is painfully bound, blindfolded and bundled into the back of a military vehicle without any indication as to why or where the child is being taken. [...] Most children confess and some are forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not comprehend. These interrogations are not video recorded as is required under Israeli domestic law.

Children as young as 12 years are prosecuted in the Israeli military courts and are treated as adults as soon as they turn 16 [...] In 91% of all cases involving Palestinian children, bail was denied. [...] With no faith in the system and the potential for harsh sentences, approximately 95% of cases end in the child pleading guilty, whether the ofence was committed or not. [...] Many children receive no family visits whilst in prison and limited education [...]

Some examples of torture

What amounts to torture or ill-treatment will depend on the circumstances of each individual case. However, it is useful to list some of the types of circumstances that have been held to amount to torture and ill-treatment by the Committee as a general guidance:

- Restraining in very painful conditions;
- Hooding under special conditions;
- Playing loud music for prolonged periods of time;
- Threats, including death threats;
- Violent shaking;
- Kicking, punching and beating with implements;
- Using cold air to chill;
- Excessive use of force by law enforcement personnel and the military;
- Incommunicado detention (detention without access to a lawyer, doctor or the ability to communicate with family members);
- Solitary confnement;
- Sensorial deprivation and almost total prohibition of communication;
- Poor conditions of detention, including failure to provide food, water, heating in winter, proper washing facilities, overcrowding, lack of amenities, poor hygiene facilities, limited clothing and medical care.

The above list is by no means exhaustive and in every case, the particular vulnerability of the victim, such as his or her young age or medical condition should be taken into consideration.

Case Study No. 15

Name: Islam M.
Date of arrest: 31 December 2008
Age at arrest: 12
Accusation: Throwing stones

On 31 December 2008, 12-year-old Islam from a village near the West Bank city of Nablus, was out hunting birds in an olive grove when he and his friends were arrested by Israeli soldiers and accused of throwing stones. The olive grove was located about 500 metres from an Israeli settler bypass road.

At around 4:00pm we decided to go home. We collected the nets. Our houses are about one kilometre away. After walking 20 metres we heard a gun shot from the bypass road. We began walking faster towards our houses in the opposite direction to the bypass road. When we reached the edge of the village, we were surprised to see Israeli soldiers, about 10 to 20 metres behind us, with their guns pointed at us. They were shouting at us to stop in Hebrew. We stopped where we were. [...] One of them approached me and grabbed my hand. Another soldier grabbed Hasan's hand. They then tied our hands together with the same plastic cord. They tied my right hand to Hasan's left hand. The soldiers then pushed us and forced us to walk towards our house. The soldiers did not tell me why they were arresting me [...] When we reached the jeep, the soldiers blindfolded me and Hasan with a piece of cloth that the soldiers had. They pushed me inside the jeep. I fell on the ground. I was seated on the floor of the jeep. I lifted the blindfold using my untied left hand and looked around. I saw six soldiers inside the jeep, sitting on seats. Hasan and I were seated between their legs.

Twelve-year-old Islam was arrested by Israeli soldiers while out hunting birds. He was transferred to an Israeli military base for interrogation. Ten minutes later a soldier asked me [...] whether I threw stones at the soldiers. Three minutes later a captain called Hasan, wearing a military uniform, came to us … He took me to a pine tree and made me sit on the ground. 'Have you seen kids throwing stones at the soldiers?' he asked. 'Yes,' I answered. 'Do you know them?' He asked. 'No,' I said. He threatened to pour hot water on my face. 'I don't know who threw stones,' I said. Five minutes later he took me to a place full of thorny bushes. He ordered me to sit in the bushes. I refused. He pushed me and I fell in the bushes. That really hurt me. They placed me inside a jeep [...] Captain Hasan approached me and asked me to confess to throwing stones. I refused. 'We'll put you in jail, patriotic boy' he said. [...] A policeman in blue uniform came and took me to interrogation. I was still tied and blindfolded, but managed to see things from beneath the blindfold. In the interrogation room, there was one policeman with a solider sitting next to him. 'You threw stones. You were photographed while throwing stones' the policeman said. I denied it [...] I asked the soldiers for food. They brought me an apple, one half rotten. I ate the good half and gave the rotten half back to the soldier [...] They seated me on a chair for about five hours without asking me anything.

A policeman in blue uniform came and took me to an office. He allowed me to watch a DVD that had children throwing stones at soldiers. 'See yourself throwing stones?' He said. I did not see myself because I had not thrown stones. He then took me out of the room. I was kept alone, tied and blindfolded, sitting on the ground for three hours. (2 February 2009)

Islam was charged with throwing stones and fned NIS 1,000 (US$ 250) by a military court after entering into a plea bargain. He spent three days in detention in Ofer.

Case Study No. 22

Name: Afaf B.
Date of arrest: 5 February 2008
Age at arrest: 16
Accusation: Contact with a wanted person and the intention to carry out a suicide bombing

On 5 February 2008, Afaf and her father voluntarily went to the Israeli intelligence headquarters at Ras al-Amoud, Jerusalem, after being ordered to attend. Afaf was immediately taken for interrogation where she was accused of having contact with a wanted person and intending to carry out a suicide bombing. Afaf's father was not permitted to remain with her during interrogation. Afaf was then interrogated for 59 consecutive days and then sentenced to 16 months imprisonment inside Israel.

The interrogator began asking me general questions about myself and how I was doing. I asked him to stop asking such questions and get straight to the reason why they brought me here. He said that I had committed some security ofences [...] he then asked me about a young man called Murad … I agreed that I had never seen Murad but I used to talk to him on the phone [...] The interrogator did not charge me directly with any wrongdoing, and he did not accuse me of a specifc accusation. He only said that I had committed some security ofences without giving any further details [...] An hour later, the interrogator came back to the room and told me I was under arrest and that they would transfer me to Al Mascobiyya Interrogation and Detention Centre in Jerusalem. [...]

Two interrogators named Arsan and David were already in the room. They had a typed paper written in Hebrew. They told me that this paper was sent via fax from the same interrogator who interrogated me earlier in Ras al-Amoud, and that I had confessed to doing many things. I told them that what was in the paper was a lie and that I did not confess to anything and no specifc accusation was made against me. They said that the paper says that I knew a young man named Murad and I knew that he was wanted by the intelligence … This interrogation lasted until midnight. [...] In the morning of 6 February 2008, they came and took me to Jerusalem's Magistrate's Court. My hands and feet were tied. A lawyer hired by the State was waiting for me, but none of my family was there [...] In the court, the prosecution asked for my detention to be extended for 10 days, relying on a secret file submitted to the judge. My lawyer objected and asked for my immediate release. However, the judge decided to extend my detention [...]

Israeli Military Court

My interrogation lasted for several hours for 59 consecutive days. In one of the interrogation rounds, a tall interrogator told me that I should confess that I had asked Murad to help me carry out a suicide bombing. I denied that of course, and he slapped me so hard that I fell over to the ground and my mouth began bleeding.

On the seventh day of my arrest [...] the interrogator told me that Murad had been arrested, and he had interrogated him. He added that Murad confessed that I asked him to help me to carry out a suicide bombing. [...] After 10 days of interrogation [...] I came back from the court and I was put in a room inside the Centre with another detainee named Nisreen Z. She was detained on a theft case. On the same day I had a stomach ache. Nisreen handed me a white pill, which turned out later to be a narcotic pill. I fainted for some time. When I woke up, Nisreen told me that I had said many things and confessed to many things and that it was recorded. I was then removed from the room and taken to the interrogation room. The tall interrogator asked me to confess to everything but I refused [...] the interrogator played the recording. I heard myself speaking with Nisreen who was asking me many questions about Murad and carrying out a suicide bombing, and I would answer her 'yes' without giving further details [...] I did not sign any confession papers. (23 December 2008)

Afaf was charged with contact with a wanted person and the intention to carry out a suicide bombing. She was sentenced to 16 months imprisonment by a military court after entering into a plea bargain. She is currently detained in Telmond Prison inside Israel. Afaf was released on 7 May 2009.

Case Study No. 33

Name: Ezzat H.
Date of arrest: 11 June 2008
Age at arrest: 10
Accusation: None

On 11 June 2008, Israeli soldiers stormed Ezzat's family's shop in a village near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, situated near the Wall. The soldiers said that they were looking for a hand gun.

At around 10:30am, I was sitting in my father's shop selling animal feed and eggs. I was wearing a red T-shirt and blue jeans. My brother Makkawi (7) and sister Lara (8) were sitting with me [...] I was surprised by the arrival of two Israeli soldiers to the shop. One of them had dark skin, wearing khaki jeans and a black T-shirt with a blue vest on top. The other one was in green clothes. Both of them were wearing helmets and carrying black weapons. The soldier with the black T-shirt was carrying a pistol around his chest in addition to the assault rife.

They suddenly walked into the shop. Once they entered the shop, the soldier with the black T-shirt began shouting at me, telling me: 'your father has sent us to you and we want the pistol your father has.' I became terrifed and said: 'my father has nothing. He doesn't own such things.' He slapped me hard across my right cheek and he slapped my brother on the face too. He then asked my siblings to get out of the shop. He asked me all over again and I told him we had nothing. He asked me to get out the pistol from the animal feed sacks. I answered him we had no pistol. He slapped me again and this time it was on my left cheek. [...]

A group of locals gathered around the store and some of them tried to enter and help me, but the soldier standing by the door prevented them from doing so. When the other soldier did not find anything, he asked me again to tell him where the pistol was. When I answered him back saying: 'we don't have anything' he punched me hard in my stomach and I fell over onto the empty egg boxes. I was crying and screaming because I could not stand the pain and I was terrified too.

The soldier with the black T-shirt made fun of me and imitated my crying. He spoke very fluent Arabic. He kept me inside the shop for 15 minutes. He then grabbed me by my T-shirt and dragged me out of the shop. I asked him to let me close the shop but he said leave it open so that it would be robbed. Some of my friends who were at the scene closed the shop.

When he dragged me out of the shop, he ordered me to walk in the street in front of him. He and the other soldier, who was pointing his weapon at me, walked behind me, and some people gathered around. While walking, the soldier in the black T-shirt would slap me hard on my neck now and then … I was slapped three to four times on my nape while walking towards the house. When we reached the house, 100 meters away, I saw many soldiers around the house and a number of dark green military vehicles. The word 'Police' was written on an olive coloured jeep. When I entered the house [...] the soldier with the black T-shirt made me stand in the yard and asked me to get the pistol out of the flower basin. When I was about to answer him and say we had no pistol, he slapped me so hard that I fell down on my face in the fower basin. [...]

My father was standing by the door of the guest room, where my family was held. The soldier slapped me on my nape in front of my father and I fell to the ground. He slapped me again on my nape and I fell to the ground after I stood up. All of this was in front of my father. He then lifted me in the air after he grabbed my T-shirt. He told my father that he was going to take me to prison [...] He threatened to arrest my older sister who was 19 years old [...] he then pushed me into the guest room where my mother and siblings were held. My mother was crying. When she saw me crying, she asked me why and I told her that I had been hit. She asked them to leave me alone and hit her instead. They told her that they would take me to prison. [...] The soldier with the black T-shirt took me to the bedroom and slapped me at the door. He then brought my older sister to search and interrogate her while forcing me to stand by the kitchen door. They then moved me to another bedroom.

Torturing Ezzat H

While passing me, the soldier with the black T-shirt slapped me so hard on my face that I fell on the ground. He asked me to stay there in the room. He would go for five minutes and then come back to slap me on the face, and punch me several times in my stomach. I would shout and burst into tears. He would imitate me and make fun of me. He continued coming to the room around six times where he would hit me and slap me. [...] I spent about one hour in the room all alone with the soldiers. During this hour, the soldier with the black T-shirt ordered me to stand on one foot and lift my hands up in the air with my back against the wall. This lasted for about half an hour. I was exhausted but I did not dare to put my foot on the ground because he ordered me not to. [...] The soldier with the black T-shirt [...] then brought my older sister and asked me whether I cared about her or not. I said: 'yes I do.' He then asked me to tell him where the pistol was and he would not tell my father. I said we did not have a pistol, so he took my sister out, and then came back and hit me all over my body. He left the room and after a while he came back and ofered me 10 Shekels if I would tell him where the pistol was. I told him I did not care about money. He really became so angry that he took of his helmet and hit me with it from two metres away. He asked me to bring him the helmet and when I did, he threw it again at me, but this time he missed. He again asked me to bring him the helmet but this time he did not hit me with it. Instead, he left the room for five minutes and came back and slapped me on the face and stomach without asking me anything. Once again he left the room and was gone for a while, and I was all alone in the room. He then came back and asked me about the pistol and I answered that we did not have any pistol. He slapped me twice on my face and pushed me back. He then left the room for a while and came back to repeat it all over again. [...]

Afterwards, a soldier wearing black sunglasses came into the room where I was held and pointed his rife at me. The rife barrel was a few centimeters away from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me and said: 'shivering? Tell me where the pistol is before I shoot you.' I replied by saying that we had nothing. He lowered his rife and took out the bullets [...] (21 June 2008)

After initially wishing to file a complaint against the soldiers involved, Ezzat's father changed his mind for fear of retaliation.

Since DCI-Palestine last published a report on Palestinian child detainees (April 2008), the practice of ill-treatment and torture has continued unabated. During the course of the reporting period DCI-Palestine continued to receive numerous testimonies from Palestinian children speaking of their ill-treatment and torture at the hands of Israeli soldiers, policemen and security operatives. This abuse occurs from the moment of arrest, and continues during transfer, interrogation and detention. The ill-treatment documented by DCI-Palestine appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalised, suggesting complicity at all levels of the political and military chain of command. This abusive system operates with the knowledge and assistance of some doctors, and is overseen by a military court system that ignores basic principles of juvenile justice and fair trial rights, whilst willfully turning a blind eye to the presentation in court of one coerced confession after another. This system imposed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory operates beyond international legal norms and within a general culture of impunity.DCI-Palestine continues in its eforts to bring this situation to the attention of the international community which is itself bound by a number of legal obligations to ensure that these violations are fully investigated, and where appropriate, prosecuted and that such conduct is not rewarded.

Without some measure of accountability, it is unlikely that the situation endured by Palestinian children described in the pages above, will improve.

* Defence for Children International – Palestine Section (DCI-Palestine) is a national section of the international non-governmental child rights organisation and movement, Defence for Children International (DCI), established in 1979, with consultative status with ECOSOC. DCI-Palestine was established in 1992, and is dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), as well as other international, regional and local standards. As part of its ongoing work to uphold the rights of Palestinian children, DCI-Palestine provides free legal assistance, collects evidence, researches and drafts reports and conducts general advocacy targeting various duty bearers.

by Carlos Latuff

By Yotam Feldman and Uri Blau

Every week, about 10 officers from the Israel Defense Force's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit convene in the white Templer building in the Kirya, the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, to decide which food products will appear on the tables of the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Among those taking part in the discussion are Colonel Moshe Levi, head of the Gaza District Coordination Office (DCO), Colonel Alex Rosenzweig, head of the civil division of COGAT and Colonel Doron Segal, head of the economics division. These officers decided, for example, that persimmons, bananas and apples were vital items for basic sustenance and thus permitted into the Gaza Strip, while apricots, plums, grapes and avocados were impermissible luxuries. Over the past year, these officers were responsible for prohibiting the entry into the Gaza Strip of tinned meat, tomato paste, clothing, shoes and notebooks. All these items are sitting in the giant storerooms rented by Israeli suppliers near the Kerem Shalom crossing, awaiting a change in policy.

The policy is not fixed, but continually subject to change, explains a COGAT official. Thus, about two months ago, the COGAT officials allowed pumpkins and carrots into Gaza, reversing a ban that had been in place for many months. The entry of "delicacies" such as cherries, kiwi, green almonds, pomegranates and chocolate is expressly prohibited. As is halvah, too, most of the time. Sources involved in COGAT's work say that those at the highest levels, including acting coordinator Amos Gilad, monitor the food brought into Gaza on a daily basis and personally approve the entry of any kind of fruit, vegetable or processed food product requested by the Palestinians. At one of the unit's meetings, Colonel Oded Iterman, a COGAT officer, explained the policy as follows: "We don't want Gilad Shalit's captors to be munching Bamba [a popular Israeli snack food] right over his head."

The "Red Lines" document explains: "In order to make basic living in Gaza possible, the deputy defense minister approved the entry into the Gaza Strip of 106 trucks with humanitarian products, 77 of which are basic food products. The entry of wheat and animal feed was also permitted via the aggregates conveyor belt outside the Karni terminal."

After four pages filled with detailed charts of the number of grams and calories of every type of food to be permitted for consumption by Gaza residents (broken down by gender and age), comes this recommendation: "It is necessary to deal with the international community and the Palestinian Health Ministry to provide nutritional supplements (only some of the flour in Gaza is enriched) and to provide education about proper nutrition." Printed in large letters at the end of the document is this admonition: "The stability of the humanitarian effort is critical for the prevention of the development of malnutrition."

In fact, the number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip is very close to the absolute minimum required for basic sustenance, as determined by the IDF itself. Data compiled by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, shows that while the minimum number of trucks per day set by the IDF is 106, in May, 117 trucks passed through the Kerem Shalom terminal; in April the number was 113 and, before the start of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, just 37.

These quantities allow a very slim margin for error or mishaps. Moreover, COGAT's analysis is statistically accurate only on condition that there is an equal division of the minimum supplies that are allowed in. "This analysis does not take distribution in the field into consideration," says the "Red Lines" document. A COGAT official says that he assumes that food distribution within Gaza is not equal. If some are receiving more, others are necessarily receiving less than the required minimum. So it is hard to reconcile this information with the claims of the defense minister and COGAT officers that there is no real food shortage in Gaza.

COGAT officers are in regular contact with international organizations, listen to their complaints and examine their requests to bring in various goods, in both official and unofficial meetings. For example, Amos Gilad has dinner from time to time with an official from the UNRWA delegation in Israel. The Israeli officers repeat the following phrase in their meetings with organization officials: "No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis." A senior COGAT officer explains to Haaretz that it's not a siege policy, but rather the restriction of entry of luxury products. The decision as to which products qualify as "luxury" changes from week to week, and sometimes from day to day.

Some of these changes are the result of international pressure exerted upon Israel. For example, when he visited Gaza last February, U.S. Senator John Kerry was stunned to discover that Israel was not allowing Palestinians to bring in trucks loaded with pasta. Following American pressure, on March 20 the cabinet decided to permit the unrestricted transfer of food products into Gaza. Incredibly, the COGAT personnel do not see any contradiction between this decision and the serious restrictions that are nevertheless imposed on the entry of various food items.

"Let it be clear that the decision was not intended to lift the restrictions that were imposed in the past in relation to the entry of equipment and food into the Gaza Strip, as determined by the cabinet decision of September 19," said COGAT in response to Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which has demanded that "prohibited" foods be allowed to enter Gaza.

Despite the many resources invested by the IDF in coordinating with the Palestinians, since the start of the blockade no list of permitted and prohibited items has been relayed to the Palestinian side. The DCO spokesperson says there is no such list and that the Palestinians "know what they're allowed to bring in." But the Palestinians are less satisfied with this situation: Riad Fatouh says that at a meeting three months ago at the Agriculture Ministry in Tel Aviv, attended by al-Sheikh and Mhana from the Palestinian side, he asked DCO chief Moshe Levi for an official document detailing which products the army currently allows to be brought into Gaza. "Even if there are just 10 types of goods, I want to see it in writing," says Fatouh.

According to Fatouh, Levi was visibly angered upon hearing the request, and told him never to make such a request again, to be satisfied with the transfer of information by telephone. When Fatouh asked Levi why, the DCO chief told him: "Any goods that we allow in, or prohibit – you'll know about it by phone. That's the way we work." No one else in the room mentioned it again.

"If you go back two years, you see that it was utter foolishness," says a senior officer who was serving in COGAT when the blockade was imposed. "There was a vague, unclear policy, influenced by the interests of certain groups, by this or that lobby, without any policy that derived from the needs of the population. For example, the fruit growers have a powerful lobby, and this lobby saw to it that on certain days, from 20-25 trucks full of fruit were brought into Gaza. It's not that it arrived there and was thrown out, but if you were to ask a Gazan who lives there, it's not exactly what he needs. What happened was that the Israeli interest took precedence over the needs of the populace."

This move was greeted with dismay by many farmers in Israel, who were very pleased with Madar's performance. At an April 20 meeting in the office of Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, it was decided that Madar is the one "who will set the agricultural agenda." Vilnai decided at that same meeting that Madar would be returned to the Erez checkpoint, but a military source explained that security considerations prevent his permanent return there. The spokesperson for the coordinator of activity in the territories would not permit Madar to be interviewed.

Avshalom Herzog, a member of Moshav Almagor, is a fruit grower and the proprietor of a large packing house. He says he has connections with 80 percent of the packing houses in Israel that transport goods to Gaza, in part because of his partnership with Khaled Uthman, the largest fruit trader in Gaza. Herzog is an energetic farmer, and frequently writes to the decision-makers – Deputy Defense Minister Vilnai, Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon and COGAT officers – about bringing goods into Gaza.

"Until three or four years ago, in a normal year I transported 30-40 percent of the fruit that went into Gaza," says Herzog. "Today it's no more than 10-15 percent, because the market in Gaza is not a real market, but rather a market determined by the Defense Ministry. If the Defense Ministry says only 10 trucks will enter, then it doesn't matter who works in Gaza – he'll make money. And then there are wars between people who were never traders and there is bribery and people start to pay huge sums for the transport of fruit – irrational things, and then my share is diminished. I know that's how it is and there's not much I can do about it."

Herzog and other farmers have found an attentive audience in Simhon and Vilnai, but they are still not satisfied. "Simhon helps us sometimes," says Herzog, "but if he wanted to, he could have solved the problems a long time ago. You know what really makes me mad? There was a decision made in a meeting back in April. They came out with a protocol that required the entry of 20 trucks a day, and required that at least three trucks be filled with melons and that an officer from the agriculture staff who was exiled to Julis, in north Israel, be immediately returned to the Erez crossing, where he needed to be for the farmers' sake. This decision makes it plain as day that the one determining the mix of fruit [to be trucked in] is the director of the fruit growers' organization together with an officer of the agriculture staff in the Gaza DCO. But it's ignored. Today it's permissible to bring in peaches, bananas, apples, dates. Kumquats were permissible until yesterday. There are no plums, no pumpkin, no watermelon and no onion. It's just impossible to believe."

Summaries of the discussions about entry of food into Gaza show just how deeply the captains of the defense establishment seem to care about the income of Israeli farmers. Hence, in a discussion that took place in the office of Deputy Minister Vilnai, it was decided that every day, 15 trucks filled with agricultural produce would be brought in. "The problem right now is the emphasis on melons and fruit in general," Agriculture Ministry Director General Yossi Yishai said at the meeting. At the conclusion of the discussion, Vilnai instructed that three trucks with melons be brought into Gaza each week, "So as not to cause a market failure in Israel." Another document, from the end of April, signed by Vilnai's public information officer, says: "Israel's policy at the crossings is set at various times in accordance with a number of considerations … Economic considerations, including the agricultural establishment, are at the basis of the policy considerations."

Meir Yifrah, secretary of the Vegetable Growers Organization, also tries to exert influence on the decisions of COGAT and the Defense Ministry, with occasional success. "Once a month or so, I send a text message to [Agriculture Minister Simhon] Shalom saying the situation in the market is very tough, the growers need to send produce to Gaza, see what you can do with the Defense Ministry, so they'll bring in what's needed. It seems odd to me that pumpkin can be defined as a luxury item. It's sometimes used to feed animals, more than for people. If there are two or three or four growers who want to send stuff in and it's something they're short on there (in Gaza), I say they should be able to do that. I tried to pressure the Agriculture Ministry, and in the end we were successful. Last year I had a bad situation with onions. A lot of growers were stuck with their stock. We pressed the Agriculture Ministry and then they increased the onion quota from five to eight trucks at the end of last year."

Are sales to Gaza significant for Israeli farmers?

"The farmers' interest is to find other markets, so we can increase profitability for the grower, by creating demand in Israel and avoiding surpluses."

The Agriculture Ministry claims it also takes care of Palestinian interests: "When it comes to a decision on the kind of produce to be allowed into Gaza, the ministry takes into consideration Palestinian needs, the Israeli growers' ability to fulfill these needs as well as their own interests, and especially the Israeli consumer, to maintain reasonable prices in the local market. Minister Simhon, as a matter of policy, sees agriculture as a bridge to peace, and in every government in which he served, he has demanded the continuation of trade in farm products with the Palestinians, as well as cooperation in disease control in animals and plants – even in the worst security situations."

COGAT's "Red Lines" document, which defines the minimum necessary for the sustenance of Gaza residents, also finds that 300 calves a week are needed to feed Gazans – That's at least 200 fewer than the number brought in when the crossing was open for trade. Nevertheless, in the six months since Cast Lead, Israel has not permitted the entry of any live calves into Gaza, allowing only frozen meat and fish. In the period prior to the war, when Gaza residents were able to obtain permits to import calves, this was limited to calves from Israel, not from other countries as in the past.

In recent months, Israeli cattle breeders have been exerting pressure on the Agriculture Minister to get him to allow calves into Gaza. Most impacted by the restrictions on bringing meat into Gaza is Eyal Erlich, a former journalist who 15 years ago made a drastic career switch to become an importer of beef. Each year, until the blockade of Gaza was announced, Erlich sold 50,000 calves that he imported from Australia to Palestinians in Gaza (Gazans apparently prefer beef to lamb).

Erlich, 50, heavyset and white-haired, complains about the severe dent in his income and that of his Gazan partner, Hosni Afana. He believes that Agriculture Minister Simhon, who was involved in shaping the policy regarding import of beef to Gaza, exploited the situation to compel the Gazan market to buy Israeli, and thereby assist local breeders.

One way the Palestinians make up for the shortage of beef is by bringing in a large number of sheep via the Rafah tunnels. Unlike other animals, lambs will walk on their own to the other end of the tunnel, so they are easier to smuggle. Veterinary services in Israel estimate that since the start of the blockade, the Palestinians have smuggled in about 40,000 lambs through the tunnels, without any veterinary oversight. The Agriculture Ministry is concerned that these animals could spread epidemics that would eventually reach Israel.

Two days before the High Court's hearing on Erlich's petition, there was a meeting with attorney Hila Gorny of the State Prosecutor's Office. At this meeting, Uri Madar, of the agriculture department of the DCO, voiced his concern that the prohibition on importing beef to Gaza was adversely affecting the residents' nutrition. Colonel Alex Rosenzweig, head of the civilian division of COGAT, argued the opposite, saying there was no shortage of meat in Gaza and the ban on importation of cattle was not endangering the Palestinians' nutrition.

Madar declined to sign the state's response to the petition, asserting that there was "a black flag waving over it," and his view was not presented at the High Court hearing. Furthermore, at the hearing, the IDF did not present the COGAT document which states that at least 300 calves are to be imported into Gaza per week.

A Justice Ministry spokesperson, responding on behalf of the High Court Petition department, confirms this, adding, "Not only that, the state's position was never that the weekly quota of 300 calves, which applied for a certain period of time, was defined as a minimal humanitarian need. The position of the COGAT officials charged with assessing the humanitarian situation in Gaza was presented to the court, stipulating that the entire 'food basket' that is brought into Gaza, which includes frozen meat products, meets the humanitarian needs there. This position was supported by data presented to the State Prosecutor. These officials also stated that they were informed that this was the case by Palestinian officials with whom they are in contact. Beyond this, the State Prosecutor does not intend to relate to the content of the internal discussions held in anticipation of the filing of responses to the petition."

The spokesperson continues, "Although Erlich is seeking to paint his motives for filing the petition as stemming from concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, he is essentially seeking to promote his business, which is being harmed by government policy on Gaza. The Supreme Court also reached this conclusion."

Erlich's experience in the ongoing fight to get cattle allowed into Gaza prompted him to establish Adam Solutions, a company devoted to assisting Palestinians in coping with the restrictions imposed on Gaza by the Israeli government. Erlich and his partner Basel Darawshe, son of former MK Abdulwahab Darawshe, hire out their services to wage a public and legal battle for "traders who need to bring in products" or "people who want to go out to get to hospitals."

How would you have helped?

"It's a legitimate and legal activity. What I would have done is go to a journalist, for example, and show how we're wrecking Israel's public relations."

Why did they turn to you?

"I'm a private businessperson. People come to me because they know I've solved more than a few problems because I was determined and clever."

Adiri also spoke about the matter with Bikel, a familiar figure in the flower, fruit and vegetable, and spice export field, who in the early 1990s also headed the Agricultural Strategy Committee, which dealt with agricultural relations with Palestinian farmers, among other things. Bikel remembers the problem with the bulbs: "The authorities wouldn't allow them to be imported. Hillel asked me if there was anything I could do. I told him that I thought I could do something, but it meant having to appeal to defense officials, to persuade the government and the agriculture minister, the defense minister and the prime minister. It's a tiring process. It's work. I told him that remuneration would only be due in the event of success, even though it meant a lot of work either way."

If it was really a security decision, how could it be subject to change?

"Decisions can be changed," Bikel insists.

In the end, Adiri did not avail himself of Erlich's or Bikel's services. "I asked the Dutch and they said absolutely not," says Adiri. "But the inquiry showed them that it was possible and motivated them to keep trying. They went to Ehud Barak and he eventually approved it."

Three months ago, an acquaintance walked into the shop run by H., an electronics merchant from Gaza City, and started talking about the situation in Gaza and the difficulty of bringing in goods. Then the acquaintance "casually mentioned" a friend of his who could help in obtaining merchandise. "After he started dropping hints, he told me that for NIS 60,000- 70,000 he might be able to bring in my merchandise," says H. He says he didn't go for the offer because of the high price. Other merchants say they've received offers to get their goods into Gaza for the exorbitant price of anywhere from NIS 40,000-100,000 per truck (the regular cost is about NIS 3,000). At least one admits that because of the ongoing blockade he did accept one such offer from an Israeli shipper.

One Israeli shipper explains how merchandise can be smuggled into Gaza. He says shippers often use permits obtained from aid organizations to bring in products Israel does not allow merchants to receive, such as clothing and shoes.

"We have no information whatsoever about this," says a spokesperson for the UN World Food Program. "This question does not apply to us since we use only our own trucks and drivers," says the International Red Cross. "All of our aid for Gaza is coordinated with the Israeli authorities," says a UNRWA spokesperson. "We have not encountered the kind of irregularities described. And if we did, we would report them."

How is it possible to do that?

"Let's say a merchant receives a turn to bring in sugar. He relays the name of the driver and the truck number to the Israeli side. The shipper who received the turn contacts another merchant, who didn't receive a turn and is ready to pay a lot of money to bring in his merchandise, which is stuck in Israel. The shipper arranges with the Palestinian shipper and transfers the sugar to the merchant who paid him. He makes up some story to tell the merchant who was supposed to receive the merchandise – that the truck got stuck or that it wasn't allowed through for some reason."

Since the blockade was placed on Gaza, the Karni terminal, through which more than 600 trucks used to pass daily has been closed. Now most goods are transferred through the Kerem Shalom crossing, and the only thing in operation at the Karni terminal is a conveyor belt that brings wheat, seeds and animal feed to the Palestinian side. The person who has profited most from this change is Nissim Jan, a former Shin Bet agent who served, among other things, as "head of the crossings department." In the seven years since he left the Shin Bet security service, he has managed to build himself a little empire that includes a company for logistical services, shipping services and real estate deals; he is currently constructing a building in the Barnea area of Ashkelon, together with contractor Didi Yamin.

Jan lives in a villa on the Ashkelon coast, drives a fancy Audi and wears neatly pressed button-down shirts. "Anyone who's anyone in the PA, and in Israel too apparently, knows me," he tells Haaretz. Palestinian and Israeli sources say that Jan is particularly close to Nasser Saraj, who oversees the operation of the crossings between Israel and Gaza.

Israel and Palestinian sources say that Jan gets a significant cut of this sum, ostensibly as payment for supplying food to the drivers and fuel for the trucks, a cost that cannot exceed more than a few thousand shekels a month. Man'am Shehaiber agreed to describe to Haaretz the way in which merchandise is transported from either side of the terminal. He said he employs 50 people at the crossing, but declined to reply to questions about his income from providing this service or the nature of his business connections with Jan. In addition, says an Israeli familiar with his business, Jan receives payment from the Palestinians for various jobs he does on the western (Gazan) side of the crossing.

Jan's profits seem dazzling to the Palestinians and the other Israelis involved in operating the crossings. One Israeli familiar with their operation says: "The services Jan supplies on both sides of the crossing have made him one of the most significant figures at Kerem Shalom." Some of the Palestinian traders mistakenly thought that he was the actual director of the crossing. Jan himself attests to his deep involvement there: "Nothing that happens at the crossings escapes my notice," he told Haaretz in a phone conversation. Sources in the Defense Ministry said that lately they've been checking into various complaints about his activity at the crossings.

Jan says that he handled, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, the passage back into Gaza of Palestinians who found themselves stuck in Egypt after Hamas took control in Gaza and the Rafah crossing was closed. "They came to me because you go to people you can rely on," he says. "I think I'm someone who has a different approach than anyone else at the crossings."

We've been told you get a share of the NIS 500 that the Shehaiber family collects on each truck that goes through the crossing.

"That's a total lie."

But you know the Shehaiber brothers?

"Of course I do. They work with me every day."

And it's not a business partnership?

"It has nothing at all to do with what you're talking about. It's purely business, all legal, and has nothing to do with any 500 shekels."

What is your connection with Nazmi Mhana (the Palestinian director of the crossings)?

"Nazmi is a personal friend of mine. For some reason, it's hard for people to accept a proper, legitimate relationship between two adults."

We've been told that you also do jobs for the Palestinians.

"All the time, all the time. Including now."

How does one get these kinds of jobs?

"Be a person like me – serious, quiet, honest – and apply for any tender in proper legal fashion, and then work. Anyone who wants to can apply."

Doesn't the Israeli crossings administration have a problem with the fact that you also work in the Palestinian Authority?

"I don't speak with the crossings administration about anything. What I do with the Palestinian population, with the Palestinian Authority, with the Europeans – has nothing to do with that."

A lot of people we've talked with seemed genuinely nervous to even speak about you. Why are people afraid of you?

"Because I have integrity. Maybe because I don't deal in dirt."

Maybe because you were in the Shin Bet?

"What does the Shin Bet have to do with anything? It's been 10 years since I was in the Shin Bet."

Jan's business wasn't hurt by his entanglement in the affair of the transfer of gas canisters to the Palestinian Authority area. Less than a year ago, in late August, inspectors from the enforcement unit of the Infrastructure Ministry raided warehouses belonging to Jan in the southern industrial zone in Ashkelon. There the inspectors found about 100 tons of cooking gas and reported at the time that this was the largest amount of stolen gas ever discovered in Israel in recent years. The Israel Police's economic crimes unit began an investigation into the matter.

But you paid a fine.

"We paid, but not at the crossings. My shippers, who operate legally, stored the gas canisters in a place where they shouldn't have been stored, and so we paid the fine and I said that it was my merchandise, so I would bear the expenses and the consequences."

Isn't paying the fine akin to an admission that you committed an offense?

"Paying the fine is just a way of saying 'Leave me alone.' People just find it hard to accept that I'm not the person they think I am. When I was given the fine, I told [the person from the Infrastructure Ministry] right to his face: I'm paying, even though I think I'm more moral than anyone." W

Source: Haaretz

Click to Enlarge - Garry Trudeau Doonesbury Cartoon

The ADL is demanding Garry Trudeau to apologize because he "maligned Judaism" and is guilty of promoting "anti-Jewish stereotypes and biblical illiteracy".

I will leave this for concerned religious scholars to decide, but my concern is the multi-faced, racist, hate-promoting ADL and how they work tirelessly to tag anyone and everyone asbeing an anti-Semite if s/he touches or even comes close to anything Jewish, Israeli or Zionist (even if it's baseless), while they play deaf and blind when obvious and clear hate, racist, anti-human and anti-Gentile cartoons are promoted by Zionist-Jews (if you don't know what a Gentile is, well, then according to Zionist-Jews, you're probably a Gentile).

So the question is: How come Abe Foxman finds no hate in the "How To Cook A Gentile" cartoon?

The following Zionist-Jewish cartoon depicts a pair of Jews murdering and killing Gentiles in the best humor of a neo-Nazi!

Click to Enlarge - How To Cook A Gentile

The above cartoon was published by Heeb #16 ("the Goy issue"), as a "family-friendly little comic strip", as per the cartoonist words.

If this is a 'family-friendly', 'non-racist', 'non-hate', humanist peace-loving cartoon, then no wonder or doubt where all the hate is coming from the Zionist-Jew families of Israel and their ilk.

Imagine the ruckus raised by the ADL should a magazine do a cartoon like this about Jews.

Stalin's Jews

By Sever Plocker

We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.

Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.

In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World, "Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.

Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.

All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.

And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."

Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.

Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not move Kaganovich.

Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.

Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

1. ROLE OF JEWS IN UKRAINIAN FAMINE

One might think the worst holocaust deniers—at least the only ones who command serious attention—are those who insist the Nazi holocaust, as it involved the Jews only, was without parallel.

Guenter Lewy argues for example in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford University Press, 2000) that while the Gypsies were gassed, shot and otherwise exterminated in great numbers, right alongside the Jews, they were not true victims of “the” Holocaust (capital “H”) but only of something collateral. Lewy even suggests the Gypsies invited their own destruction with certain cultural traits—in particular, sharply divergent moral standards for dealing among their own and with outsiders.

But pre- or anti-Enlightenment Judaism is hardly a less ethnocentric or hostile moral system. As Edward Gibbon correctly notes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 15 (1776), “the wise, the humane Maimonides openly teaches [in The Book of Torts, 5:11] that, if an idolator fall into the water, a Jew ought not to save him from instant death.” See also Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s remarkable second-century exercise in ejusdem generis: “The best of the heathen merits death; the best of serpents should have its head crushed; and the most pious of women is prone to sorcery” (Yer. Kid. iv. 66c; Massek. Soferim xv. 10; comp. Mek., Beshallah, Wayehi, 1, and Tan., Wayera, 20, all as cited by JewishEncyclopedia.com). For “heathen” some translators simply write “goyim”; for “prone to sorcery” they write “a witch.” Rabbi Simeon is mentioned more than 700 times in the Talmud.

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2d ed. 2004), say (p. 1) “that in the usual English translations of talmudic literature some of the most sensitive passages are usually toned down or falsified,” and indeed (pp. 150-51) that “the great majority of books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter,” in part by omitting or obscuring such teachings. For a fuller discussion of the point, see Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, esp. ch. 2 (1994), available online. As to Jews, Gypsies or anyone else, of course, ethnocentrism or even outright cultural hostility as a rationale for genocide is obscene.

A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1987). Norman Davies gives the following description in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed phrase is his own:

“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants,” “like one vast Belsen.” “The rest, in various stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or neighbours.” “[As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”

. . . All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the “class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has seen many terrible famines. . . . But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.

See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986); Nicolas Werth, “The Great Famine,” in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism, pp. 159-68 (Harvard University Press, 1999); Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 257-59 (1996); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (1985); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 84-85 (2003); and the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Report to Congress (1988). That report, at pp. 6-7, cites estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the Ukraine and 9 million overall.

Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, pp. 248-49 (2000) gives this description, drawn from still further sources, all cited in his notes:

A population of “walking corpses” . . . even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. . . . Cannibalism became so common-place that. . . local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.”. . .

They staggered into towns and collapsed in the squares. . . . Haunting the railway stations these “swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice,” followed passengers with mute appeals. . . . [They] “dragged themselves along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy. Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead.” Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by wolves.

Boris Pasternak says “what I saw could not be expressed in words. . . . There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.” See Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century, p. 130 (1994). Nikita Khrushchev, in Khrushchev Remembers: The Final Testament, p. 120 (1976), says “I can’t give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers.”

According to S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, p. 202 (Oxford University Press 1990), “. . .Soviet authorities

. . . require[d] that the shades of all windows be pulled down on trains traveling through the North Caucasus, the Ukraine and the Volga basin.” At pp. 239-40, Taylor says this famine “remains the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish Holocaust of the next decade.”

In September 1933, Duranty—who cultivated his relationship with Stalin, and is remembered today for his public denials that any such thing was happening—privately told fellow journalists Eugene Lyons (United Press) and Anne O’Hare McCormick (herself from the New York Times) that the death toll was 7 million, but that the dead were “only Russians.” (Sic: mostly Ukrainians; and note the word “only.”) See Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 579-80 (1937). Duranty’s number is described in Lyons’s book only as “the most startling I had. . . heard,” but is revealed in Lyons’s “Memo for Malcolm Muggeridge” (Dec. 9, 1937), quoted by Marco Carynnyk in “The New York Times and the Great Famine, Part III,” available online.

Several days after giving the 7-million number to Lyons and McCormick, Duranty told the assembled staff at the British chancery in Moscow that the toll for the Soviet Union as a whole might be as high as 10 million. See the report of William Strang, the charge d’affaires (Sept. 26, 1933), quoted by Carynnyk in the text accompanying n. 46. The British government referred publicly to the ongoing situation as an “illegal famine.” Id., n. 46.

Duranty’s 10-million number may have come from Stalin himself. It’s reputedly the same number Stalin gave Winston Churchill a decade later; see, e.g., Eric Margolis, “Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust,” Toronto Sun, Dec. 13, 1998 (available online).

According to Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, pp. 261-62 (1967):

In 1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial starving infants. . . . [T]hey were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads. I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered—but the elastic shock-absorbers of my [Communist] Party training began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This “inner censor” is more reliable and effective than any official censorship. . . .

Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge, who covered the holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the trouble to say that this mass starvation was imposed largely by Jews. Lazar M. Kaganovich is often identified as an architect of the policy. A photograph in Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, shows him personally searching a farm for concealed food. In Muggeridge’s novel Winter in Moscow (1934) he appears as Kokoshkin, “a Jew” and “Stalin’s chief lieutenant.”

In 2003 Levko Lukyanenko, the first Ukrainian ambassador to Canada, was said to have made an anti-Semitic embarrassment of himself on this subject. But see Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, p. 363 (2d ed. 1994)(“Jews were . . . disproportionately prominent among the Bolsheviks, notably in their leadership, among their tax- and grain-gathering officials, and especially in the despised and feared. . . secret police [emphasis added]”); Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, p. 305 (as late as 1937, Jews accounted for only 5.7 percent of Soviet party members, but “formed a majority in the government” [emphasis added]); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 254 (Princeton University Press, 2004)(the secret police was “one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”); and Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 60 (1988)(“As of the late twenties . . . [a] disproportionate number of Jews came to hold high posts in the secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed services. They. . . were. . . appointed to high-level and conspicuous positions which called for unimpeach-able political loyalty. . . ”). Mayer, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, is himself Jewish, and had to flee the Nazis as a refugee.

The Israeli writer Boas Evron says the leaders of the Soviet revolution were scarcely less Jewish than the Zionists. See his book Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, p. 107 (English tr., Indiana University Press, 1995): “The backgrounds of the two groups were much the same. . . . Only differences of chance and temperament caused the one [individual] to be a Zionist and the other a revolutionary socialist.”

On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill published an article, “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” in the Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), reprinted in Lenni Brenner, ed., 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, p. 23 (2002). Among other things, Churchill said (pp. 25-26):

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshe-vism. . . by. . . international and for the most part atheistical Jews. . . . [I]t probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin [who had a Jewish grandfather and by some accounts a Jewish wife], the majority of leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. . . . And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism. . . has been taken by Jews. . . . The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey on the temporary prostration of the German people.

Churchill’s views, as expressed here, resemble those of the Times of London’s correspondent in Russia, Robert Wilton. See George Gustav Telberg and Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1920), esp. pp. 222-30, 391 (“[t]aken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the komisars that rule Bolshevik Russia they are nine in ten—if anything, the proportion of Jews is still higher”), 392-93 and 400. The French version of the book, Les Derniers Jours des Romanofs, also published in 1920, contains a list of 556 top figures in the Bolshevik regime, classified by ethnicity. The Jewish proportion is a bit over eight in ten, including two-thirds of the leadership of the secret police.

The non-Jews are divided among various small categories—Russian, Lett, Armenian, German, Georgian, etc. The list is absent from the slightly later English and American editions, but is available online. See also John F. O’Conor, The Sokolov Investigation (1971)(a translation, with commentary, of sections of Nikolai Sokolov’s Enquête judiciaire sur l'assassinat de la famille impériale Russe), especially for the comments of O’Conor and his sources on Wilton.[i]

Jews among the Bolsheviks who imposed the holodomor of 1932-33 would have relished settling scores after the 40 years of bloody pogroms that followed Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881—especially the still-recent massacre of 50,000 to 100,000 Jews, mostly in the Ukraine, during the Russian civil war of 1918-21. (Far greater numbers of gentiles, of course, also perished in that war; estimates run well into the millions.)

Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, pp. 442-43 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) says that “[i]n. . . the Ukraine, the Cheka leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish”; that “the high percentage of Jews in the secret police continued well into the 1930s”; and that “[c]omparisons to the secret police in Nazi Germany have tempted many observers.

. . . [T]he extent to which both. . . prided themselves in being. . . willing to carry out the most stomach-turning atrocities in the name of an ideal. . . is striking.” Lindemann adds that:

George Leggett, the most recent and authoritative historian of the Russian secret police, speculates that the use of [non-Slavic ethnic minorities in the secret police] may have been a conscious policy, since such ‘detached elements could be better trusted not to sympathise with the repressed local population’.[ii] Of course, in the Ukrainian case that population had the reputation of being especially anti-Semitic, further diminishing the potential sympathies of Jewish Chekists in dealing with it. [Citing Leggett, The Cheka, Lenin’s Political Police, p. 263 (Oxford University Press, 1981).] . . . . Cheka personnel regarded themselves as a class apart. . . with a power of life or death over lesser mortals. (Emphases added.)

Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, above, illustrates the attitude of Jewish Bolsheviks toward dying Ukrainians. See Kevin MacDonald’s review of Slezkine, entitled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners?”, www.vdare. com/ misc/051105 /macdonald _stalin.htm (a much fuller version of which appears in the Occidental Quarterly, fall 2005, also available online):

Lev Kopelev, a Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine in which millions died horrible deaths of starvation and disease as an “historical necessity,” is quoted [on p. 230 as] saying “You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary duty.” On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater, sent their children to the best schools, [and] had peasant women (whose families were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies. . . .

Kopelev did not offer his opinions from a distance. In his words, “I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses. . . . I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. . . .” Moynahan, The Russian Century, above, p. 149. Moynahan, by the way, gives a high-end estimate of the death toll as “probably. . . 14 million.” Id. at 130.

Kopelev was then in his early 20s. (Koestler was six-and-a-half years older.) Kopelev believed without question that “we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting against kulak sabotage for the grain that was needed by the country, by the five-year plan.” See vol. 1 of his memoirs, The Education of a True Believer, p. 226 (1980). He gave speeches to starving peasants at “several meetings a day,” telling them how much more the state needed their grain than they did themselves. Id. at 229. The peasants most often responded, “chop off my head”; they had nothing left to give. Id. at 231.

Fifteen years later, Kopelev himself was in the Butyrka prison in Moscow, where his fellow inmates, the writers Dmitri Panin[iii] and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, challenged his denial of his own Jewishness, and the Jewishness of the revolution. See vol. 3 of Kopelev’s memoirs, Ease My Sorrows, p. 18 (1983):

When I told Solzhenitsyn the history of the various parties and reached the Socialist Revolutionaries, recalling the leaders, Gorovits, Gershuni, Gots, he interrupted in astonishment, almost in disbelief: how can that be— Jewish surnames, when the SRs were a Russian peasant party?

* * *

Panin reproached me for the sinful rejection of my people—for not wanting to avow myself “first and foremost a Jew. . . . But it’s clearer to an outsider.” . . . Solzhenitsyn seconded him. . . . He could not agree with. . . my self-definition: “A Russian intellectual of Jewish descent.”

Notwithstanding Kopelev’s self-definition, he was incontestably Jewish for purposes of the Israeli Law of Return, which came into effect well within his lifetime.[iv] Moreover, while he became a man of far more humane views as he grew older, there would be some irony in excusing his “true believer” phase as a mere youthful folly. Compare the unsparing treatment recently given Günter Grass, concerning service in the Waffen SS that involved no complicity in atrocities, and ended in his late teens.

The phrase “Stalin’s willing executioners”—with its echo of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen—is Slezkine’s (p. 130). At pp. 183-84, translating from the Russian, Slezkine quotes Ia. A. Bromberg (1931) on what Stalinism brought out in its Jewish servitors:

The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty. . . , who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and [has], in fact, lost all human likeness. . . , standing in a Cheka basement doing “bloody but honorable revolutionary work.”

II. PEASANT-JEWISH RELATIONS: "ARENDARS"

Shahak, in Three Thousand Years, above, ch. 4, traces Jewish “hatred and contempt” for peasants— “a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies”—back to the great Ukrainian uprising of 1648-54, in which tens of thousands of “the accursed Jews” (to quote the Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky) were killed. Some say the number is more accurately stated in the hundreds of thousands. Heinrich Graetz says the number “may well be. . . a quarter of a million.” See his History of the Jews, vol. 5, p. 15 (1856-70, English tr., Jewish Publication Society of America ed., 1956).

The Jews at the time of the massacres were serving the Polish szlachta (nobility) and Roman Catholic clergy on their Ukrainian latifundia as arendars—toll-, rent- and tax-farmers, enforcers of corvee obligations, licensees of feudal monopolies (e.g., on banking, milling, storekeeping, and distillation and sale of alcohol), and as anti-Christian scourges who even collected tithes at the doors of the peasants’ Greek Orthodox churches and exacted fees to open those doors for weddings, christenings and funerals. They had life and death powers over the local population (the typical form of execution being impalement), and no law above them to which that population had recourse. See Graetz, vol. 5, pp. 3-6; Subtelny, pp. 123-38; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1, p. 444 (Oxford University Press, 1982); and Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, pp. 68-79, 283 (1993). According to the last three of these sources, the arendars leased estates for terms of only two or three years and had every incentive to wring the peasants mercilessly, without regard to long-term consequences.

As Shahak points out in Three Thousand Years, chs. 3 and 5, a non-Jew, in traditional Judaism, was never “thy neighbor” for purposes of Leviticus 19:18—which was doubtless an advantage in such taxing work as an arendar’s. Shahak has much to say about rabbinical pronouncements, abundant in Israel even now, that gentile souls are closer to the souls of animals than to those of Jews. Those pronouncements are grounded, at least in part, on Ezekiel 23:20 (“[their] flesh [i.e., penises] is as the flesh of asses and [their] issue [i.e., semen] is like the issue of horses”).[v]

Norman Cantor comments in The Sacred Chain, p. 184 (1994) that “perhaps the Jews [of the arenda period] were so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian and Polish peasantry as to regard them as subhuman. . . . There is a parallel with the recent attitude of the West Bank Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox toward the Palestinians. Judaism can be in its Halakhic form an extremely restrictive and blinding faith.”

According to Chaim Bermant, The Jews, p. 26 (1977):

. . . [O]ne cannot see the events of [1648-49] as entirely the result of crazed fanaticism or mindless superstition. . . . [I]f the nobility were. . . the ultimate exploiters,the Jews were the visible ones and aroused the most immediate hostility. Rabbis warned that Jews were sowing a terrible harvest of hatred, but while the revenues rolled in the warnings were ignored. Moreover, the rabbis themselves were beneficiaries of the system.

Those rabbinical forebodings are also mentioned in Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, p. 152 (Oxford University Press, 1961). Graetz (vol. 5, pp. 5-6) says of the Jewish arendars that they had lost “integrity and right-mindedness. . . as completely as simplicity and the sense of truth. They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating.” He adds that they “advised the [Polish noble and ecclesiast-ical] possessors of the Cossack colonies how most completely to humiliate, oppress, torment, and ill-use [those colonies]. . . . No wonder that the enslaved Cossacks hated the Jews. . . . The Jews were not without warning what would be their lot, if these embittered enemies once got the upper hand.”

Graetz (vol. 5, p. 7) also says Khmelnytsky had personal reasons for leading the revolt: “A Jew, Zachariah Sabilenki, had played him a trick, by which he was robbed of his wife and property.” It says everything, of course, that it was possible by trickery to rob a Cossack of his wife.

The best-known contemporaneous account of the revolt is Nathan (Nata) ben Moses Hannover, Yewen Mesulah, which appeared in Venice in 1653. An English translation was published three centuries later as The Abyss of Despair (1950). Hannover was well aware of the peasants’ grievances (see pp. 27-30 of The Abyss). He described the massacres in the grimmest of terms, full of biblical allusions. He then gave the rest of his life to the holy mysteries of Lurianic cabbalism. As Graetz puts it (vol. 5, pp. 21-22), “that book of falsehoods, the Zohar, [had] declared that in the year of the world 5408 (1648) the era of redemption would dawn, and precisely in that year Sabbathai [Ze’evi] revealed himself. . . as the messianic redeemer.”

Sabbathai was a manic-depressive one of whose followers, Samuel Primo, preached that “your lament and sorrow must be changed into joy.” Spinoza and other rationalists were not amused. Thousands of Sabbathai’s flock even followed him into “holy apostasy” when he converted to Islam in 1666. His own conversion was under duress; theirs was not. Graetz’s highly-readable account of the fervor (vol. 5, pp. 121-67) is similar in style and tone to Gibbon’s account of the early Christian Church.

Arendas did not disappear after the Khmelnytsky uprising. See Jewish FamilyHistory. org/ Grand_ Duchy_of_Lithuania. htm (“During the 18th century, up to 80 percent of Jewish heads of households in rural areas [of what are now Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and parts of Poland] were arendars, that is, holders of an arenda”). Pogonowski, p. 72, describes the return of the Jews to the Ukraine after 1648-54. Similarly, see Simon M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 1, p. 158 (1916).

Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4) says that under the arenda system, “the full weight of the Jewish religious laws against gentiles fell upon the peasants.” As to the nature of those laws, see id., ch. 5, especially under the heading “Abuse.” See also such passages as Psalm 2:8-9 (“. . . I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance. . . . Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”); Psalm 21:8-10 (“[T]hy right hand shall find out those that hate thee. Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the Lord shall swallow them up. . .”); Psalm 79:6-7 (“Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen. . . [f]or they have devoured Jacob [i.e., Israel], and laid waste his dwelling place”); Jeremiah 10:25 (al-most identical); Psalm 137:8-9 (“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, . . . [h]appy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”); Psalm 149:7-8; Isaiah 45:14 (“Thus saith the Lord, . . . in chains. . . they shall fall down unto [Israel]. . .”); Isaiah 60:12 (“. . .[T]he nation and kingdom that will not serve [Israel] shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted” ); Isaiah 61:5-6 (“. . .[S]trangers shall stand and feed your flocks. . . : [Y]e shall eat the riches of the Gentiles. . .”); and of course Esther 8:11 through 10:3. As to the last, and the feast of Purim, celebrated yearly then as now, see Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites (Princeton University Press, 2006).

III. JEWISH ATTITUDE TO NON-JEWS, i.e. "ESAU AND EDOM"

The Babylonian Talmud, cabbalist treatises, and other rabbinical writings extant during the arenda period were even harder on the gentiles, particularly Christians. See Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s hugely controversial Entdektes Judenthum (1700), translated as Rabbinical Literature: Or the Traditions of the Jews (1748). At p. 253 of that translation we read that:

The [cabbalist] Treatise Emek hammelech, in the Part entitled Shaar shiashue hammelech, gives us the following Passage. “Our Rabbins, of Blessed Memory, have said, Ye Jews are stiled Men; because of the Soul ye have from the Supreme Man (i.e., God; whom the Cabalists call Adam Ahelion; that is, the Supreme Man). But the Nations of the World are not stiled Men, because they have not, from the Holy and Supreme Man, the Neshama (or glorious Soul). But they have the Nephesh (i.e. the Soul) from Adam Belial; that is, the malicious and unnecessary Man, called Sammael, the Supreme Devil.”

The next seven pages are filled with further such quotations. Eisenmenger also discloses a rabbinical obsession with Esau and his nation Edom, themselves deemed satanic (as to which see more from scholars discussed below).

Jacob Katz, the author of Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, and a professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is hardly an admirer of Eisen-menger. Very much the contrary. But in From Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 14-15, 21, passim (Harvard University Press, 1980), Katz admits some important points:

[Eisenmenger’s] book was impressive both on account of its size—some 2,120 pages in two volumes—and its tremendous erudition. . . . [He] was acquainted with all the literature a Jewish scholar of standing would have known. . . . Contrary to accusations that have been made against him, he does not falsify his sources. He quotes them in full and translates them literally. . . . The question is how did Eisenmenger arrive at so darkly a negative picture of Judaism while quoting its sources unadulteratedly?

* * * There was a nucleus of truth in all his claims: the Jews lived in a world of. . . ethical duality—following different standards in their internal and external relationships. . . . (Emphases added.)[vi]

The anthropologist John Hartung comments, in an essay entitled “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality” (1995, available online), that “the half-life and penetrance of such cultural legacies are often under-appreciated.” To illustrate Hartung’s point, “Pour out thy wrath upon our enemies” (“shfoch hamatcha al hagoyim”) is even now a prayer at the Passover seder.

David M. Weinberg, director of public affairs at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies of the Orthodox Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, defends it as being “part of the Haggada text for a reason: to purposefully exclude and ward off the placid, falsely high-minded thinking that has overtaken so much of today’s Western world.” See Weinberg’s essay in the Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2003 (available online). The English translation “upon our enemies”—not “upon thine enemies,” or even “upon the heathen”—is taken here directly from Weinberg. All those renditions seem interchangeable in any event. The actual word, of course, is goyim.

According to Davies (God’s Playground, vol. 1, p. 444) the oppressiveness of the Jews as arendars “provided the most important single cause of the terrible retribution that would descend on them on several occasions in the future. . . .” In 1986 the Stanford history department voted 12-11 against offering tenure to Davies, then a professor visiting from the University of London. Davies sued unsuccessfully for defamation, which suggests the tenor of the discussion. Davies is now a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The queen awarded him a CMG in 2001.

Actually, the Jewish “hatred and contempt” that Shahak remarks on can be traced back to times well before the events of 1648-54. Such attitudes can be seen, for example, in medieval traditions in which Esau—portrayed in Isaiah 63 and Obadiah as one with whom God himself is at war—came to stand for agricultural Christian Europe. See Rabbi Tzvi Weinberg, “Esau-Edom: Profile of a People” (Dec. 16, 2000), at http://www .biu.ac.il/ JH/Parasha/ eng/ vayishlach/ wei.html. See also Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, p. 6, which says that in medieval Jewish poetry Edom was synonymous with Christianity. In Malachi 1:4 “the Lord hath indignation for ever” against Edom; see also Jeremiah 49:7-8, Lamentations 4:21-22, Ezekiel 35, and Amos 1:11.

IV. SLAVE TRADE

Edom was never geographically fixed. It followed the Jews wherever they went—the nation allotted to Israel’s dehumanized twin, as ripe for righteous predation as the original Esau.[vii] Edom’s presence in Europe helped rationalize the Jewish role in the immensely profitable slave trade of the eighth through the 10^th centuries. European boys—mostly in the East, but in the West as well—were kidnapped and castrated by Vikings, sold to Jews, taken south down the major rivers, and sold again as eunuchs in Muslim lands from Persia to Spain. See H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, pp. 92-93 (1965). As Trevor-Roper points out, the words for slave and Slav come from the same root in every European language, a reminder of a commerce whose memory has faded away in the West. The Arabic word for eunuch is from the same root. Some trace this trade as far back as the fifth century. .

A related matter is Ashkenazic—though not Sephardic—eschatological doctrine, which in the “late antique” period followed Jeremiah 46:28 (“Fear thou not, O Jacob [i.e., Israel], my servant, saith the Lord: . . . for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have driven thee: but I will not make a full end of thee. . .” ) and Psalms 110:6 and 94:1. See Adiel Schremer, of Bar Ilan University, “Eschatology, Violence and Suicide: An Early Rabbinic Theme and its Influence in the Middle Ages,” at research. yale.edu/ ycias/database/Files/MESV6-2.pdf: At p. 4, Schremer says:

[T]he construction of the eschatological redemption in terms of the total eradication of the nations, or at least in association with such an expectation, has a potential of shaping a violent personality and might contribute to. . . a violent mind-setting. For if one is hoping for God’s redemption soon to come, and is inspired by the idea of a total vanquish-ing of Israel’s enemies as an essential part of that redemption, one’s violent inclinations are not entirely suppressed and in a sense they are being fostered. (Emphasis added.)

Schremer’s paper was presented on May 5, 2002 at the Yale Divinity School. The reference in his title to suicide concerns the year 1096, when large numbers of Jews in the Rhineland killed themselves and their own children, siblings and parents, rather than submit to Crusaders’ efforts to convert them by force. By way of explanation, Schremer quotes Sigmund Freud: “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others.” Schremer cites many biblical passages and rabbinical exegeses that might feed such impulses.

For a much fuller discussion of this whole set of issues, see Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb (English tr., University of California Press, 2006). At pp. 120-21 Yuval tells of prayers that:

. . . demonstrate the abyss of hostility and hatred felt by medieval Jews toward Christians. And we have here not only hatred, but an appeal to God to kill indiscriminately and ruthlessly, alongside a vivid description of the anticipated horrors to be brought down upon the Gentiles. These pleas are formulated in a series of verbs—“swallow them, shoot them, lop them off, make them bleed, crush them, strike them, curse them, and ban them. . . destroy them, kill them, smite them. . . crush them [again], abandon them, parch them”—and in the best alphabetical tradition, the string of disasters the poet wishes for the Gentiles goes on and on.

Yuval collects an abundance of such material, from both before and after the events of 1096. In agreement with Schremer, he says (p. 123) that “we are dealing here with a comprehensive religious ideology that sees vengeance as a central component in its messianic doctrine.” He repeats (p. 125) that this vengeance was to be “against the Gentiles”—most of whom, it seems safe to say, were peasants—and that the vengeance stood “at the very heart of the messianic process.” He says tellingly (p. 134) that “the Christians were not unaware of the Jewish desire to see their destruction.”[viii]

The ethnocentric hostility of the Jews—consistently commented on by the peoples who have encountered them over the millennia—can be traced ultimately to the origins of Judaism as set forth in the Torah, e.g., Genesis 9:25 (“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren”); Exodus 17:14-16 and 34:12-13 ; Numbers 24:8 (“God. . . shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows”), 25:6-13 (wherein God commends Phineas for his initia-tive in running a javelin through both parties to a marriage of Jew and gentile), 31:7-19 and 33:50-56; and Deuteronomy 2:33-35 (“[on God’s command] we. . . utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain”), 3:4-7, 7:1-5 (“thou shalt. . . utterly destroy them”), 7:14-26 (“thine eye shall have no pity”), 20:10-17 (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth”) and 25:19. Disdain for ordinary labor—to be performed by Esau and Edom, but to be exploited by Israel—appears as early as Genesis 25:23-27, as discussed in note vii below.

Ethnocentric hostility has lent itself to Jewish tax-farming. This can be traced back to very early times, and has sometimes involved copious use of deadly force, put at the disposal of the tax-farmers by their noble clients. See Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, bk. 12, ch. 4 (1^st c.), available online (Syria violently stripped to its “bones” for Ptolemy III); and Elias Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age, p. 120 (Harvard University Press, 1988).

See also Rabbi Simeon’s lumping of gentiles with serpents, above; Cornelius Tacitus, The Histories, bk. 5.5 (c. 109 A.D.) (“[the Jews] regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies”); Gibbon, ch. 15 (“the[ir] sullen obstinacy. . . and unsocial manners seemed to mark them out a distinct species of men, who boldly professed, or who faintly disguised, their implacable hatred to the rest of humankind”); and Emilio Gabba, “The Growth of Anti-Judaism or the Greek Attitude Toward the Jews,” in W.D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2 (Cam-bridge University Press, 1990). At p. 629 Gabba attributes to Hecataeus of Abdera (early 3d c. B.C.) an observation about the hostility of the Jews. Gabba excuses that hostility, saying the Jews’ “misanthropic reserve” was understandable in light of the exodus from Egypt. But the exodus—thought by Hecataeus to have been an expulsion, and by Tacitus to have been an expulsion of lepers—was perhaps a thousand years past even when Hecataeus wrote. At p. 645 Gabba cites Posidonius (134 B.C.) on the advice given to his contemporary, King Antiochus Sidetes, to destroy the Jews, “for they alone among all peoples refused all relations with other races and saw everyone as their enemy. . . .”

Almost identical advice was given to King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I, 485-465 B.C.) in Esther 3:8-9. Some two-and-a-half millennia after Ahasuerus, the Jews still celebrate on their most joyous holiday the vengeance he allowed them: “sl[aughter] of their foes seventy and five thousand,” including “both little ones and women,” and hanging not just of the man who gave the advice, but of all ten of his sons. It was an occasion of “light, and. . . joy, and honour,” and of “gladness and feasting.” Id., 8:11-17, 9:13-28.

Martin Luther’s comments on this story, in The Jews and Their Lies (1543), fit with Yuval’s account of “a comprehensive [Jewish] religious ideology that sees vengeance as a central component in its messianic doctrine,” and Schremer’s account of Jewish hopes for “eschatological redemption in terms of the total eradication of the nations”:

Oh how [the Jews] love the Book of Esther, which so nicely agrees with their bloodthirsty, revengeful and murderous desire and hope. The sun never did shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people than they, who imagine themselves to be the people of God, and who desire to, and think they must, murder and crush the heathen. And the foremost undertaking which they expect of their Messiah is that he should slay and murder the whole world with the sword.

This passage—indeed, the whole 64-page essay—is often cited as evidence of Luther’s pathological anti-Semitism, but Yuval and Schremer show that at least on this point he knew whereof he spoke. As Yuval says, “the Christians were not unaware of the Jewish desire to see their destruction.” Luther’s comments also fit with the descriptions of Jewish arendars given above—men who “found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating” (Graetz); who sowed “a terrible harvest of hatred” (Bermant); and who may have been “so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian and Polish peasantry as to regard them as subhuman” (Cantor).

V. THE NEED TO HATE AND TO BE HATED

Even in the 21^st century, Israeli children are taught to sing “The Whole World is Against Us”(“Ha’olam Ku’lo heg’denu”). We have not only David M. Weinberg’s defense of the “shfoch hamatcha” prayer, but even Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, “The Virtue of Hate,” First Things, Feb. 2003 (available online) (“When hate is appropriate, then it is not only virtuous, but essential for Jewish well-being”). Soloveichik is not a fringe figure. He is a member of an exceedingly eminent Orthodox rabbinical family. When he wrote the article he was resident scholar at the Jewish Center in Manhattan and a Beren fellow at Yeshiva University, and was studying the philosophy of religion at the Yale Divinity School.

Note the words “essential for Jewish well-being.” The “virtue of hate” seems to come of a positive need to be hated. The widely-published Rabbi Dr. Dan Cohn-Sher-bok, professor of Jewish history at the University of Wales (Lampeter) and author of The Paradox of Anti-Semitism (2006), says in an interview with the Independent (U.K.), March 19, 2006 (available online) that: “Jews need enemies in order to survive. . . . [I]n the absence of Jew-hatred, Judaism is undergoing a slow death. . . . We want to be loved, and we want Judaism to survive intact. . . . [T]hese are incompatible desires. . . . Why do we endure? Because we’re hated.” (Emphases added.)

Cohn-Sherbok says of a founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl: “He warned that if our Christian hosts were to leave us in peace for two generations, the Jews would merge entirely into surrounding races.” Id. Herzl also wrote in his conclusion to Der Judenstaat (1896): “Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream. Antagonism is essential to man’s greatest efforts.”

In his book (p. 209) Cohn-Sherbok says that “in the past ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders were profoundly aware of this dynamic.” One of his examples is Schneur Zalman of Lyady, the first Lubavitch Rebbe and author of the Tanya (1796), the fundamental book of the Habbad movement, whose first chapter famously concludes by saying gentile souls “contain no good whatever.” [ix] In 1812, Zalman worked with the anti-Semitic Czar Alexander I to defeat Napoleon. He feared Napoleon would liberate the Jews, who might expect to benefit materially—although that’s a much-disputed calculation—but whose souls would be lost to assimilation and intermarriage.

Similarly, according to Ha’aretz, June 3, 2004 (available online), “in the mid-19th century, Rabbi [Samson Raphael] Hirsch, the leader of Germany’s Orthodox Jews, wrote that anti-Semitism is the tool through which the God of Israel preserves his people.” In 1958, Rabbi Dr. Nahum Goldmann, then president of the World Jewish Congress, com-plained that the “current decline of overt anti-Semitism might constitute a new danger to Jewish survival,” one that “has had a very negative effect on our internal life.” In 1957, Leo Pfeffer, then counsel to the same organization, said much the same. As to both, see Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, p. 412 (1982). See also Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People, p. 165 (1985):

“For all that we are preoccupied by the damage once done to us by our enemies, we are still more concerned by the curse of friendship we now encounter,” Leonard Fein, editor and publisher of Moment magazine, told the Conference of Jewish Communal Service in 1980. . . . “Deep down—and sometimes not so very deep—we still believe that we depended on the pogroms and persecutions to keep us a people, that we have not the fiber to withstand the lures of a genuinely open society.” (Emphasis added.)

Hannah Arendt says of this whole line of thinking, in The Origins of Totali-tarianism, p. 7 (1973 ed.), that “. . . eternal anti-Semitism would imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish [corporate] existence. This superstition is a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness.”

VI. PROVOKING ANTI SEMITISM

It follows from this “superstition” (or psychological insight) that where anti-Semitism is inadequate to prevent an erosion of Jewish identity, it has to be fabricated or provoked. A seemingly encyclopedic survey of such fabrication—at least as it’s appeared in recent years—can be found in Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 21-85 (University of California Press, 2005).[x] As to the other technique, provocation, see Yuval, Two Nations; Shahak, Three Thousand Years; Lindemann, Esau’s Tears; some of the other material discussed above; and the private diary of Moshe Sharett, then prime minister of Israel, for May 26, 1955.

That diary entry records the view of Sharett’s colleague Moshe Dayan that only by a strategy of endless “provocation and revenge” toward its neighbors can Israel survive. Israel, says Sharett (paraphrasing Dayan), “must. . . invent dangers” to “keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension.” Sharett even quotes David Ben Gurion: “It would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.” See the extended quotation from Sharett’s diary in Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, p. 44 (1980) (available online; emphasis in original). Rokach, whose father was Sharett’s minister of the Interior, says (id., p. 8 ) that by the mid ‘50s, if not before:

Terrorism and “revenge” were. . . to be glorified as the “moral . . . and even sacred” values of Israeli society. . . . [T]he military symbol was now Unit 101, led by Arik Sharon. . . . The lives of Jewish victims. . . had to be sacrificed to create provocations justifying subsequent reprisals. . . . A hammering, daily propaganda, controlled by the censors, was directed to feed the Israeli population with images of the monstrosity of the Enemy. (Emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, she says, Israel’s leaders never believed in any external threat to Israel’s survival. What they wanted was regional hegemony, and of course internal cohesion. In 1984, after her book had ceased to be news, Rokach was found dead in a Rome hotel room.

Boas Evron makes some of the same points as Rokach, in Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, above. At p. 251 he says: “In the absence of a positive national bond, Ben Gurion deliberately sought to base the national consciousness on the negative foundation of terror and nightmare. . . .” According to two books by the Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception (1990) and The Other Side of Deception (1994), Mossad doctrine is squarely in accord with the views of Dayan and Ben Gurion, as recorded by Sharett and amplified by Rokach and Evron.[xi]

For more on hostile solidarity as an essential element of Judaism, see three books by Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998); and John Hartung’s essay “Love Thy Neighbor,” above. Hartung begins with an epigraph from Blaise Pascal’s Pensees (1670): “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

MacDonald and Hartung see Judaism as an economic strategy for competing with host populations, from whom the sharpest self-differentiation has to be maintained. One might infer from their work—as from such passages as Deuteronomy 7:14-26—a system designed to suppress the recognition of fellow humanity across ethnic and religious lines, a system still functioning millennia after its inception. Of course, any such analysis is taken as purest anti-Semitism, an occasion of “terror and nightmare” call-ing for (of all things) hostile solidarity.[xii]

See also Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion, chs. 7 and 20 (Columbia University Press, 1959) as to the influence, via Plato, of closed, totalitarian Sparta on Judaism as far back as the Maccabean period (142-63 B.C.).[xiii]

Then there’s the widely-reprinted article that Rabbi Israel Hess, campus rabbi at Bar-Ilan University, wrote for its student magazine, Bat Kol, entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” (Feb. 26, 1980). Rabbi Hess took as his text Deuteronomy 25:17-19 (“[T]hou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget [to do] it”). Amalek, he said, is any people that declares war on Israel. The Israeli state rabbinate has never taken direct issue with Rabbi Hess—as it has for example with Reform Judaism.[xiv]

In 2001, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, formerly Sephardi chief rabbi, and founder and leader of Israel’s third largest political party, Shas, called sweepingly for “extermination of the Arabs,” saying “it is forbidden to be merciful to them.” Shas M.K. Eli Yishay (later Ehud Olmert’s vice prime minister) said Rabbi Yosef was merely echoing Ariel Sharon. BBC News, April 10 and 11, 2001, available online.

Desire to escape the Jewish condition—with its ethical double standards, its “virtue of hate,” its abhorrence of “the curse of friendship,” its obsession with “total eradication of the nations,” and the consequent esotericism of the rabbinical literature—motivated those early secular Zionists who longed for direct labor on the land and disparaged intellectual and commercial occupations reminiscent of the arendar role. Lenni Brenner discusses such attitudes in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, ch. 2 (1983), available online. See also Slezkine, The Jewish Century, above, pp. 327-28. That group of Zionists hoped to make Israel a “normal” nation.

But their religious successors, returning to Judaism’s roots, have countered that normality is precisely what Israel can never have, because of its unique relationship with God. See Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, above, p. 71:

The Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful] argument is that secular Zionists measured. . . “normality” by applying non-Jewish standards that are satan-ic. . . . [According to] one of the group’s leaders, Rabbi [Shlomo] Avner: “While God requires. . . normal nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.” . . . Relying upon the Code of Maimonides and the Halakha, Rabbi [Israel] Ariel [of Gush Emunim] stated: “A Jew who kill[s] a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment and has not violated the [religious] prohibition of murder.”[xv] (Emphases added.)

On the other hand Shahak and Mezvinsky say (id.) that “the murder of a Jew, particularly by a non-Jew, is in Jewish law the worst possible crime.”

Such contemptuous attitudes and narcissistic double standards were very much alive at the time of the holodomor. In 1932, the first year of the famine, the great Eastern European Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik published the poem “My Father,” which Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4 n.9) says is still “taught in all Israeli schools.” The poem depicts Bialik’s “righteous and upright” father dispensing vodka in a “den of pigs like men,” to Slavic peasants “rolling in vomit” with “faces of monstrous corruption.”

Bialik calls them “scorpions” for good measure. The father’s “whispered syllables,” meanwhile, audible only to his adoring son, are “pure prayer and law, the words of the living God.” The poem nowhere acknowledges the common complaint that the Jews encouraged Slavic alcoholism, which brought in revenue, exposed peasants’ remaining assets to foreclosure, and made them easier to control.

The poem is missing from Bialik’s supposedly Complete Poetic Works (1948) published in English 14 years after his death. That brings us back to Shahak and Mezvinsky’s point, above, about books and translations that falsify by omission.

VI. SUPPRESSION OF CAUSES OF ANTI SEMITISM

A related point: A search of the Library of Congress catalog under the keyword “arenda” brings up 37 apparently relevant items, not one of which is in English. By way of comparison, a search under the combination of “United States” and “slavery” brings up more than 10,000. A search under “Ukrainian famine” brings up all of ten items. A search under “holocaust” brings up more than 10,000.

More evidence of ineradicable attitudes (“. . . I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance. . . . Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”) was recently seen on Israeli television in the series “The Oligarchs.” The series was most definitely not shown in the U.S. Uri Avnery describes it in an article entitled “How the Virgin Became a Whore” (2004), available online:

Some of its episodes are simply unbelievable—or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses’ mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.

* * *

[The oligarchs] exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six of the seven are Jews. . . . [Boris] Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective [oil] pipeline there.

. . . In the end there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, [and] caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, [and] another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here [in Israel]).

In short, then, the history of Jewish relations with Slavic peasants—together with the much longer history of Jewish attitudes toward “the nations”—has enormous rele-vance in explaining why hereditarily-Jewish Bolsheviks in the 1930s, using supposedly scientific Marxist terminology, defined the Ukrainian peasantry as the “class enemy” and carried out a policy of genocidal starvation. In The Jewish Experience, p. 364 (1996), Norman Cantor freely admits as much:

The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. . . . During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that—as 1930s anti-Semites claimed—Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back. (Emphases added.)

These words are part of Cantor’s introduction to a chapter by the Russian Jewish writer Arkady Vaksberg, entitled “Stalin’s Jews.” It is most unlikely that Cantor, a professor of history at New York University and a former Rhodes scholar, wrote in ignorance of the scope of Soviet state homicide. Leaving aside issues of pride, shame, and ethnic or religious loyalties, this passage puts Cantor in full agreement with Churchill, Robert Wilton, and Ambassador Levko Lukyanenko, all above.

Edwin Schoonmaker, Democracy and World Dominion, p. 211 (1939) confirms Cantor’s point:

Fifteen years after the Bolshevist Revolution was launched to carry out the Marxist program, the editor of the American Hebrew could write: “According to such information [as] the writer could secure while in Russia a few weeks ago, not one Jewish synagogue has been torn down, as have hundreds—perhaps thousands—of the Greek Catholic churches. . . .” (American Hebrew, Nov. 18, 1932, p. 12.) Apostate Jews, leading a revolution that was to destroy religion as the “opiate of the people,” had somehow spared the synagogues of Russia.[xvi] (Emphasis added.)

Thus the long cycle of violence: (a) throughout the middle ages, the Ashkenazim prayed for divine extermination of the goyim, as described in Two Nations; (b) the atti-tudes reflected in such prayers were reflected as well in speech, conduct and demeanor, plainly intelligible to the goyim themselves, as described both in Two Nations and at greater length in Three Thousand Years; (c) Jews as slave-traders and arendars, in Chaim Bermant’s words, “sow[ed] a terrible harvest of hatred”; (d) peasants responded by killing Jews in great numbers in revolts and pogroms over the centuries; and (e) Jews as Bolsheviks ultimately responded, in Cantor’s phrase, with “Jewish revenge.” That revenge consisted of mass murder on a scale far beyond any theretofore imposed on Jews by Christians, or on the civilians of any European nation by their own government.

Apart from war as such, there has there been no terror on that scale since, either, at least in Europe. (Asia, and particularly Asian Communism, is another matter.) See the numerical estimates in The Black Book of Communism, p. 4, and in Harvest of Sorrow, p. 306. The former set of estimates puts the overall number of deaths from Communist “crimes against civilians” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at 21 million. Martin Malia of the University of California at Berkeley, in his foreword to the Black Book, p. xx, says “. . . it is at last becoming clear that our current qualitative judgments are scandalously out of line with the [20^th] century’s real balance sheet of political crime.”

There has been little Jewish willingness to accept responsibility for any part of the long cycle. Cantor “learn[ed] to take pride in. . . a species of striking back,” and Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4) says of the Khmelnytsky rebellion that:

This typical peasant uprising against extreme oppression, an uprising accompanied not only by massacres committed by the rebels but also by even more horrible atrocities and “counter-terror” of the Polish magnates’ private armies, has remained emblazoned in the consciousness of east-European Jews to this very day—not, however, as a peasant uprising, a revolt of the oppressed, of the real wretched of the earth, nor even as a vengeance visited upon all the servants of the Polish nobility, but as an act of gratuitous antisemitism directed against Jews as such.

An example demonstrating Shahak’s point is Louis Finkelstein, ed., The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion (3d ed., 2 vol., 1960), which tells of the massacres of 1648-49 (pp. 250-51, 388-89), but says nothing of the arenda system. Finkelstein’s index has no entry under that word. Nor, for that matter, does Geoffrey Wigoder, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (2d. ed., New York University Press, 2002). The essay on Khmelnytsky in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1972), ignoring even Graetz and Nata Hannover, actually denies the existence of evidence the Jewish arendars were oppressive. None of these recent works, of course, says so much as a word about the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 or its perpetrators.

In The Sacred Chain, pp. 14-16, passim, Cantor says that “. . . rabbinical Judaism prefers silence on history,” and that after the intense historical emphasis of the Bible:

Judaism [swung] radically to become a religion without history by not later than the second century A.D. . . . By and large the Jewish blackout on historical writing continued into the nineteenth century. . . . What was not blotted out was diminished and narcotized into a recital of unprovoked victimization [of Jews]. . . .

To similar effect, see Three Thousand Years, ch. 2, esp. notes 8-14 and accompanying text; and Samuel Grayzel’s preface to The Abyss, above, at p. ix. Even today, Cantor says (p. 15), “realistic, truth-telling history of the Jews is not welcome in the ruling circles of the American and Israeli Jewish communities, among the rabbis, the billionaire patriarchs. . . and the prominent politicians.”[xvii]

See also chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents, above (“Self Deception as an Aspect of Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy”). MacDonald begins that chapter with a quotation from Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, above, pp. vii-viii. Arendt notes the “strong polemical and apologetic bias” in Jewish historiography (a matter that also interests Cantor, and especially Shahak), and then says:

When [the] Jewish tradition of an often violent antagonism to Christians and Gentiles came to light “the general Jewish public was not only outraged but genuinely astonished,” so well had its spokesmen succeeded in convincing themselves and everybody else of the non-fact that Jewish separateness was due exclusively to Gentile hostility and lack of enlight-enment. . . . [T]his self-deceiving theory. . . actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness. . . .[xviii]

Arendt’s interior quotation in this passage is from Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, p. 196. Compare chs. 11 (“Ghetto Segregation”) and 12 (“The Attitude of Estrangement”) in that book. Such self-persuasion as to non-facts may be why Guenter Lewy, above, can argue that the Gypsies brought down genocidal wrath on their own heads with their moral and ethical double standards. Lewy has apparently repressed all awareness that Judaism has, in Katz’s words, its own “ethical duality—following different standards in . . . internal and external relationships.”[xix]

VII. TREATMENT OF JEWISH 'INFORMERS'/INTELLECTUAL TERRORISM

The preference for silence about Jewish history may be also be a corollary of din moser, the law—rooted in Deuteronomy 17:8-12 and openly enforced in the Pale of Settlement through most of the 19^th century—under which those suspected of betraying Jewish information to gentile authorities were subject to death without notice, by order of the rabbis and other community leaders. See Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, above, pp. 140-47. At pp. 146-47 Shahak and Mezvinsky say that:

The new Israeli historians have presented evidence showing that until the 1880s the killings of Jewish informers by Jews in the Tsarist Empire were numerous. . . . [T]he writer Shaul Ginzberg. . . wrote in his autobiography that during the nineteenth century hundreds of Jewish informers were drowned in the Dnieper, the largest river in the “Pale.” These informers were charged and convicted under the law of the informers simply because they were suspected of informing the authorities about something. * * * [A] Jewish informer was condemned to death in secret without being able to say anything in his own defense. This mode of execution was employed for hundreds of years until the recent time.

Again, as Hartung says, “the half-life and penetrance of such cultural legacies are often under-appreciated.” Shahak and Mezvinsky discuss din moser in the context of Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a religious zealot, heartily encouraged by othodox rabbis, only a few years short of the 21^st century. Also as to the Rabin case, see Allan C. Brownfeld, “Growth of Religious Extremism in Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Aug.-Sept. 2000, available online. Din moser may have some-thing to do with the enormous antipathy with which some regard Shahak himself, and with the death of Livia Rokach. It may also illuminate some of the matters discussed in the endnotes below.

While truth-telling is silenced, ad hominem vilification is amplified. David Horowitz of FrontPageMag. com, to pick just one example, calls former President Jimmy Carter a “Jew-hater, genocide-enabler and liar” for saying Israel imposes “apartheid” on the Palestinians in the West Bank. He also accuses Carter of “blood libel.” But Horowitz surely knows that Ariel Sharon told former Italian Premier Massimo D’Alema—at length, according to D’Alema—that Israel means to force the Palestinians into “Bantu-stans.” Ha’aretz, May 13, 2003 (available online). See also Shulamit Aloni (formerly Israeli minister of Education), “Indeed There is Apartheid in Israel,” Jan. 5, 2007 (avail-able online):

On one occasion I witnessed an encounter between a [Palestinian] driver and [an Israeli] soldier who was taking down the details before confisca-ting the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order—this is a Jews-only road,” he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign. . . instructing [non-Jewish] drivers not to use it. His answer was. . .: “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign. . . and let some anti-Semitic reporter. . . take a photo so he can show the world that apartheid exists here?” (Emphases added.)

Horowitz’s invective is aimed, of course, not so much at Carter as at politicians and others still worried about their jobs. It’s meant to intimidate—which it does—and its style is not new. Esau’s Tears, above, reports complaints of such “intellectual terrorism” (Franz Mehring’s words) from the early 1880s. See p. 136; compare pp. 138-39, 193. There’s no reason to suppose such character-assassination began only then, or that it’s unrelated to the essential, unifying cycle of provocation and revenge discussed above.

VIII. THE NAZIS AND THE HOLODOMOR

The Nazis, no less than the Bolsheviks, regarded Slavic peasants with murderous contempt, an attitude not traditional in the army general staff, but brought to exceedingly full flower in the SS. See, e.g., H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 5-8 (1947). Arendt says the Nazi plan, on which time blessedly ran out, “aimed at the extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people, . . . 170 million Russians [and] the intelligentsia of Western Europe.” The Origins of Totalitarianism, above, p. 411. The Ukrainians learned what the Nazis meant to do with them after they initially greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators in 1941—a greeting the holodomor goes far to explain.

It would be interesting to know what the Nazis made of the holodomor, which was still very much in progress when they came to power in 1933.

They surely knew about it. The German intelligence services, even on the unlikely assumption that they had no sources of their own, could hardly have missed the story in the British press as reported by Muggeridge, by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s heroic protégé Gareth Jones, and by A.T. Cholerton of the News-Telegraph and the Sunday Times; in the American press as reported by Lyons, by Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune, by W.H. Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor, by William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News, by Harry Lang and Richard M. Sanger of the New York Journal, and by Adam J. Tawdul of the New York American; in the French press as reported by Suzanne Bertillon of Le Matin; and in the German press as reported by the liberal (and Jewish) Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt, and by Otto Auhagen in the scholarly journal Osteuropa, VII (Aug. 1932). Even at that early date, Auhagen said Ukrainian peasants were reduced to eating the cadavers of horses, from which they contracted infectious diseases.

The Nazis could hardly have failed to notice, moreover, when Theodor Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna called in August 1933 for relief efforts, stating that the Ukrainian famine was claiming lives “likely. . . numbered. . . by the millions” and driving those still alive to infanticide and cannibalism. See the New York Times, Aug. 20, 1933, reporting both Innitzer’s charge and the official denial (“in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor cardinals”). The next day, the Times added Duranty’s own denial.

Other sources can be found by searching on the combination of “Innitzer” and “Ukraine” and “famine.” Also, P.C. Hiebert and the Rev. Charles H. Hagus tried to organize relief efforts on behalf of the German Mennonite community. None of the proposed relief operations had any significant success.

Most likely, the lesson the Nazis drew was how safe, easy, even acceptable it was to murder whole populations. That was demonstrably Hitler’s own conclusion about the early-20^th-century Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks (“Who speaks any more [of that]?”)[xx] and the annihilation of the American Indians (“Treat them like redskins”). Likewise, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky actually spoke of the “good name” Hitler himself had supposedly given to forced “mass migrations.”

Just before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky justified “transferring” the Palestinian people out of their homes on the ground that “the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. . . . Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.” Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 406-07 (2000); see generally Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992). Twenty-one years after Jabotinsky’s back-handed compliment to Hitler, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel. Two of the counts on which he was convicted alleged mass forcible expulsion of people—non-Jews at that—from their homes. Those counts (nos. 9 and 10) both carried the death penalty. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 245 (1963).

Israel is now concerned both to cultivate its relations with Turkey and to preserve the claim of Jewish exclusivity for “the” Holocaust (capital “H”). There is also a Jewish tradition in which the Armenians, for obscure reasons, are equated with the Amalekites; see Reckless Rites, above, pp. 10, 122-25. Accordingly Israel not only maintains a diplomatic silence about the slaughter of the Armenians but also lobbies against its commemoration in the U.S. See Larry Derfner in the Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2005 (“[O]n the subject of the Armenian genocide, Israel and some U.S. Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, have for many years acted aggressively as silencers”); and Jon Wiener in the Nation, July 12, 1999 (“Lucy Dawidowicz, a leading Holocaust historian, argued that the Turks had ‘a rational reason’ for killing Armenians, unlike the Germans, who had no rational reason for killing Jews”).

Note carefully Dawidowicz’s “rational reason” for killing 1.5 million human beings; Kopelev’s “historical necessity” and “revolutionary duty” to kill 7 (or perhaps even 10) million; Koestler’s “mind conditioned to explain away what [he] saw”; and Cantor’s mature judgment that “there is nothing to be ashamed of.” Bernard Lewis, by the way, a Zionist professor emeritus at Princeton, actually has the distinction of having been convicted in a French court of “holocaust-denial” as to the Armenians. See Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 59n, above.

The late David Roth, national ethnic liaison of the American Jewish Committee, once testified before Congress—in 1966, when Israel was describing itself as a bastion against Soviet influence in the Middle East, rather than as a magnet drawing it in—that “it is outrageous to think that the death of 7 million Ukrainians is somehow less important than the death of 6 million Jews.” We should, he said, “deny the Soviets the ultimate victory of our silence.”

Nicholas Lysson

1. In 1920 Wilton and Churchill both expressed hope that through Zionism, Jewish energies could be channeled constructively (that is, one is tempted to say, against non-Europeans) rather than destructively (that is, on the same interpretation, against fellow Europeans, their social and economic order, and their royal houses). Hence the title of Churchill’s article. Churchill’s views evolved as Britain descended what Robert Fisk calls “the bloody staircase”—as to which see my companion essay, “On the Origins of the Balfour Declaration.” Note in that essay threats made by both Chaim Weizmann and his protégé Samuel Landman about the destruction Jews might wreak if frustrated as to Palestine. Weizmann wrote of “overthrow[ing] the world,” and Landman of “pull[ing] down the pillars of civilisation,” a metaphor obviously inspired by Judges 16:21-31. Whence came these ferocious energies? Part of the answer involves traditional eschatological doctrines and attitudes toward gentiles, as discussed in the present essay. Another part involves the Jewish population explosion in the Ukraine during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It swamped the occupations traditionally thought suitable and—together with the pogroms that followed the czar’s assassination in 1881—led to massive emigration, heightened revolutionary activity, and other attempts to recover those occupational niches. See, e.g., Subtelny, above, p. 276:
   

   Throughout the nineteenth century, especially in its latter part, the Jews experienced a tremendous rise in population. Between 1820 and 1880, while the general population of the [Russian] empire rose by 87%, the number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank [of the Dnieper] this rise was even more dramatic: between 1844 and 1913 the number of its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to famine, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of communal self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted for this extraordinary increase. back

2. Similarly, the Soviet Union put Jews in charge of camps for German POWs in the immediate aftermath of World War II. For the torture and killing that ensued, see John Sack, An Eye for an Eye (1993). Sack’s book was denounced by Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress on the CBS program “Sixty Minutes,” Nov. 24, 1993. Steinberg accused Sack of “blackening history,” as if such a thing were possible.back
3. For more on Dmitri Panin, see, e.g., David Remnick, “Seasons in Hell: How the Gulag Grew,” the New Yorker, April 14, 2003. A search on his name, in quotation marks, also brings up considerable material. back
4. The Law of Return is based on heredity and ethnic affiliation, and ignores issues of religious belief and practice (or lack of either) so long as no other religion has been willingly adopted in lieu of Judaism. Sec. 4A(a) and (b), enacted by Amendment No. 2 (1970) permits qualification through certain Jewish relatives by blood or marriage. Some have suggested connections through which Lenin, and even Stalin, might have qualified. See Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 8-9 (1994) as to Stalin’s suppression of information about Lenin’s Jewish antecedents; compare Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, pp. 17-21, 28-29 (Harvard University Press, 2000). Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin, pp. 169-71 (1987), alleges that Stalin was married at one point to Rosa Kaganovich, Lazar’s sister. As befits a regime that regularly “blot[ted] out the remembrance of [inconvenient people] from under heaven,” the record is unclear. Some have denied even that Lazar had such a sister. She is depicted, though, in Robert Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin, pp. 410-12 (1965), in connection with the apparent suicide of Stalin’s second wife.back
5. See, e.g., Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, p. xix, discussing the centrality of this theme in Lurianic Cabbalism and in the views of its recent followers, including particularly Avracham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, chief rabbi of Palestine, 1920-35. They quote him: “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” They add that “according to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.” Such tribal narcissism pervades the various teachings discussed by Johann Eisenmenger (p. 9, above), by Shahak in Three Thousand Years, and by Israel Jacob Yuval in Two Nations in Your Womb (pp. 11-12, above). Biblical passages quoted herein, by the way, are taken from the King James Version, but the bracketed reference to penises in Ezekiel 23:20 is based on the Revised Standard Version, where the word is “members.” back
6. See also Elisheva Carlebach, liided Souls: Converts From Judaism in Germany, 1500-1750, pp. 212-13 (Yale University Press, 2001)(“Eisenmenger did not fabricate. . .; he quoted accurately and translated literally. . .”); and Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews, vol. 3, p. 49 (1871 ed.)(“[Eisenmenger’s] reading was vast, his industry indefatigable. . . . I have never heard his accuracy seriously impeached”). Having granted those points, Katz and Carlebach are left to argue—most indignantly—that Eisenmenger errs by assuming Jews are aware of rabbinical writings and take them to mean what they say. On publica-tion, Eisenmenger’s book was suppressed by official decree; influential Jews had complained that it might lead to the sort of massacres seen just 50 years before in the Ukraine. The English-language version even now has a habit of disappearing from libraries (see, e.g., the online catalogue of the New York Public Library) and is available in many university libraries only online, with access restricted. It is, however, available for purchase in a facsimile edition published in 2006. back
7. See Genesis 25:31-34 (Jacob’s taking advantage of Esau’s mortal distress to acquire his birthright—“I am at the point to die,” answered with “swear to me this day”), and the immediately following verse, 26:1, about “famine in the land”; and 27:15-44 (Jacob’s theft of Esau’s blessing by outright fraud). Note the grandiosity of the blessing (Genesis 27:29): “Let people serve thee and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee; cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.” In Genesis 32:28 and 35:10 Jacob is renamed Israel. In Genesis 33:1-13 Esau good-heartedly forgives his twin. Jacob (Israel), though, retains Esau’s birthright and blessing. Esau remains eternally in liine disfavor (see the sources just cited in the text). This continues the subservient status God ordained not just for him, but also for his “nation” or “manner of people,” even before his birth (Genesis 25:23). Esau’s murderous but transitory rage at being defrauded (Genesis 27:41) puts him afoul of the stolen blessing: “[C]ursed be every one that curseth [Jacob!].” Apart from that, Esau’s only obvious fault is naïve trust in his own mother and his own twin. Esau’s “manner of people,” i.e., mere “m[e]n of the field” (Genesis 25:23, 27) can expect little from that twin, who prefers to stay in his tent (id.), “flee[s],” at the mother’s direction, from the victim of his fraud (Genesis 27:43), and deals underhandedly with Laban, the uncle who gives him refuge (Genesis 30:31-43). Jacob is to be “lord over [his] brethren,” and to him even “nations [are called to] bow down.” This foundational myth may be the earliest record of the “hatred and contempt” referred to by Shahak (see p. 7, above). Later Pharisaic contempt for men of the field is discussed in Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, above, pp. 29-30. Evron thinks the reaction came in the form of Christianity and its spread among the disfavored. For talmudic vilification of Esau, a metaphor for Rome, then Christianity, see http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view_friendly.jsp?artid= 457&letter=E. And see Alastair G. Hunter, “(De)nominating Amalek: Racist Stereotyping in the Bible and the Justification of Discrimination,” in Jonneke Bekkenkamp and Yvonne Sherwood, eds., Sanctified Aggression, p. 92 (2003). Hunter writes of the expropriator’s invariable dehumanization—not to say demonization—of those he expropriates. back
8. Yuval is a professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a visiting fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the spring of 2004. His ventilation of the matters covered in Two Nations has not been uniformly well received. His introduction (p. xiii) quotes Ezra Fleischer’s reaction to an earlier article Yuval wrote on the same themes: “This article is of the type that it would have been better had it never been written; and once written—it would have been better had it never been published; and once published—it would have been better had it been forgotten as quickly as possible.” Another version of those last five words is “sentenced to oblivion.” See Israel Shamir, “A Yiddishe Medina,” available online. Compare the discussion of din moser at p. 20, above.back
9. This is one of the milder translations. Others include “totally impure and evil” and “totally satanic.” (See generally Eisenmenger as to such matters.) Yisrael Meyerowitz, “Hasidic Primary Works in English Translation” (2004, available online) says that “due to the difficult homiletic style of most primary Hasidic works, a mere translation will not properly convey the author’s intent.” (Emphasis added.) Three Thousand Years (esp. chs. 2 and 5) might suggest that the supposed futility of “mere translation” is quite intentional, allowing simultaneous (a) practice of the “virtue of hate,” (b) denial to outsiders—especially gentile authorities—that any such thing is actually meant, and (c) assertion that any outsider who perceives hostility does so only because of the anti-Semitism imputed to all gentiles. back
10. See also, e.g., BBC News, July 18, 2004 (“[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon said that his advice to French Jews was that moving to Israel was ‘a must and they have to move immediately.’ * * * A week ago, President Jacques Chirac rushed to condemn an apparently anti-Semitic attack on a Paris train that turned out to be a hoax”); Jewish News Weekly of Northern Calif., July 23, 2004 (“Three months after an arson fire that their son has admitted to igniting charred their home, Rabbi Yosef and Hinda Langer are turning their lives right side up again”); Agence France Presse, Aug. 30, 2004 (“French police confirmed that a man arrested in connection with what was first believed to be an anti-Semitic arson attack on a Jewish social center a week ago was a Jewish man who had worked there. . . ”); Associated Press, Sept. 19, 2004 (reporting that Kerri Dunn, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, was convicted of attempted insurance fraud after spray-painting her own car with anti-Semitic slurs); cbsnewyork.com, Oct. 19, 2004 (reporting that Olga Abramovich was caught after a spree of painting swastikas through Jewish sections of Queens and Brooklyn, and that her motives were not as might appear); and an FBI notice issued in mid-Sept. 2005 for Adam Pearlman, a/k/a Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, Abu Suhayb, and Yihya Majadin Adams, wanted for questioning about “Al Qaeda” terrorist threats against the U.S. Pearlman’s grandfather, with whom he had lived, was Carl K. Pearlman, M.D., a prominent Orange County, Calif. urologist and Anti-Defamation League board member. See also note xi, below.back
11. As to Zionist false-flag terrorism, designed to look like the work of others and (generally) to create the appearance of external threats, see, e.g., By Way of Deception and The Other Side of Deception (including plot to assassinate Pres. George H.W. Bush and frame Palestinians for the crime after Bush froze loan guarantees for Israel); Ari Ben Menashe, Profits of War:Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (1992)(S.S. Achille Lauro attack, successfully blamed on Palestinians, and an attempt to blow up an El Al airliner in England, successfully blamed on Syria, after which “Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian embassy in London”); Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire (1992)(City of Poros ferry attack, successfully blamed on Palestinians, assassinations of Palestinian moderates, shooting of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London in 1982 to provide pretext for invasion of Lebanon); Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews (1992, available online) (Israeli bombing of synagogues and libraries in Baghdad in the early 1950s to stampede Iraqi Jews into moving to Israel, and a scheme to paint an airplane in Egyptian colors and use it to bomb Israel); Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion (1986)(bombing of Iraqi Jews); Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East (1980)(same, also Israeli sinking of U.S.S. Liberty in June 1967: Eveland was a high-level CIA official in the region); Cdr. Elmo H. Hutchison, Violent Truce (1956) (Hutchison was the American chairman of the Israeli-Jordanian Joint Armistice Commission, which the Israelis walked out of in 1954, taking as their pretext killings that appear to have been false-flag); Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel (1984), and Living by the Sword (1988); Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals (1977)(Haganah’s blowing up of S.S. Patria in Haifa harbor in 1940 to embarrass British over policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine, falsely blamed on Masada-style mass suicide of passengers, who would otherwise have been taken to safety in Mauritius); Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Nov. 2002 (Israeli false-flag attempt to assassinate John Gunther Dean, once himself a Jewish refugee, and by then U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, in 1980); Barbara Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?” World Policy Journal, fall 2005 (Dean’s accusation in 1988, when he was U.S. ambassador to India, that Israel assassinated Pres. Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and Arnold Raphel, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, by sabotaging their plane—following which Dean was declared mentally unstable and relieved of his office); Procuraduria General de la Republica de Mexico, Boletin No. 697/01 (Oct. 12, 2001)(attempt by Israeli agents to bomb the Mexican legislative palace a month after 9/11); Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, ch. 10 (1982, available online) (Lilienthal, a lawyer who advised the U.S. delegation at the founding of the UN, is mostly concerned with overt Israeli terrorism that the American and European media refuse to acknowledge as such, but also describes letter bomb campaigns that he thinks were false-flag); Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (1973)(reporting Zionist attempts to assassinate Pres. Truman, various of his aides, and British politicians such as Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin with letter bombs); Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet (1990) (Israeli plan to use Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League to embarrass U.S.- Soviet relations by assassinating Soviet diplomats in the U.S.); George W. and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment (1992)(same: the senior Ball was undersecretary of State in the 1960s); many sources on the blowing up of the King David Hotel on July 26, 1946 by Irgun Zvai Leumi agents disguised as Arabs; and Rokach herself, above, on such subjects as the 1954 Lavon Affair, in which Israeli agents bombed USIS libraries, theaters and other sites associated with the U.S. and U.K. in Cairo. This list is hardly exhaustive; nor perhaps could the subject ever be exhausted.back
12. At the same time, of course, it’s perfectly acceptable—no evidence whatever of bigotry—to use terms like “Islamofascism,” or to trace problems to the very nature of some religion (so long as it’s not Judaism), e.g., the supposed anti-Semitism of such passages as John 8:37-44 and Revelation 2:9—even Luke 10:29-37!—or “jihadist” exhortations in the Koran. Many have remarked on the explosive reaction that would ensue if anyone spoke of Jews in the terms the Talmud uses for gentiles, to say nothing of the terms Maimonides uses for blacks. As to the former, see Eisenmenger. As to the latter, see A Guide for the Perplexed, bk. III, ch. 51 (12^th c.); cf. the Talmud tractate Sanhedrin, which as quoted by Eisenmenger (Eng. tr., pp. 105-06) teaches that:
    

    . . .Three different Kinds mingled carnally in the Ark of Noah: And . . . they were all branded and punish’d for it: Namely the Dog, the Raven, and Shem. The Dog (in Coition) is linked to the Bitch. The Raven emits his Seed by the Mouth. And Shem was punish’d on his Skin; for from him has sprung the Black Cus [i.e., Cushite; compare the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Numbers 12:1, using that word, with the same verse in the King James Version, which more forthrightly—not contemplating sales in the American South—says “Ethiopian”]. back

13. Hadas, pp. 81-82, quotes a well-known passage from Plato, Laws 942ab (360 B.C.?), which he says provided a model for both Maccabean and then talmudic Judaism:
    

    The principal thing is that none, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his inliidual responsibility. In peace as in war he must live always with his eyes on his superior officer, following his lead and guided by him in his smallest actions. In a word, we must train the mind not to even consider acting as an inliidual or know how to do it.

    Hadas says Jewish religious leaders, unlike Plato and his “Nocturnal Council,” have genuinely believed in liine revelation as a basis for this model. (For Plato, the claim of liine authority was only a necessary lie.) For Shahak’s comments on Hadas, see Three Thousand Years, in the concluding paragraphs of ch. 1. Shahak sees Israel, unless it changes course in a most unlikely way, as becoming “a fully closed and warlike ghetto, a Jewish Sparta, supported by the labour of Arab helots.” The resemblance of the Spartan model to Soviet Communism is also obvious. Some have noticed a similarity between Israel and the Soviet Union of the 1930s in terms of the ideologically-blindered style of their respective apologists, particularly in excusing state terrorism—e.g., Arthur Koestler and Lev Kopelev in their days of hope and illusion, Daniel Pipes and Alan Dershowitz today. That seems understandable in terms of Boas Evron’s point, above, that “the backgrounds of the two groups were much the same.”back

14. Not only have the rabbis reacted indulgently to such verbal expressions. They have also endorsed mass killing directly after the fact, a time when sober second thoughts might be expected. See David Hirst in the Nation, Feb. 2, 2004 (online only) on Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s Purim 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians and wounding of scores more, children included, by machine-gunning them in the back as they bent heads-to-ground in prayer (whereupon Israeli troops killed 25 more as the survivors rose to retaliate):
    

    Many were the rabbis who praised this “act,” “event” or “occurrence,” as they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of Jerusalem’s religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling Goldstein’s virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond the religious camp. . . ; polls said that 50 percent of the Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less approved of it. back

15. See id. at p. 43 for a similar statement by the head of a yeshiva near Nablus, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, that a Jew’s killing non-Jews does not constitute murder in the Jewish religion. Ginsburgh wrote this in his contribution to a book of essays praising Baruch Goldstein. The interesting point is that “[n]o influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburgh’s statements.” At p. 63, Shahak and Mezvinsky quote Rabbi Yehuda Amital—whom Shimon Peres considered a moderate and appointed to his cabinet in 1995—as saying “our war is directed against the impurity of Western culture and against rationality as such.” (Emphasis added.) back
16. The term “Greek Catholic” refers to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic (or “Uniate”) church formed in 1596 under the rule of Roman Catholic Poland. The rite is Greek Orthodox, but the church recognizes the pope. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution it included a substantial proportion of the peasantry at which the holodomor was directed, especially in the western Ukraine. back
17. Power is spoken to truth. See Noam Chomsky, “The Fate of an Honest Intellectual,” available online, on how Norman Finkelstein, then a Princeton doctoral candidate, became a non-person there after he exposed as fraudulent Joan Peters’s hugely successful From Time Immemorial (1984), a purported proof that there had been no significant indigenous population in Palestine prior to Zionist settlement. See also Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches From the Wellesley Battlefront (1993) on what happened when Martin, using Jewish sources, tried to explore the Jewish role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that arose more or less contemporaneously with the arenda system. Search on the combination of “Mark Roberts” and “Columbia University” as to the ongoing Zionist “witch hunt” at that institution. Search on the combinations of “Juan Cole” and “Yale,” and “Rashid Khalidi” and “Princeton” for Zionist vetoes over faculty appointments. See Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out (1985 and subsequent editions) on other academic and political freezeouts. Findley’s first edition also has stories about how Jewish professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.—risk destruction of their livelihood if they oppose the official line (as might be predicted by the observations of Moses Hadas in note xiii and the accompanying text, above). Something similar happened to the New York Times, threatening to put it out of business, when Arthur Hays Sulzberger refused in 1947 to run an advertisement by an alter ego of Menachem Begin’s terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi. See Alfred M. Lilienthal, “Book on New York Times Editor [A.M. Rosen-thal] Helps Explain Media Bias for Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1989 (avail-able online). See also Victor Ostrovsky, “First-Hand Accounts of Pro-Israel McCarthyism [sic],” Washing-ton Report, Nov. 1997 (available online). Ostrovsky reports threats to the safety of a Montreal law firm’s employees, which forced it to abandon a lawsuit. The suit was based on an Israeli request, televised in Canada, that some “decent” Canadian Jew assassinate Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky also tells of arson that suc-ceeded in burning to the ground his house in an Ottawa suburb. In fairness to the unlamented Joe Mc-Carthy, he never did things quite like those. Again, compare the discussion of din moser at p. 20, above.back
18. Such moral inversions are pervasive and seem to form with automatic ease. Three examples: First, Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye der Milkhiker” (1895) and its adaptations (most notably Fiddler on the Roof) present Jews in the highly anomalous role of lovable Ukrainian peasants. (Compare Subtelny, above, p. 276: “Traditionally the Jews were an urban people. Tsarist restrictions against their movement into the countryside reinforced this condition”). Second, the movie version (1960) of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958) has Jews, per Lee J. Cobb, “beseech[ing]” Palestinians in 1948 to remain on their land—whereupon the Palestinians depart of their own volition, presumably out of gratuitous anti-Semitism. (Compare p. 577 of the novel: “If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it. . . . The Arabs had little to live for. . . . This [departure] is not the reaction of a man who loves his land.”) Third, rabbinical involvement in the American civil rights struggle of the 1960s presents baffling anomalies. As Shahak puts it in ch. 2 of Three Thousand Years:
    

    Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of “Jewish interest” (wishing to win black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle—and back—and back again.

    At present, Israel’s closest non-Jewish ally is exactly the white “Christian Zionist” element in the Old Confederacy against which much of the civil rights struggle was waged. The alliance is based on shared fear of repressed populations seeking to gain or assert rights. See, e.g., Michael Lind, Made in Texas, p. 156 (2003). Lind also reports (id.) Benjamin Netanyahu’s “contemptuous comparison,” before a Dallas audience in 2002, “between Palestinian Arabs and Mexicans.”back

19. Norman Finkelstein gives some examples of that duality at pp. 2-3 of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2d ed. 2003), where he describes the progress of the philosopher Michael Walzer, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, from (a) defending Israel on the basis of a universal ethic, in Just and Unjust Wars (1977), to (b) defending it, once that became impossible, on the basis that there is no universal ethic, in Spheres of Justice (1983) and Exodus and Revolution (1985), to (c) arguing, in The Company of Critics (1988), that even if there were a universal ethic, a “connected” social critic would still privilege his “own” people. Finkelstein comments that “for Israel’s ‘friends,’ the ring of Walzer’s message is as welcome as it is familiar: to be ‘connected’ is to ask, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’” Compari-sons, of course, run not just to the Gypsy double standards described by Guenter Lewy, but also to the NSDAP slogan “Think with your blood.” The latter parallel has plainly occurred to Finkelstein. He compares Walzer, in the second and third stages of his metamorphosis, to “the fascist ideologues that Julien Benda chastised in The Treason of the Intellectuals” (1969). As to denial of a universal ethic by another prominent defender of Israel, see Hadley Arkes, “The Rights and Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz,” Claremont Review of Books, fall 2005 (available online)(“Dershowitz has insisted that ‘reason’ has no truths to disclose in the realm of morals”). See also Jewish Fundamentalism and Three Thousand Years, both above, for rabbinical pronouncements, not otherwise translated from the Hebrew, that could easily pass as expressions of Nazi ideology if certain proper nouns were changed. It appears, by the way, that the comparison between Jews and Gypsies has occasionally intruded on Jewish consciousness, and that the subject is a sensitive one. See Graetz, vol. 5, p. 197. The comparison with the Nazis, of course, is absolutely forbidden, as became clear when the Israeli politician Yosef (Tommy) Lapid told the cabinet that a picture of a suffering Palestinian woman reminded him of his own grandmother. See “Gaza Political Storm Hits Israel,” BBC News, May 23, 2004 (available online)(“referring to the TV picture, Mr. Lapid said he was ‘talking about an old woman crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house and that she made me think of my grandmother. I said that if we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague’ . . .”). Lapid’s remarks produced an uproar. He was reprimanded by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and had to deny publicly that he’d intended a comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany. More recently, however, he has returned to the theme. See his article “Stop the Jewish Barbarians in Hebron,” Jerusalem Post, Jan. 17, 2007 (available online)(“[L]iving here among us are Jews that behave toward Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews”).back
20. For an excellent—and thoroughly disgusted—account of the Armenian genocide and the general present-day reluctance to discuss it, see Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, pp. 316-55 (2005).back

Image by: Carlos Latuff

What follows are some of the highlights of the Executive Summary, but first a few observations. Describing Israel or Israeli policies in terms of apartheid has become more common in recent times, but has also provoked a strong backlash. It is interesting to note, therefore, that this study is a measured assessment written by legal experts on the specific ways in which Israel's policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) can be considered to be 'colonialism' and/or 'apartheid', as defined by international law. It is not, quite clearly and openly, saying Israel=South Africa.

The new report was carried out by the Middle East Project of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. The Middle East Project is:

an independent two year project of the HSRC to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy. Its funding was provided by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa. The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa and does not represent an official position of the HSRC. It is intended purely as a scholarly resource for the Department of Foreign Affairs and the concerned international community.

Background

In January 2007, while addressing the UN Human Rights Council in his capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, South African law Professor John Dugard asked the following question:

Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT. At the same time, elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law. What are the legal consequences of a regime of prolonged occupation with features of colonialism and apartheid for the occupied people, the Occupying Power and third States?

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (and specifically, their Middle East Project) "commissioned this study to test the hypothesis" put forward by Dugard. Beginning in February 2008, fifteen months of workshops, drafting, re-drafting and revision finally produced this report for publication.

Aim and focus

The aim of the project "was to scrutinise the situation from the nonpartisan perspective of international law, rather than engage in political discourse and rhetoric". The conclusion is that "Israel, since 1967, has been the belligerent Occupying Power in the OPT, and that its occupation of these territories has become a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid".

The study also focuses on "the responsibility of States as a result of internationally wrongful acts", concluding:

Faced with a violation of the prohibitions of colonialism and apartheid, all States have three duties: to cooperate to end the violation; not to recognise the illegal situation arising from it; and not to render aid or assistance to the State committing it.

On the legal framework in the OPT:

"The occupied status of the West Bank was confirmed by the ICJ in the Wall advisory opinion. Israel's 'disengagement' from the Gaza Strip did not constitute the end of occupation because, despite the redeployment of its military ground forces from Gaza, it retains and exercises effective control over the territory."

"…Israel's administration of the OPT systematically breaches the law of armed conflict, both by disregarding the prohibition imposed on an Occupying Power not to alter the laws in force in occupied territory and by enforcing a dual and discriminatory legal regime on Jewish and Palestinian residents of the OPT. Israel grants to Jewish residents of the settlements in the OPT the protections of Israeli domestic law and subjects them to the jurisdiction of Israeli civil courts, while Palestinians living in the same territory are ruled under military law and subjected to the jurisdiction of military courts whose procedures violate international standards for the prosecution of justice. As a consequence of this bifurcated system, Jewish residents of the OPT enjoy freedom of movement, civil protections, and services denied to Palestinians. Palestinians are simultaneously denied the protections accorded to protected persons by international humanitarian law. This dual system has gained the imprimatur of Israel's High Court and constitutes a policy by the State of Israel to sustain two parallel societies in the OPT, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, and discriminate between these two groups by according very different rights, protections, and life chances in the same territory."

Findings on Colonialism:

"Although international law provides no single decisive definition of colonialism, the terms of the Declaration on Colonialism indicate that a situation may be classified as colonial when the acts of a State have the cumulative outcome that it annexes or otherwise unlawfully retains control over territory and thus aims permanently to deny its indigenous population the exercise of its right to self-determination. Five issues, which are unlawful in themselves, taken together make it evident that Israel's rule in the OPT has assumed such a colonial character: namely, violations of the territorial integrity of occupied territory; depriving the population of occupied territory of the capacity for self-governance; integrating the economy of occupied territory into that of the occupant; breaching the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources in relation to the occupied territory; and denying the population of occupied territory the right freely to express, develop and practice its culture."

"Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem is manifestly an act based on colonial intent. It is unlawful in itself…"

"By thus partitioning contiguous blocs of Palestinian areas into cantons, Israel has violated the territorial integrity of the OPT in violation of the Declaration on Colonialism."

"The economic dimension of self-determination is also expressed in the right of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which entitles a people to dispose freely of the natural wealth and resources found within the limits of its national jurisdiction. Israel's settlement policy and the construction of the bypass road network and the Wall have deprived the Palestinian population of the control and development of an estimated 38 percent of West Bank land. It has also implemented a water management and allocation system that favours Israel and Jewish settlers in the OPT to the detriment of the Palestinian population…Moreover, it is significant that the route of the Wall is similar to the 'red line' that delineates those areas of the West Bank from which Israel can withdraw without relinquishing its control over key water resources that are used to supply Israel and the settlements."

"This study demonstrates that the implementation of a colonial policy by Israel has not been piecemeal but is systematic and comprehensive, as the exercise of the Palestinian population's right to self-determination has been frustrated in all of its principal modes of expression."

Findings on Apartheid:

"The Apartheid Convention criminalises 'inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them'. The Rome Statute criminalises inhumane acts committed in the context of, and to maintain, 'an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.' Both focus on the systematic, institutionalised, and oppressive character of the discrimination involved and the purpose of domination that is entailed. This distinguishes the practice of apartheid from other forms of prohibited discrimination and from other contexts in which the listed crimes arise."

"It must be clear, however, that practices in South Africa are not the test or benchmark for a finding of apartheid elsewhere, as the principal instrument which provides this test lies in the terms of the Apartheid Convention itself."

"…Palestinians are subject to legal systems and courts which apply standards of evidence and procedure that are different from those applied to Jewish settlers living the OPT and that result in harsher penalties for Palestinians."

"Restrictions on the Palestinian right to freedom of movement are endemic in the West Bank, stemming from Israel's control of the OPT's checkpoints and crossings, impediments created by the Wall and its crossing points, a matrix of separate roads, and obstructive and all encompassing permit and ID systems that apply solely to Palestinians."

"The right of Palestinians to choose their own place of residence within their territory is severely curtailed by systematic administrative restrictions on Palestinian residency and building in East Jerusalem, by discriminatory legislation that operates to prevent Palestinian spouses from living together on the basis of which part of the OPT they originate from, and by the strictures of the permit and ID systems."

"Palestinians are denied their right to leave and return to their country… hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced to surrounding states from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 have been prevented from returning to the OPT…Palestinian residents of the OPT must obtain Israeli permission to leave the territory…Political activists and human rights defenders are often subject to arbitrary and undefined 'travel bans', while many Palestinians who travelled and lived abroad for business or personal reasons have had their residence Ids revoked and been prohibited from returning."

"Israel denies Palestinians in the OPT their right to a nationality by denying Palestinian refugees from inside the Green Line their right of return, residence, and citizenship in the State (Israel) governing the land of their birth. Israel's policies in the OPT also effectively deny Palestinians their right to a nationality by obstructing the exercise of the Palestinian right to self determination through the formation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip."

"Israeli military actions have included extensive school closures, direct attacks on schools, severe restrictions on movement, and arrests and detention of teachers and students…A segregated school system operates in the West Bank as Palestinians are not allowed to attend government funded schools in Jewish settlements."

"Israel has divided the West Bank into reserves or cantons in which residence and entry is determined by each individual's group identity. Entry by one group into the zone of the other group is prohibited without a permit. The Wall and its infrastructure of gates and permanent checkpoints suggest a policy permanently to divide the West Bank into racial cantons. Israeli government ministries, the World Zionist Organisation and other Jewish-national institutions operating as authorised agencies of the State plan, fund and implement construction of the West Bank settlements and their infrastructure for exclusively Jewish use."

"Israel has extensively appropriated Palestinian land in the OPT for exclusively Jewish use. Private Palestinian land comprises about 30 percent of the land unlawfully appropriated for Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Presently, 38 percent of the West Bank is completely closed to Palestinian use, with significant restrictions on access to much of the rest of it."

"In sum, Israel appears clearly to be implementing and sustaining policies intended to maintain its domination over Palestinians in the OPT and to suppress opposition of any form to those policies."

"The comparative analyses of South African apartheid practices…is there to illuminate, rather than define, the meaning of apartheid, and there are certainly differences between apartheid as it was applied in South Africa and Israel's policies and practices in the OPT. Nonetheless, it is significant that the two systems can be defined by similar dominant features."

"A troika of key laws underpinned the South African apartheid regime—the Population Registration Act 1950, the Group Areas Act 1950, and the Pass Laws—and established its three principal features or pillars…Israel's practices in the OPT can be defined by the same three 'pillars' of apartheid."

"The first pillar derives from Israeli laws and policies that establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews… At the root of this system are Israel's citizenship laws, whereby group identity is the primary factor in determining questions involving the acquisition of Israeli citizenship…Israeli law conveying special standing to Jewish identity is then applied extra-territorially to extend preferential legal status and material privileges to Jewish settlers in the OPT and thus discriminate against Palestinians.

"The second pillar is reflected in Israel's grand policy to fragment the OPT for the purposes of segregation and domination….That these measures are intended to segregate the population along racial lines in violation of Article 2(d) of the Apartheid Convention is clear from the visible web of walls, separate roads, and checkpoints, and the invisible web of permit and ID systems, that combine to ensure that Palestinians remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory."

"…the policy of geographic fragmentation has the effect of crushing Palestinian socio-economic life, securing Palestinian vulnerability to Israeli economic dominance, and of enforcing a rigid segregation of Palestinian and Jewish populations."

"The third pillar upon which Israel's system of apartheid in the OPT rests is its 'security' laws and policies. The extrajudicial killing, torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of Palestinians, as described under the rubric of Article 2(a) of the Apartheid Convention, are all justified by Israel on the pretext of security.

"This study does not contend that Israel's claims about security are by definition lacking in merit; however, Israel's invocation of 'security' to validate severe policies and disproportionate practices toward the Palestinians often masks the intent to suppress Palestinian opposition to a system of domination by one racial group over another. Thus, while the individual practices listed in the Apartheid Convention do not in themselves define apartheid, these practices do not occur in the OPT in a vacuum, but are integrated and complementary elements of an institutionalised and oppressive system of Israeli domination and oppression over Palestinians as a group; that is, a system of apartheid."

"This discriminatory treatment cannot be explained or excused on grounds of citizenship, both because it goes beyond what is permitted by ICERD and because certain provisions in Israeli civil and military law provide that Jews present in the OPT who are not citizens of Israel also enjoy privileges conferred on Jewish-Israeli citizens in the OPT by virtue of being Jews. Consequently, this study finds that the State of Israel exercises control in the OPT with the purpose of maintaining a system of domination by Jews over Palestinians and that this system constitutes a breach of the prohibition of apartheid."

Implications and Recommendations:

"The legal consequences of these findings are grave and entail obligations not merely for Israel but also for the international community as a whole."

"Israel bears the primary responsibility for remedying the illegal situation it has created. In the first place, it has the duty to cease its unlawful activity and dismantle the structures and institutions of colonialism and apartheid that it has created. Israel is additionally required by international law to implement duties of reparation, compensation and satisfaction in order to wipe out the consequences of its unlawful acts."

"Breaches of peremptory norms, which involve a gross or systematic failure by the responsible State to fulfil the obligations they impose, generate derivative obligations for States and intergovernmental organisations of cooperation and abstention. States, and intergovernmental organisations, must cooperate to bring to an end any and all serious breaches of peremptory norms."

"States must not recognise as lawful situations created by serious breaches of peremptory norms nor render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation. In particular, States must not recognise Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem or its attempt to acquire territory in the West Bank through the consolidation of settlements, nor may they bolster the latter's economic viability. Should any State fail to fulfil its duty of abstention then it risks becoming complicit in Israel's internationally wrongful acts, and thus independently engaging its own responsibility, with all the legal consequences of reparation that this entails…If a State aids or assists another State in maintaining that unlawful situation, knowing it to be unlawful, then it becomes complicit in its commission and itself commits an internationally wrongful act.

"States cannot evade their international obligations by hiding behind the independent personality of an international organisation of which they are members."

"Accordingly we respectfully suggest that, in accordance with Article 96 of the Charter of the United Nations and pursuant to Article 65 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, an advisory opinion be urgently requested on the following question:

Do the policies and practices of Israel within the Occupied Palestinian Territories violate the norms prohibiting apartheid and colonialism; and, if so, what are the legal consequences arising from Israel's policies and practices, considering the rules and principles of international law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and other relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions?

Source: Mondoweiss

This is a real news report from Gaza that shows a sample of the inhuman result on our Palestinian health system caused by the the Zionist-Israeli occupation siege on Gaza, which continued even after the Israeli genocide war there.

But first, here is a description of what you expect to see (the news report is in Arabic):

Another Palestinian child died in a very dramatic scene documented on T.V. A baby aged 2 died today from a heart defect made worse by lack of medical care due to the Israeli imposed siege.

Aljazeera's reporter, Tamer Al meshal, reveals one of the miseries resulting from the Israeli siege on Gaza . Feras As'ad Al Mazlom, an infant aged 2, was the only child of newly married couple As'ad and Amal.

Infant Feras who was born with a heart defect, he had to spend more time in a hospital bed rather than his loving parents' arms. He never played nor enjoyed his innocent life like others.

Like many Palestinians, Feras paid for the siege with his precious life. The hospital and equipment were not able to rescue him nor could his parents move him to Egypt for treatment. However, the hospital managed to coordinate a transfer to an Israeli hospital.

With hope, the father tried obtaining permits for both his wife and son to cross the border, and he finally succeeded. The father moved like crazy to complete the travel documents necessary for Feras to be transferred for treatment.

Unfortunately, as they were on the way to pick their child and head to Erez crossing into Israel, they received an excruciating phone call saying their only was no longer alive and there's no need to take him anywhere.

It was minutes or rather seconds between life and death for Feras. This baby, didn't fight Israelis, never shot at them, nor fired a rocket rather, his only fault was being, "a child born in Gaza".

Thousands of Palestinian like Feras are still on the waiting list of death. Israel is hindering access to their basic right of treatment. Those patients' rights are highly recognized and guaranteed by the 4th Geneva convention and humanitarian law. However, Israel does not respect UN authority or declarations regarding human rights.

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Sources: The Palestine Telegraph and Aljazeera

YouTube: http://bit.ly/hP6H8
Original Video link: http://bit.ly/2EHtnX

Same old story, new president:

U.S. President Barack Obama will not cut the billions of dollars in military aid promised to Israel, a senior U.S. administration official said Wednesday. The $30 billion in aid promised to Israel over the next decade will not be harmed by the world financial crisis, the official told Israel Radio. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. military aid to Israel was increased in a decade-long deal agreed to by Bush in 2007. OTOH, U.S. will pay close to $1 billion for rebuilding the wreckage in Gaza mostly caused by armaments paid for by the U.S.! To add insult to injury, there is a condition on that money:

Clinton: Some $900 million pledged by the United States to the Palestinians will be withdrawn if the expected Palestinian Authority coalition government between Fatah and Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist, Western and Israeli diplomats said Wednesday.

Key Facts

• Total direct aid to Israel, 1948-2003, $89.9 billion (uncorrected for inflation)
• Since 1976 Israel has been the largest annual recipient of US aid. It is the largest cumulative recipient since World War II.
• Direct U.S. aid for each Israeli citizen in 2001 (per capita annual income of Israel = $16,710) — over $500
• Direct U.S. Aid for each Ethiopian citizen in 2001 (per capita annual income of Ethiopia = $100) — about $.45
• REGULAR US GRANT AID in FY 2003
1. $2.76 billion military aid grant
2. $2.1 billion economic support funds
3. $600 million refugee resettlement grant
• COMMERCIAL LOAN GUARANTEES IN FY 2003, $2 billion
• BUSH ADMINISTRATION SUPPLEMENTAL REQUEST FOR FY 2003
1. Military aid grant $1 billion
2. Commercial loan guarantees $9 billion
3. Arrow missile development $60 million
• TOTAL AID FOR FY 2003 $14.82 billion
• Percentage of U.S. foreign aid that goes to Israel — 30%
• Israel's population as a percentage of world population — .01%
• Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) states, "No assistance may be provided under this part to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." 22 U.S.C. 2304(a)
• Section 4 of the Arms Export Control Act prohibits selling military equipment to countries that use them for non-self-defense purposes.
• The U.S. State Department determined in February 2001 that Israel has committed each of the acts that the law defines as "gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges and trial, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, and other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or the security of person." It described Israeli army use of live ammunition against Palestinians when soldiers were not in impending danger as "excessive use of force."

SOURCES: Clyde R. Mark, Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance, Congressional Research Service, updated April 1, 2003; Clyde R. Mark, Middle East: U.S. Foreign Assistance, FY 2001, FY 2002, FY 2003 Congressional Research Service, March 28, 2002

By Dr. Elias Akleh

Since their occupation of Palestine in 1948 to establish illegal Israel in the heart of the Arab World until the present, Zionist Israelis had initiated seven wars against their Arab neighbors. Six of those were waged after 1967 to maintain their occupation of the rest of Palestine, Lebanese Sheb'a Farms, and Syrian Golan Heights; formally recognized by the international community as an occupation.

Israel had maintained its occupation of the land for the last sixty years. The question that poses itself, here, is how a small state like Israel, 7 million Zionist Jews in an area of 8 thousand square miles (excluding the 1967 occupied territories), could maintain such an occupation against hundreds of millions of Arabs and against the disapproval of the civic (not political) international community? Bullying with extreme brutal force is the answer. Israel is a military society with every Zionist Israeli citizen, from childhood to old age, being militaristic in one form or another. Israel possesses all kinds of weapons including weapons of mass destruction (WMD) such as nuclear and chemical weapons.

Israel did not become the fourth largest army in the world by its own merit, but by the Western countries supplying it with all kinds of weapons. In its February 23^rd report "Foreign Arms Supplies To Israel/Gaza Fueling Conflict" amnestyusa.org named 18 EU member states, which authorized 1,018 arms export licenses to Israel worth a little less than 200 million Euros. All these arms exports are in violation of the EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports under Criterion 2, which states that member states are supposed to "deny an export license if there is a clear risk that the proposed export might be used for internal repression or be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law". Israel had committed such violations throughout its entire existence.

France, Germany, and Romania were the top three arms suppliers to Israel worth of 126 million Euros, 28 million Euros, and 17 million Euros respectively. Other significant arms suppliers to Israel since 2001 also include alphabetically Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Columbia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, India, Italy, Poland, Romania, Serbia-Montenegro, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, and UK.

The report also indicated the well-known fact that "Since 2001, the USA has been by far the major supplier of conventional arms to Israel" It also stated the logical conclusion that "Put simply, Israel's military intervention in the Gaza Strip has been equipped to a large extent by US-supplied weapons, munitions and military equipment paid for with US taxpayers' money" What the report failed to indicate is that Israel had violated all the US laws governing arms transfers.

Examining the American military aid to Israel we find that since the end of WWII Israel had been the largest recipient of US aid (Armed & Dangerous Report). From 1949-2007 Israel had received more than $101 billion in total US economic and military aid. A previous Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two countries started phasing out the economic aid and increasing the military aid, and in 2008 all US aid to Israel turned into military aid only. The current MOU, singed by Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns in August 2007, has increased military aid to Israel by 25% a year for the next ten years FY2009-2018, totaling to $30 billion.

During the Bush administration 2001-2007 American military aid to Israel came under three primary programs; Foreign Military Sales (FMS) ran through the Pentagon totaled $25.2 billion in arms sales and contracts, Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) ran through the States Department totaled $6.16 billion in weapons and equipment, and Excess Defense Articles (EDA) also ran through the Pentagon totaled $36 million in used weapons and equipment. The total comes to a little more than $31.4 billion.

The Foreign Military Sales (FMS) provided Israel with air, missile & munitions, naval, design, vehicles, and miscellaneous military aid. Israel received $19.81 billion for their air forces that included F-35 joint strike fighters, C-130J-30 aircrafts, JP-8 aviation jet fuel, and T-6A Texan aircrafts. In missiles and munitions Israel received $2.73 billion worth of GBU-28 & 39 small diameter bombs, TOW, Hellfire, bunker buster munitions, AMRAAM, Harpoon, Sidewinder, JDAM's, and MK-80 series. US gave Israel $1.9 billion worth of the new series (Littoral) naval combat ships, $164 million worth of troop carrier armored vehicles and trucks, and $253 million worth of miscellaneous in the form of Patriot Missiles upgrade and M72A7 Light Anti-Armor weapons. Also included in this FMS package were $350 million worth of design and construction of two infantry bases.

The Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) program contained about three hundred different categories of weapons transfer to Israel. The main top ten categories for FY2001-2006 were $557,896 million in aircraft spare parts, $449 million in missile spare parts, $439 million in engine jet F-100 spare parts, $254 million in engine jet F-100 series (F-15 & F-16), $210 million in ship components and spare parts, $186 million in aircraft fighter F-15 spare parts, $163 million in electronics components and spare parts, $128 million in ammunition raw materials, and $120 million in training equipment.

The Excess Defense Articles (EDC) program shipped to Israel $36 million worth of used Cobra Helicopters, personnel carriers, carrier command posts, and miscellaneous articles.

The most outrageous American military aid to Israel is the billions of Dollars worth of refined fuel to the Israeli army. Israel's own oil refineries in Haifa and Ashdod, which could supply Israeli military with all its fuel needs, are instead producing and selling its refined products on the open market. The Israeli army gets all its military fuel from the USA through the FMS program. The US Defense Department uses American tax money to buy oil crude from Arab Gulf States, ship it to American refineries to refine it, and then ship it to Israel.

According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, from 2004 to 2008 the Bush administration had granted the Israeli army 500 million gallons of oil products worth $1.1 billion. During this period the American tax payers were faced with energy crises and had to pay $4 per gallon of gas at the pump while Israel was getting free gas from the Bush administration. Somebody has to pay for this gas, and it wasn't the Israelis.

Moreover, the US provides loan guarantees to Israel so that Israel can take out loans in the international money market with lower interest rates, and if Israel happens to default on any of these loans the US will bail Israel out with American tax money similar to the latest $700 billion bailout for the American banks. There is a condition on these loan guarantees. It states that these loans can only be used to support the activities within the sovereign areas in Israel (pre-1967 war), and cannot be used in the occupied Palestinian territories. This is a facetiously misleading condition, since such loans can free other monies in the Israeli budget to be used in building illegal colonies (settlements) in the occupied territories.

The US has three laws that govern arms transfer to other countries. The first is the Arms Export Control Act (P.L.80-829). This law states that American weapons given or sold to any foreign country can be used only for legitimate self-defense or for internal security. They are not to be used in occupational operations.

The second is the Foreign Assistance Act (P.L.97-195), which states that any country is not illegible for any form of US aid if it engages in consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. The third is the Leahy Law (Foreign Ops Appropriations Act). This is an annual part of the Foreign Appropriations Act, and states that no aid will be given to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross violations of human rights. Expanding their occupation of the land the Israelis had violated numerous UN Resolutions, broke international laws as well as their own local laws, violated all human rights, committed grave war crimes, and perpetrated terrorism against Arabs in general and Palestinian Arabs in specific.

It has been, numerously, documented by Israeli, Palestinian, and international NGOs that Israel had consistently violated international laws and human rights since 1948. In all its seven wars Israel, contrary to the false Israeli/American propaganda, had initiated the conflict in one way or another. Israel had attacked all its neighbors, committed war crimes, and occupied parts of their land. The Israelis had evicted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their country, completely wiped off many Palestinian towns and built Israeli colonies in their place, had stolen Palestinian farm land and forcefully controlled the economy. Israel had shoved thousands of Palestinian leaders and freedom fighters into prisons, and kept the rest of the Palestinian populations confined into open air virtual town-prisons within a separation wall.

Attacking Palestinian civilians, mainly defenseless children and women, has become the daily entertainment of Israeli government -backed and armed extreme Zionist colonizing terrorists (settlers?). Israeli soldiers developed the sport of hunting (shooting) Palestinian children on their way to schools or while playing in front of their homes. The Israeli army is using the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories and its Palestinian inhabitants as testing fields and subjects for theirs and for the American newly developed weapons as was exhibited in Israel's latest 22-days onslaught and massacres in Gaza.

Successive Israeli governments had consistently sent their armies to massacre Palestinian civilians. Israeli army had used all types of American supplied weapons; including depleted uranium tipped bombs and missiles, DIME bombs, chemical weapons such as phosphorous bombs and conventional weapons, to specifically and deliberately target Palestinian children and women. We need only go back to the Israeli last two wars; July 2006 against Lebanon and December 2008 against Gaza, still fresh in memory, to witness clear evidence of Israel's terrorism, war crimes, disrespect and contempt of international laws and human rights.

The driving force for the Zionist Israeli crimes and terrorism has been the extreme racist religious ideology of establishing a pure theocratic "Jewish" state for a prejudice- god's chosen people "narcissist Zionist Jews" in the real-estate- brokering-god's promised land of Greater Israel "Eretz Israel" extending from Nile to Euphrates. This theocratic dream necessitates a holy war (not the first one against the Middle East) to evict and remove the original inhabitants of the land to make living space for world Jewry to come and live in this Promised Land. This is how Israelis perceive their "final solution" to their "Palestinian problem"; destruction, massacres and mass evictions.

Although Israel has violated all EU and US arms transfer laws yet none had conducted any investigation to hold Israel accountable to these laws. The two rare incidents when under pressure the American State Department investigated Israeli violations where completely suppressed and quashed. The first was in 2002 when Israel dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza City in order to extra-judicially assassinate a Hamas leader, Salah Shehadeh, and killed 14 other civilians, women and children, in the process. This investigation was quashed by none other than John Bolton, the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security at the time. The investigation was never sent to the Congress in violation of US laws.

The second investigation was in 2006 when Israel dropped an estimated one million cluster bombs on the civilian areas of South Lebanon in the last 72 hours of the war, even after a seize-fire was agreed upon. This was made a top secret State Department investigation and was released to only a few senior members of the Cogress such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and "Zionist" Joe Biden, the present Vice President. Needless to say that this investigation had never came to light.

Israel is a terrorist entity without any specific borders. It is an expansionist colonizing regime. Its successive governments had disregarded all UN resolutions, broken international laws, violated all human rights, committed holocaustal-level genocides, and perpetrated war crimes against all its neighbors and against mother earth and against the environment.

Yet the Western political power elites justify Israeli terror as a self-defense, and keep transfering more devastating arms to this terrorist entity to wage more future wars and to wreck more havoc in the Arab World. They also distort facts and describe the victims of the Israeli terror, the Palestinians, as terrorists, deny them their legitimate right to bear arms for self-defense, and send their naval war machines and serveillance equipment to tighten the illegal Israeli blockade against Gaza Strip under the guise of preventing "arms smuggling", while at the same time shedding some crockodile tears and call for humanitarian aid to Gaza's Palestinians.

To the Arabs of the Middle East, Israel seems to be a military tool for the Western countries. Hatred towards these Western political regimes is the natural consequences of arming Israel. Should we keep asking "why do they hate us" any more?

* Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the "Nakba" of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the "Nakseh" of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.

By Carlos Latuff

Please phone and ask for correction!

[A FLYER about this can be downloaded at: www.IfAmericansKnew.org/download/gazacfv.pdf ]

American media are reporting violence that took place along the Gaza-Israel border on January 27th as, in the words of CNN, "the first incidents of violence since last week's Mideast cease-fire," telling the public that Palestinians broke the ceasefire. [1]

The reality, however, is that Israel had already violated the cease-fire at least 7 times, the Israeli military killing 2 Palestinian civilians and injuring at least 5, at least one of them a child:

* Israeli forces killed a Palestinian farmer in Khuza'a east of Khan Yunis on Jan 18
* Israeli forces killed a Palestinian farmer east of Jabalia on Jan 19
* Israeli naval gunboats shelled the Gaza coast line, causing damage to civilian structures on Jan 21
* Israeli troops shot and injured a child east of Gaza City on Jan 22
* Israeli gunboat fire injured 4-7 Palestinian fishermen on Jan 22
* Israeli shelling set a Palestinian house on fire on Jan 22
* Israeli tanks fired on the border town of Al Faraheen, causing damage to homes and farms on Jan 24

This list does not include two Palestinian children who were killed on January 20th by unexploded ordnance left from Israel's 22-day assault on Gaza.[2] (Additional details about the above cease-fire breaches and citations can be found in the timeline below.)

Media Contacts

Most of the media seem to have reported this wrong. You may check your local newspaper and contact it if it reported the story incorrectly.

Below are some national contacts:

Associated Press

Read the AP article: http://tinyurl.com/dllqd6

Phone: 212-621-1500 (Ask for International Desk or for Corporate Communications)
Fax: 212-621-7523
General Questions and Comments: info@ap.org

The New York Times

Read the NYT article: http://tinyurl.com/ctscwj

Phone: 212-556-1234
Fax: 212-556-3690
Letters to the Editor (for publication): letters@nytimes.com
Write to the news editors: news-tips@nytimes.com
Corrections: senioreditor@nytimes.com

Washington Post

Read the Washington Post article: http://tinyurl.com/ddgqs4

Phone: 202-334-6000
Fax: 202-334-5269
Letters to the Editor: letters@washpost.com
Ombudsman: ombudsman@washpost.com

CNN

Read CNN's article: http://tinyurl.com/cfnjzd

Phone: 404-827-1500
Fax: 404-827-1784

NPR

NPR's article: http://tinyurl.com/cquq33

Phone: 202-513-3232
Fax: 202-513-3329
E-mail: Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, Ombudsman – ombudsman@npr.org

McClatchey Newspapers

Read McClatchey's article: http://tinyurl.com/affyp2

Main Phone: 916-321-1855

For more media contacts, go to http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=111

Timeline of Cease-fire Breaches & Important Events

Sunday, Jan 18 – After a 22-day assault on Gaza in which over 1,300 Palestinians were killed and approximately 9 Israelis were killed, Israel and Hamas each declared a ceasefire. Within several hours, the first breach took place, when Israel killed a Palestinian civilian:

The UN reports: "One Palestinian farmer was killed on the morning of 18 January in Khuza'a east of Khan Yunis following the Israeli-declared cease-fire." [3]

Monday, Jan 19 – Once again the ceasefire was breached when Israel killed another Palestinian civilian. Palestinian militants did respond, but caused no damage or injuries:

The UN reports: "On 19 January, a Palestinian farmer was killed by Israeli gunfire east of Jabalia. The same day, Palestinian militants fired a number of mortars towards Israel and also shot at Israeli troops still inside the Gaza Strip. No injuries or damage were reported." [4]

Wednesday, Jan 21 – Israeli naval boats fired at the Gaza coastline, causing some damage.

IMEMC reports: "On Wednesday, the boats fired shells at the coast line, causing damage but no injuries." [5]

Thursday, Jan 22 – A Palestinian child was wounded by gunfire from Israeli troops, between 4 and 7 Palestinian civilians (fishermen) were injured when they were fired upon by Israel's navy, and a home was set fire by shells from the Israeli navy:

The UN reports: "Four Palestinians were injured on 22 January by a shell fired from an Israeli gunboat off the Gaza coast. The same day, a house was set on fire by a shell fired from an Israeli gunboat. No injuries were reported. Also on 22 January, IDF troops shot and injured a child east of Gaza City near the border." [6]

IMEMC reports: "On Thursday of last week, Israeli Navy forces opened fire at Palestinian fishermen just off the shore of Gaza City, injuring seven civilians." [7]

Saturday, Jan 24 – Israeli tanks fired on the border town of Al Faraheen, causing damage to homes and farms. Also, Aid agencies call on Israel to finally open all crossings into Gaza:

IMEMC reports: "On Saturday, the Israeli army opened fire at residents homes and farmlands located in Al Faraheen village located in the southern part of the Gaza strip. Local residents said that Israeli tanks stationed at the borders opened fire at their homes and farms; damage was reported but no injuries." [8]

Maan News reports: "A coalition of international aid agencies urged the Israeli government on Saturday to open the Gaza Strip's border to allow vital goods into the territory… The agencies, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) held a news conference on Saturday at the intensive care unit of Gaza's Ash-Shifa Hospital to point up an ongoing humanitarian crisis stemming from Israel's blockade." [9]

Sunday, Jan 25 – Israeli F-16s flew over Gaza, causing schools, government offices, and banks to close and causing Egypt to rapidly evacuate all of its personnel from the Rafah crossing in fear that an attack was imminent.

Haaretz reports: "On Sunday Israeli F-16s flew over Gaza, terrifying people who thought Israel was launching a new offensive. A number of banks, government offices and schools were closed, occupants running to their homes as the Israeli warplanes flew overhead." [10]

Maan News reports: "Egypt suddenly and rapidly evacuated its personnel from=0 Athe Rafah border crossing with Gaza on Sunday fearing a possible Israeli airstrike on the Palestinian side of the crossing, Egyptian security sources said." [11]

Violence on January 27th

What appears to have happened today is that a remote device was detonated near or under an Israeli patrol near the Kissufim crossing between Gaza and Israel. It is not clear on which side of the border the attack took place. One soldier was killed and three were injured.

(The New York Times is reporting this as "the first serious confrontations between Hamas and Israel since each declared a tentative cease-fire 10 days ago."[12] However, there is no indication that Hamas was responsible for the bomb and seems, despite all the Israeli violations, to be pushing for a cease-fire.)

The Israeli military then opened fire on the Palestinian farmland nearby, killing a civilian: a 27-year-old farmer was killed by tank fire.

Israel also closed the crossings into Gaza, denying the entire population (1.5 million) access to desperately needed shipments of food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid.

An Israeli drone fired a missile into the city of Khan Yunis, injuring a Hamas militant on a motorcycle. There are reports that 2 Palestinian children playing nearby were also injured.

It has also been reported that Israeli soldiers occupied a home near the town of Deir Al Balah.

[A FLYER about this can be downloaded at: www.IfAmericansKnew.org/download/gazacfv.pdf ]

—

1. CNN: http://tinyurl.com/c5kpnf
2. UN OCHA: http://tinyurl.com/cmp3gm (PDF)
3. UN OCHA: http://tinyurl.com/craare (PDF)
4. UN OCHA: http://tinyurl.com/cs2sbj
5. IMEMC: http://imemc.org/article/58644
6. UN OCHA: http://tinyurl.com/cmp3gm (PDF)
7. IMEMC: http://imemc.org/article/58644
8. IMEMC: http://imemc.org/article/58613
9. Maan News: http://tinyurl.com/cbzjhn
10. Haaretz: http://tinyurl.com/amcmr7
11. Maan News: http://tinyurl.com/arxsv4
12. The New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/ctscwj

[Via: www.wrmea.com]

I can't say I'm surprised by what I saw in the following videos because I know what Zionists are made of. I can only say that I was disgusted and sick to my stomach.

What you are going to see is a sample of the overwhelming majority that voted FOR the Jewish state's war crimes and supported it day after day. These warmongers form the majority of Israel too, so no wonder.

After all that they have done, after all the war crimes they have committed, they are still asking "why do they hate us?"

Well, this is why (listen carefully to the bitch in the first video, close to 58 sec):

Jewish war-crimes-dance over innocent Palestinian bodies:

And finally, a holocaust survivor protests Israeli War Crimes in Occupied Gaza:

After the successful email campaign, it's time to move to the next level: calling some of the war criminals.

Objectives of this campaign are as follows:

1. Bombard their phone/mobile/fax lines with anti-war, anti-Zionist messages. This can be in the form of calls, faxes or even sms's;
2. Waste the time of these war criminals as much as possible. Some of them are doing nothing else but jumping on the TV screens to spread lies and hatred. They justify killing Palestinian children and civilians;
3. Directly delivering to them the message that we are disgusted by what they are doing and they should stop now;
4. Show them the magnitude of support that Palestinians have after the world witnessed their war crimes in Gaza.

Let's start with war criminal, Mark Regev, International Media Adviser to the Prime Minister.

His MOBILE number is: +972-5-0620-3264 and his office number is +972-2670-5354
If you like to follow your call/sms with an email, use this one:
mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il

Second war criminal, Shlomo Dror in the Ministry of Defence.
His MOBILE number is +972-5-0629-8148, office number is +972-3697-5339, fax number is +972-2670-5602
As before, if you like to follow it up with an email, use this:
mediasar@mod.gov.il

Third war criminal is Major Liebovitz from the Israeli Navy
His MOBILE number is +972-5-781-86248
(Sorry, I could not find his email. If you have it, please share it to update this post.)

If you know or come across any mobile number* of any Israeli war criminal, please send it to (haitham.sabbah@gmail.com) so that I can update the list here. Meanwhile, you can bombard the top war criminal, Olmert and his office assistance, managers, spokesperson, etc… Please visit the following page to select the name that you like to play with and pick his/her office number and/or fax number.
http://www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/PM+Office/Contacts/

Note: To call or fax any in the above list, remove the "zero" and add +972 (Israel Int'l code) before the number. (Example: Ehud Olmert's phone number is 02-670-5555 will become +972-2-670-555, fax number is 02-670-5475 will become +972-2-670-5475)

I suggest that you put your feelings on paper either by drawing or as a letter (in any language, in fact using other than English language will keep them busier and waste more of their time, which we want) and fax it to the maximum fax numbers you find there, but phone calls are still very important if you can.

More? Yes, you can do more. Call or fax the current Knesset members. Go to the following link, select any name and you will find their phone and fax numbers. Again, to call or fax any, remove the "zero" and add +972 before the number. (Example: Benjamin Netanyahu (a.k.a. Bibi the butcher!) phone: 02-6408456 will become +972-2-6408456 and his fax number is 02-6496659 which becomes +972-2-6496659)

Knesset members:
http://www.knesset.gov.il/mk/eng/mkindex_current_eng.asp?view=0

Also Knesset Directory (add +9722 before the numbers you find here):
http://www.knesset.gov.il/description/eng/eng_directory.htm

To: The Israeli Ministry of Defense, Fax: +972-3-697-6717
To: The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fax +972-2-5303367

Last but not least, share a copy of your fax with others. Please post your fax on this flickr group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/fax-israel/

PS. Feel free to do the same with any and all pro-Israel war on Gaza. You can start with:

White House (although they are busy backing up there files, but we can only hope that Obama will get something to read and learn about on his first day in office):
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

The Congress (which justed gave Israel new green light to kill kids and women of Gaza):
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

Be creative! Search for the contacts of your government official's website and contact them. Save Gaza!

Remember, Silence is Complicity!

* Israeli mobile numbers start with the following codes:
9725 Israel-Mobile
9726 Israel-Mobile
97251 Israel-Mobile
97253 Israel-Mobile
97255 Israel-Mobile
97256 Israel-Mobile
97258 Israel-Mobile
97252 Israel-Mobile-Cellcom
97257 Israel-Mobile-Mirs
97254 Israel-Mobile-Partner
97250 Israel-Mobile-Pelephone
Source: http://www.nstelcom.com/support/codes_il.htm

====

Update: Here is a list of most terrorist Israeli officials. Feel free to bombard them with your words of condemnation and pictures of their war crimes. [Hat tip: Shadia]

Shimon Peres (president@president.gov.il); Ehud Olmert – Prime Minister (eulmert@knesset.gov.il); Ehud Barak – Deputy Prime Minister , Minister of Defense (minister@mod.gov.il); Tzipi Livni – Acting Prime Minister , Minister of Foreign Affairs (zlivni@knesset.gov.il); Abraham Dicter – Minister of Internal Security (adichter@knesset.gov.il); Ariel Atias – Minister of Communications (aatias@knesset.gov.il); Binyamin (Fouad) Ben-Eliezer Minister of National Infrastructure(binyaminb@knesset.gov.il); Eli Aflalo – Minister of Immigrant Absorption (eaflalo@knesset.gov.il); Eliyahu Yishai – Deputy Prime Minister , Minister of Industry, Trade, and Labor (eyishay@knesset.gov.il); Gideon Ezra – Minister of Environmental Protection (gezra@knesset.gov.il); Isaac Herzog – Minister of Welfare and Social Services, Minister of the Diaspora, Society, and Fight Against Antisemitism (iherzog@knesset.gov.il); Jacob Edery – Minister of the Development of the Negev and Gal); (yedri@knesset.gov.il); Meir Sheetrit – Minister of Internal Affairs (mshitrit@knesset.gov.il); Raleb Majadele – Minister of Science, Culture, and Sport (gmagadla@knesset.gov.il); Ruhama Avraham Bal);a – Minister of Tourism (ravraham@knesset.gov.il); Shalom Simhon – Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development (ssimhon@knesset.gov.il); Shaul Mofaz – Deputy Prime Minister , Minister of Transportation and Road Safety(shaulm@knesset.gov.il); Ze'ev Boim – Minister of Housing and Construction (zaevb@knesset.gov.il); Haim Ramon – Vice Prime Minister (ChaimR@knesset.gov.il); Rafi Eitan – Minister of Pensioner Affairs – (reitanhantman@knesset.gov.il); Ronnie Bar-On – Minister of Finance (rbaron@knesset.gov.il); Yacov Ben Yizri – Minister of Health (ybenyizri@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Cohen – Minister of Religious Services (izchakec@knesset.gov.il); Yuli Tamir – Minister of Education (ytamir@knesset.gov.il); Majalli Whbee – Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs (mwahaba@knesset.gov.il); Matan nai – Deputy Minister of Defense – (matanv@knesset.gov.il); Meshulam Nahari – Minister Without Portfolio (mnahari@knesset.gov.il); Benjamin Netanyahu (bnetanyahu@knesset.gov.il); Ehud Olmert – Prime Minister (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Raanan Dinur – Director General Of the Prime Minister's Office (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Ovad Yehezkel – Government Secretary (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Ya'akov Galanti – Head of Communications Division and Media Adviser to the Prime Minister (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Shalom Tourgeman – Foreign Policy Adviser for Prime Minister (MEDINI@IT.PMO.gov.il); Amnon Ben-Ami – Deputy Director General (amnon.benami@it.pmo.gov.il); Tzahi Gavrieli – Personal Assistant to the Prime Minister (TzahiG@it.pmo.gov.il); Shlomit Barnea Farago – Legal Adviser (legal@pmo.gov.il); Joseph Strauss – Accountant (J.strauss@it.pmo.gov.il);Marit Danon – Director of the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women (women@it.pmo.gov.il); Uzi Keren – Adviser to the Prime Minister (Settlement Affairs) (Uzi.Keren@it.pmo.gov.il); Hagar Biran – Advisor to the Prime Minister for Liaison with the Knesset (hagar.biran@it.pmo.gov.il); Ruti Avramovitz – Pub);c affairs Adviser to the Prime Minister (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Ofer Levy – Adviser to the prime minister for official visits and special events (PMO.HEB@it.pmo.gov.il); Yael Nachmias – Head of the Division for policy Implementation (Yael.Nachmias@it.pmo.gov.il); Gavriel Golan – Adviser to the Prime Minister for Planning and Development (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Mark Regev – International Media Adviser to the Prime Minister (Gali.Cohen@it.pmo.gov.il); Rachael Risby-Raz – Diaspora Affairs Adviser (risbyraz@it.pmo.gov.il); Gal Alon – Adviser for Strategic Development (gal.alon@it.pmo.gov.il); Julia Braya – Adviser to the Prime Minister for the Russian Languge Media (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Edna Halbani – Director of International Visits – (edna@it.pmo.gov.il); Vered Swid – Adviser to the Prime Minister (Social Affairs) (Vered.Swid@it.pmo.gov.il); Avi Widerman – Adviser to the Prime Minister (aviw@it.pmo.gov.il); David Baker – Senior Foreign Press Coordinator (david.baker@it.pmo.gov.il); Yehiel Nizri – Director of the Prime Minister's Bureau (Central Region) (yehiel_nizri@walla.co.); Avigdor Liberman (aliberman@knesset.gov.il); Ami Ayalon (aaylon@knesset.gov.il); Amir Peretz (aperetz@knesset.gov.il); Abraham Hirchson(ahirshson@knesset.gov.il); Alex M);ler (am);ler@knesset.gov.il); Amira Dotan (adotan@knesset.gov.il); Amnon Cohen (amncohen@knesset.gov.il); Arieh Eldad (aeldad@knesset.gov.il); Avishay Braverman(abraverman@knesset.gov.il); Avraham Michaeli(amichaeli@knesset.gov.il); Avraham Ravitz(aravitz@knesset.gov.il); Avshalom V);an(av);an@knesset.gov.il); Benyamin Elon(belon@knesset.gov.il); Chaim Amsellem(eamsalem@knesset.gov.il); Chaim Oron(horon@knesset.gov.il); Colette Avital(avitalk@knesset.gov.il); Dalia Itzik(yor@knesset.gov.il); David Azoulay(dazulay@knesset.gov.il); David Rotem(drotem@knesset.gov.il); David Tal(davidt@knesset.gov.il); Dov Khenin(dhanin@knesset.gov.il); Effie Eitam(efye@knesset.gov.il); Eitan Cabel(ecabel@knesset.gov.il); Elhanan Glazer(eglazer@knesset.gov.il); Eliahu Gabbay(egabai@knesset.gov.il); Esterina Tartman(etertman@knesset.gov.il); Gideon Sa'ar(gsaar@knesset.gov.il); ad Erdan(gerdan@knesset.gov.il); Haim Katz(hkatz@knesset.gov.il); Isaac Ben-Israel(itzik@knesset.gov.il); srael Hasson(ahason@knesset.gov.il); Itshac Galantee(ygalanti@knesset.gov.il); Izhak Ziv(yziv@knesset.gov.il); Lia Shemtov(lshemtov@knesset.gov.il); Limor Livnat(llivnat@knesset.gov.il); Marina Solodkin(msolodkin@knesset.gov.il); Mazor Bahyna(mazorb@knesset.gov.il); Meir Porush(mporush@knesset.gov.il); Menahem Ben-Sasson(mbensason@knesset.gov.il); Michael Eitan(meitan@knesset.gov.il); Michael Melchior(melchiorm@knesset.gov.il); Moshe Kahlon(mcachlon@knesset.gov.il); Moshe Gafni(mgafni@knesset.gov.il); Moshe Sharoni(msharoni@knesset.gov.il); Nissan Slomiansky(nslomianski@knesset.gov.il); Nissim Zeev(nzeev@knesset.gov.il); Ophir Pines-Paz(pinespaz@knesset.gov.il); Otniel Schneller(oschneller@knesset.gov.il); Ran Cohen(rancohen@knesset.gov.il); Reuven Rivlin(rrivlin@knesset.gov.il); Robert );atov(r);atov@knesset.gov.il); Ronit Tirosh(rtirosh@knesset.gov.il); Sara Marom Shalev(smarom@knesset.gov.il); Shachiv Shnaan(shanans@knesset.gov.il); Shai Hermesh (shermesh@knesset.gov.il); Shelly Yacimovich (syechimovich@knesset.gov.il); Shlomo (Neguse) Molla (smolla@knesset.gov.il); Shmuel Halpert (shmuelh@knesset.gov.il); van Shalom (sshalom@knesset.gov.il);Sofa Landver (slandver@knesset.gov.il); Stas Misezhnikov (smiseznikov@knesset.gov.il); Tzachi Hanegbi (zhanegbi@knesset.gov.il); Tzvia Greenfield (tzviag@knesset.gov.il); Uri Maklev (umaklev@knesset.gov.il); Uri Yehuda Ariel (uria@knesset.gov.il); Yakov Litzman (ylitzman@knesset.gov.il); Yakov Margi (ymargi@knesset.gov.il); Yisrael Katz (yiskatz@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Aharonovitch (iaharon@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Levy (ithakl@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Vaknin (yvaknin@knesset.gov.il); Yoel Hasson (yhasson@knesset.gov.il); Yohanan Plesner (yohananplesner@knesset.gov.il); Yoram Marciano (ymarziano@knesset.gov.il); Yosef Shagal (yshagal@knesset.gov.il); Yuli Yoel Edelstein (yedelstein@knesset.gov.il); Yuval Steinitz (ysteinitz@knesset.gov.il); Zahava Gal-On (zgalon@knesset.gov.il); Zeev Elkin
(Zelkin@knesset.gov.il); Zevulun Orlev (zorlev@knesset.gov.il);Zvi Hendel (zhendel@knesset.gov.il)

After a long search for a copy of the leaflet, I finally found it on Ma'an News (a Palestinian news agency). The leaflet gave me an idea for action that might help our people in Gaza a little. Let's read this leaflet first then follow the action.

The leaflet reads:

To the residents of the Gaza Strip,

Take responsibility for your fate!

If you wish to provide help and assistance to your people in the sector, call the number below to provide us with the needed information. The projectile launchers and the terrorist elements pose a threat to you and your families.

The power to stop the massacre is in your hands.
Don't hesitate!

We will be glad to receive any information you have and it is not necessary to give us your personal information.

Your anonymity is guaranteed.

Call us at the following number:
02-5839749

Or you can e-mail us at: helpgaza2008@gmail.com to provide us with any information on the terrorist factions.

Note: To protect your safety, we ask you to be secretive when you call us.

Head of the Israeli Defense Forces

It is clear that these Israeli terrorist pamphlets are marketing the blind insane destruction services of Israel to anyone who is WILLING to advise them of a target. In other words, to Spy for Israel!

These are the desperate and bankrupt measures (referring to 'Targets Bank' the IOF is supposed to attack) that this terrorist gang has reached. Note that they themselves understand that they engage in massacres, and that their actions are premeditated. They also offer no guarantees of safeguarding the informants.

As you notice in the pamphlet, they ask Gazans to call 02-583-9749, therefore for those outside of Palestine that's +972-2-583-9749. Also they left an email to contact them: helpgaza2008@gmail.com

So, what can be done? Simply, I encourage everyone to call above mentioned number (from your land line, mobile phone, Skype, etc.) and say in Hebrew "Atem Poshim, tafsiku laharog palestinayim, Palestien Meshuchreret, Aza meshuchreret."

The above is an oral Hebrew translation of: "You are Criminals. Stop Killing Palestinians. Free Palestine. Free Gaza."

Alternatively, use the above mentioned email (for your privacy, read below) and attach one of the following photos or album link to show them the result of their war crimes in Gaza.

Photos (click to enlarge):

Photo album:

Link: http://tinyurl.com/9sta9r

Your privacy:

For privacy reasons, we don't want the IOF to record your email, IP address, ISP, country, etc and track you down and maybe hack your PC or something worse. Therefore, don't use your original email account to contact them. To overcome this, you can send them ANONYMOUS emails. This way they can't track you or find any info about the sender (you).

There are two ways to send an anonymous email.

(1) The easy way:

All you need to do is go to the following address and register for a new email account. I suggest you create a completely random pseudonym (username). It will take you only 5 sec. to register and start sending emails (you don't have to give any personal info and they will not record any info about you, e.g. IP address etc. More: http://tinyurl.com/6wxmxk )

Go here to register and send your email:
http://tinyurl.com/6wxmxk

(2) The hard way:

Create and use your own anonymous email by using reliable remailers and GnuPG. This method is for high-tech wizards who like to do it the hard way:
Here is a step-by-step tutorial:
http://tinyurl.com/f6h2l

Update 1:
A clearer version of the same leaflet found on Facebook (Hat tip: Omar):

Update 2: As indicated by Shaltaf here, the anonymous email service won't allow you to attach a file unless you upgrade to the paid version. Fair enough! You still can paste the link of the album mentioned above (and few strong words of your liking).

Update 3: Here is a list of most terrorist Israeli officials. Feel free to bombard them with your words of condemnation and pictures of their war crimes. [Hat tip: Shadia]

Shimon Peres (president@president.gov.il); Ehud Olmert – Prime Minister (eulmert@knesset.gov.il); Ehud Barak – Deputy Prime Minister , Minister of Defense (minister@mod.gov.il); Tzipi Livni – Acting Prime Minister , Minister of Foreign Affairs (zlivni@knesset.gov.il); Abraham Dicter – Minister of Internal Security (adichter@knesset.gov.il); Ariel Atias – Minister of Communications (aatias@knesset.gov.il); Binyamin (Fouad) Ben-Eliezer Minister of National Infrastructure(binyaminb@knesset.gov.il); Eli Aflalo – Minister of Immigrant Absorption (eaflalo@knesset.gov.il); Eliyahu Yishai – Deputy Prime Minister , Minister of Industry, Trade, and Labor (eyishay@knesset.gov.il); Gideon Ezra – Minister of Environmental Protection (gezra@knesset.gov.il); Isaac Herzog – Minister of Welfare and Social Services, Minister of the Diaspora, Society, and Fight Against Antisemitism (iherzog@knesset.gov.il); Jacob Edery – Minister of the Development of the Negev and Gal); (yedri@knesset.gov.il); Meir Sheetrit – Minister of Internal Affairs (mshitrit@knesset.gov.il); Raleb Majadele – Minister of Science, Culture, and Sport (gmagadla@knesset.gov.il); Ruhama Avraham Bal);a – Minister of Tourism (ravraham@knesset.gov.il); Shalom Simhon – Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development (ssimhon@knesset.gov.il); Shaul Mofaz – Deputy Prime Minister , Minister of Transportation and Road Safety(shaulm@knesset.gov.il); Ze'ev Boim – Minister of Housing and Construction (zaevb@knesset.gov.il); Haim Ramon – Vice Prime Minister (ChaimR@knesset.gov.il); Rafi Eitan – Minister of Pensioner Affairs – (reitanhantman@knesset.gov.il); Ronnie Bar-On – Minister of Finance (rbaron@knesset.gov.il); Yacov Ben Yizri – Minister of Health (ybenyizri@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Cohen – Minister of Religious Services (izchakec@knesset.gov.il); Yuli Tamir – Minister of Education (ytamir@knesset.gov.il); Majalli Whbee – Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs (mwahaba@knesset.gov.il); Matan nai – Deputy Minister of Defense – (matanv@knesset.gov.il); Meshulam Nahari – Minister Without Portfolio (mnahari@knesset.gov.il); Benjamin Netanyahu (bnetanyahu@knesset.gov.il); Ehud Olmert – Prime Minister (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Raanan Dinur – Director General Of the Prime Minister's Office (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Ovad Yehezkel – Government Secretary (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Ya'akov Galanti – Head of Communications Division and Media Adviser to the Prime Minister (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Shalom Tourgeman – Foreign Policy Adviser for Prime Minister (MEDINI@IT.PMO.gov.il); Amnon Ben-Ami – Deputy Director General (amnon.benami@it.pmo.gov.il); Tzahi Gavrieli – Personal Assistant to the Prime Minister (TzahiG@it.pmo.gov.il); Shlomit Barnea Farago – Legal Adviser (legal@pmo.gov.il); Joseph Strauss – Accountant (J.strauss@it.pmo.gov.il);Marit Danon – Director of the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women (women@it.pmo.gov.il); Uzi Keren – Adviser to the Prime Minister (Settlement Affairs) (Uzi.Keren@it.pmo.gov.il); Hagar Biran – Advisor to the Prime Minister for Liaison with the Knesset (hagar.biran@it.pmo.gov.il); Ruti Avramovitz – Pub);c affairs Adviser to the Prime Minister (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Ofer Levy – Adviser to the prime minister for official visits and special events (PMO.HEB@it.pmo.gov.il); Yael Nachmias – Head of the Division for policy Implementation (Yael.Nachmias@it.pmo.gov.il); Gavriel Golan – Adviser to the Prime Minister for Planning and Development (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Mark Regev – International Media Adviser to the Prime Minister (Gali.Cohen@it.pmo.gov.il); Rachael Risby-Raz – Diaspora Affairs Adviser (risbyraz@it.pmo.gov.il); Gal Alon – Adviser for Strategic Development (gal.alon@it.pmo.gov.il); Julia Braya – Adviser to the Prime Minister for the Russian Languge Media (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il); Edna Halbani – Director of International Visits – (edna@it.pmo.gov.il); Vered Swid – Adviser to the Prime Minister (Social Affairs) (Vered.Swid@it.pmo.gov.il); Avi Widerman – Adviser to the Prime Minister (aviw@it.pmo.gov.il); David Baker – Senior Foreign Press Coordinator (david.baker@it.pmo.gov.il); Yehiel Nizri – Director of the Prime Minister's Bureau (Central Region) (yehiel_nizri@walla.co.); Avigdor Liberman (aliberman@knesset.gov.il); Ami Ayalon (aaylon@knesset.gov.il); Amir Peretz (aperetz@knesset.gov.il); Abraham Hirchson(ahirshson@knesset.gov.il); Alex M);ler (am);ler@knesset.gov.il); Amira Dotan (adotan@knesset.gov.il); Amnon Cohen (amncohen@knesset.gov.il); Arieh Eldad (aeldad@knesset.gov.il); Avishay Braverman(abraverman@knesset.gov.il); Avraham Michaeli(amichaeli@knesset.gov.il); Avraham Ravitz(aravitz@knesset.gov.il); Avshalom V);an(av);an@knesset.gov.il); Benyamin Elon(belon@knesset.gov.il); Chaim Amsellem(eamsalem@knesset.gov.il); Chaim Oron(horon@knesset.gov.il); Colette Avital(avitalk@knesset.gov.il); Dalia Itzik(yor@knesset.gov.il); David Azoulay(dazulay@knesset.gov.il); David Rotem(drotem@knesset.gov.il); David Tal(davidt@knesset.gov.il); Dov Khenin(dhanin@knesset.gov.il); Effie Eitam(efye@knesset.gov.il); Eitan Cabel(ecabel@knesset.gov.il); Elhanan Glazer(eglazer@knesset.gov.il); Eliahu Gabbay(egabai@knesset.gov.il); Esterina Tartman(etertman@knesset.gov.il); Gideon Sa'ar(gsaar@knesset.gov.il); ad Erdan(gerdan@knesset.gov.il); Haim Katz(hkatz@knesset.gov.il); Isaac Ben-Israel(itzik@knesset.gov.il); srael Hasson(ahason@knesset.gov.il); Itshac Galantee(ygalanti@knesset.gov.il); Izhak Ziv(yziv@knesset.gov.il); Lia Shemtov(lshemtov@knesset.gov.il); Limor Livnat(llivnat@knesset.gov.il); Marina Solodkin(msolodkin@knesset.gov.il); Mazor Bahyna(mazorb@knesset.gov.il); Meir Porush(mporush@knesset.gov.il); Menahem Ben-Sasson(mbensason@knesset.gov.il); Michael Eitan(meitan@knesset.gov.il); Michael Melchior(melchiorm@knesset.gov.il); Moshe Kahlon(mcachlon@knesset.gov.il); Moshe Gafni(mgafni@knesset.gov.il); Moshe Sharoni(msharoni@knesset.gov.il); Nissan Slomiansky(nslomianski@knesset.gov.il); Nissim Zeev(nzeev@knesset.gov.il); Ophir Pines-Paz(pinespaz@knesset.gov.il); Otniel Schneller(oschneller@knesset.gov.il); Ran Cohen(rancohen@knesset.gov.il); Reuven Rivlin(rrivlin@knesset.gov.il); Robert );atov(r);atov@knesset.gov.il); Ronit Tirosh(rtirosh@knesset.gov.il); Sara Marom Shalev(smarom@knesset.gov.il); Shachiv Shnaan(shanans@knesset.gov.il); Shai Hermesh (shermesh@knesset.gov.il); Shelly Yacimovich (syechimovich@knesset.gov.il); Shlomo (Neguse) Molla (smolla@knesset.gov.il); Shmuel Halpert (shmuelh@knesset.gov.il); van Shalom (sshalom@knesset.gov.il);Sofa Landver (slandver@knesset.gov.il); Stas Misezhnikov (smiseznikov@knesset.gov.il); Tzachi Hanegbi (zhanegbi@knesset.gov.il); Tzvia Greenfield (tzviag@knesset.gov.il); Uri Maklev (umaklev@knesset.gov.il); Uri Yehuda Ariel (uria@knesset.gov.il); Yakov Litzman (ylitzman@knesset.gov.il); Yakov Margi (ymargi@knesset.gov.il); Yisrael Katz (yiskatz@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Aharonovitch (iaharon@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Levy (ithakl@knesset.gov.il); Yitzhak Vaknin (yvaknin@knesset.gov.il); Yoel Hasson (yhasson@knesset.gov.il); Yohanan Plesner (yohananplesner@knesset.gov.il); Yoram Marciano (ymarziano@knesset.gov.il); Yosef Shagal (yshagal@knesset.gov.il); Yuli Yoel Edelstein (yedelstein@knesset.gov.il); Yuval Steinitz (ysteinitz@knesset.gov.il); Zahava Gal-On (zgalon@knesset.gov.il); Zeev Elkin
(Zelkin@knesset.gov.il); Zevulun Orlev (zorlev@knesset.gov.il);Zvi Hendel (zhendel@knesset.gov.il)