Of the 6 items below, the first is brief and self-explanatory. Ireland calls on Israel to free the activists who took part in the recent flotilla to Gaza .
Apart from that, both yesterday and today I kept an eye out for articles on the Russell Tribunal when scanning the online media. The findings were slim. Of the 13 or so newspapers that I checked today, almost everyone of them had news of Israel ’s High Court finding Israel ’s former president guilty of rape. But only 1—the Cape Times —had an editorial on the Tribunal. Obviously there are articles on the subject, many from before the Tribunal. Terry has sent 4 links which I include with item 2, and a Google search for links on the Tribunal brings up more. All the articles are either for or against the Tribunal, but few are from the commercial press. Item 2 is one that is, though frankly speaking I don’t know what to make of it, as I don’t understand what it applies “never again” to? The Holocaust? The Nakba? Or both?
Item 3 reports that a 94 year old Holocaust survivor made a plea to President Zuma to protect one of the participants who gave evidence at the Tribunal, Haneen Zoabi , a Palestinian citizen of Israel , who happens also to be a Member of the Knesset.
In item 4 Gideon Levy makes the same arguments as I did yesterday in a family discussion about Iran . That is to say, why Iran ? After all, Israel has nuclear weapons, the United States , Russia , Pakistan , North Korea also do. Does anyone make a fuss about their weapons of mass destruction? Did anyone except Human Rights groups shout at Israel when it used phosphorus on Palestinian citizens? Not that I approve or want nuclear weapons, or any weapons for that matter. But why single out Iran ? Could it be that it, like Iraq , has oil?
Item 5, “hacking Palestine : a digital occupation,” discusses a subject seldom dealt with—how Israel controls Palestinian communication systems. Long but worth reading.
In item 6, ‘Today in Palestine ,’ as usual, you should try to run through as many of the summaries as possible. Additionally, there are a few pieces worth reading the whole—particularly these:
Check out the Political Detainees section, especially the report on child detainees.
In the Solidarity/Activism?BDS section see ‘Why is an Israeli soldier worth more than a Palestinian child.’
In the Gaza section all the reports
The more of the reports in ‘Today in Palestine ’ that you read, the better informed you will be.
Ireland is urging Israel to quickly release international activists who were captured while attempting to breach Israel ‘s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Israel ‘s Navy intercepted two boats bound for Gaza on Friday. Of the 27 people on board, 19 remained in Israeli custody Thursday. Israeli officials said Thursday that the activists refused to sign waivers that would have allowed them to leave sooner, and they are being deported on available flights. (AP)
The second day of the Russell Tribunal held at the District Six Museum . Photo: Neil Baynes
IT WAS always going to be a foregone conclusion that the Russell Tribunal on Palestine , which completed its work in Cape Town yesterday, would make the findings it did. This includes the finding that “ Israel subjects the Palestinian people to an institutionalised regime of domination amounting to apartheid as defined under international law”.
The very existence of the tribunal, and the fact of its sitting in Cape Town , evoked cries of outrage from the Zionist lobby and from supporters of Israel in advance of this weekend’s meeting. No doubt the findings, carried elsewhere in this newspaper today, will evoke similar outrage.
That is the right of those who oppose the existence, and the legitimacy, of the Russell Tribunal.
Equally, it is the right of the Russell Tribunal, and the eminent group of public intellectuals and personalities who compose the panel, to find as they did. As the tribunal itself points out in its summary of findings, “The tribunal has no legal status; it operates as a court of the people.”
It also points out that “the Israeli government was invited to present its case before the tribunal but chose not to exercise this right and provided no answer to correspondence from the Russell Tribunal on Palestine ”.
Abstention, and ignoring the tribunal, is equally the right of the Israeli government.
But turning the tribunal into an object of scorn and hatred, as has been done by some of its more vociferous critics, is to exhibit an intolerance and a lack of respect for intellectual inquiry that is out of step with the great traditions of Jewish scholarship. Whatever one may think of the tribunal itself, and of those who comprise its membership, one cannot deny it the right to examine one of the great international moral issues – and great tragedies – of our time, the intertwined narratives of Israel and Palestine .
As Moira Levy points out on our facing page today, the Israel-Palestine debate should not be about who has committed the worst atrocities, or who has done more harm, or who is more to blame for the conflict, or who has killed more civilians. It should instead be about saying “never again”, wherever, and whenever, it needs saying.
And that includes Israel and Palestine .
From: Google Alerts [mailto:googlealerts-noreply@google.com] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 2:37 PM To: ecaar@icon.co.za
Subject: Google Alert – Russell Tribunal on Palestine , Cape Town —A search on Google today turned up numerous commentaries on the Tribunal. Below, thanks to Terry, are several links to articles on the subject
Kangaroos in South Africa
Jerusalem Post
The State of Israel has been put on trial this week in Cape Town for supposed Apartheid crimes against the Palestinians by the “judicial” (and I use that term loosely) farce known as the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. The Russell Tribunal forms part of …
See all stories on this topic »
‘Tribunal’ attacks Israel
Jewish Chronicle
Delivering the findings of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine , held in Cape Town last weekend, the UK barrister said: “MK Haneen Zoabi has been categorised as a ‘threat to security’. They want to withdraw her citizenship. Tell me that’s anything but …
See all stories on this topic »
The Russel Tribunal on Palestine – Cape Town session …
The Russel Tribunal on Palestine – Cape Town sessionSUMMARY OF FINDINGS , 7 NOVEMBER 2011’May this tribunal prevent the crime of silence’Bertrand …
A 94-year-old survivor of Hitler’s death camps has made an impassioned plea to President Jacob Zuma to protect an Israeli MP from being stripped of her citizenship for testifying at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine .
Death camps survivor and Russel Tribunal jurist Stephane Hessel addresses a press conference yesterday after delivering a letter to President Jacob Zuma appealing for protection for an Israeli MP who testified at the tribunal in Cape Town yesterday
” Any Israeli citizen who talks about rights is normally targeted”
After sitting in Cape Town at the weekend, where it heard evidence from a range of witnesses, the tribunal declared that Israel was guilty of practising apartheid and called for it to be isolated.
The finding sparked fury from the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and SA Zionist Federation, which denounced it as “a vehicle for anti-Israel propaganda”.
Yesterday, Stephane Hessel, who survived the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp and later became part of the team that wrote the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, delivered a letter at Zuma’s home in Cape Town asking him to protect Haneen Zoabi , an MP for Israel’s Balad party.
This came after another Israeli MP, Otniel Schneller of the conservative Kadima party, reportedly asked her country’s parliament’s ethics committee to strip Zoabi of her citizenship after she said the Israeli state was “racist”.
Hessel and his fellow jurists, including former cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils, acclaimed author Alice Walker and Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire, told Zuma they were concerned other Israelis and Palestinians who testified at the tribunal would also be persecuted. They want Zuma to get an assurance from the Israeli government that all witnesses will be given safe passage home.
Zoabi told The Times: “Any Israeli citizen who talks about full national and civic rights for the Palestinians is normally targeted. It is more of a political persecution,” she said.
Zuma’s spokesman, Mac Maharaj, referred inquiries to the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, whose spokesman, Clayson Monyela, did not respond to questions.
After declaring at a press conference in Cape Town yesterday that Israel was guilty of practising apartheid, the tribunal called on world governments to institute sanctions against it and break off diplomatic ties.
Apartheid is defined under international law as a situation in which two distinct racial groups can be identified and inhumane acts committed against the subordinate group with state backing, according to the tribunal.
Jurist and veteran British lawyer Michael Mansfield said Palestinian territories consisted of ”a series of separate reserves with the two groups [Palestinian and Israeli] segregated. He added that Israeli expert witnesses had said this policy was even called hafrada, Hebrew for “separation”.
“There are two entirely separate legal systems. Palestinians are subjected to military law, which falls far short of … due process and Israelis living in settlements [inside Palestine ] are subjected to civil law,” said Mansfield .
” Israel subjects the Palestinian people to an institutionalised regime of domination amounting to apartheid as defined under international law.”
But South African Jewish Board of Deputies chairman Mary Kluk said the tribunal was staged to “depict Israel in the most damning light possible”, and that it had “confirmed predictions that it would be no more than an unbalanced vehicle for anti-Israel propaganda thinly disguised as a quasi-judicial investigation”.
A small group of the board’s supporters protested outside the press conference, some dressed as kangaroos.
Kasrils slammed them, saying that a kangaroo court was a situation in which a helpless individual was dragged into a short trial before being sent “to the gallows”.
The tribunal, he said, was only passing moral judgment and had no power to punish Israel .
========================================
4. Haaretz
Thursday, November 10, 2011
What Israel can learn from Iran
Like Israel , Iran will apparently not heed the words of the world. But does Israel want in any way to resemble Iran ?
Iran will apparently have an atom bomb, and that is very bad news. It is a country that sows evil. There is no need to add words about its dreadful threats or its dark regime – the Israeli media does so more than enough.
At the same time, other questions are not being raised – questions about the double standards of the West and of Israel . The nations of the West know how to discriminate between countries. They shut their eyes to certain nuclear countries, some of them dangerous, while making a tremendous fuss about how Iran is arming itself. For its part, Israel is turning to the international community for help in fighting the Iranian nuclearization but rudely ignores the decisions of that same community whose help it is desperately seeking now. In both cases, this is hypocrisy. The world lives in peace with nuclear arms as long as they are in the hands of the great powers. It’s okay that America has nuclear weapons even though it is the only country that has ever used them (in monstrous fashion ). It is even okay that Russia and China have nuclear weapons – who can stop them? It is also doubtful whether the West would go wild if other members of its club, or its proteges, equip themselves with the bomb. After all, these countries are members of the family of cultured nations, and so they are allowed. In other words – discrimination.
There are countries that have permission and others for whom it is prohibited. Some of the enlightened countries have already sent threats in the past, either explicit or implicit, that they are likely to use their nuclear power under certain circumstances. It was in enlightened Europe that that terrible war took place.
The nuclear powers also ignore the fourth chapter of the treaty for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons that calls for dismantling them. They are permitted to ignore it. The world lives in peace too with the fact that 189 countries have indeed signed the treaty but that there are four, including Israel , that have not. The world has learned to live with the North Korean and Pakistani bombs even though this is a danger that is no smaller than that which Iran poses. True, Iran is threatening Israel and the United States , but in Pakistan too the bomb could fall into terrible hands, and the North Korean regime could also use the doomsday weapon if it were to feel threatened. The world learned to live with that, after its leaders divided the countries on the globe into bad ones and good ones, and in particular into those that have permission and those that do not. There division is quite arbitrary.
Israel , which has not signed the treaty, is in the same company as North Korea , Pakistan and India – that is, very dubious company. No one asks why, no one asks for what reason, not in Israel and not in the rest of the world.
According to the assessments of the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are another 40 countries at present that are capable of developing nuclear weapons of their own. The fact that the world acts with such hypocrisy could be one of the motives and impetuses for them to do so and to join in the crazy arms race.
There is a great deal of hypocrisy in Israel ‘s attitude toward the world. All of a sudden, the international community is a factor not only to be taken into account but even to turn to for help. All of a sudden, there is an international organization whose word we trust and whom we want to enlist. The UN is “Um-Shmum” [a derisive term coined by the first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion] and UNESCO is anti-Semitic, and only the International Atomic Energy Agency’s word can be trusted.
Perhaps now that Iran is threatening us, Israel will begin to understand the importance and strength of the international community. Perhaps thanks to Iran , it will finally sink in that it is impossible to disregard the world all of the time, again and again, and only in times of distress to call on it to help. Perhaps thanks to Iran we shall understand that it is impossible forever to ignore the positions of most of the countries of the world and to remain isolated and despised in this community of nations forever.
In recent years the world has said definitive things about Israel ‘s steps, in the name of a sweeping and very solid majority. Israel did not take heed. After all, it is not important what the world says; it is important what Israel does. But now, suddenly, the world is important to Israel .
Like Israel , Iran will apparently not heed the words of the world. But does Israel want in any way to resemble Iran ?
Israel controls all Palestine ‘s digital infrastructure, limiting the use of phones, mobiles and internet at any time.
Israel has strategically located connecting points for landlines, mobiles and internet outside Palestinian territories forcing all trafic flowing from and to Palestine to be routed through Israeli hubs [EPA]
In the aftermath of the near-total shutdown of the internet and telephone network in the West Bank and Gaza Strip last week, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is attempting to figure out how, why and by whom Palestine was hacked. Whether the PA ever comes to a conclusive finding is arguable, even if it manages to mobilise the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to conduct an investigation. The Palestinian Minister of Communications has been hinting that a state may be behind the concerted attack – by which he means Israel .
No matter who the attack was waged by, that the Palestinian infrastructure is hacked into is indeed the responsibility of the Israeli regime, for it is with the latter that ultimate power and control over Palestinian telecommunications actually lies. In fact, the shutdown highlights the continued precariousness of Palestinian telecommunications (landlines, cellular, and internet services), and the regime of digital occupation that Palestinians live under.
The current Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure is a result of the asymmetrical power relationship between the PA and Israel , as well as the constraints and failures of the Oslo Accords. Much the same way in which sovereignty afforded to the PA over internal political and civilian issues has been a masquerade, so too is sovereignty over telecommunications a facade. Consider for example that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (as others before him) stresses that any future Palestinian state will not have control over its electro-magnetic field. If the future vision of Palestine is one without sovereignty over telecommunications, the present condition is one that ascertains such an outcome.
A much less publicised event than this latest cyber attack was the interruption of international landline, mobile phone and internet connection in the Gaza Strip this past August which occurred when an Israeli military bulldozer digging near the Nahal Oz checkpoint severed one of the fibre-optic lines connecting Gaza to the rest of the world. The ability to shutdown telecommunications whether by dictatorial regimes – as we witnessed in Egypt in January 2011 – or occupying regimes, is incumbent on an infrastructure being managed and controlled in particular ways. In other words, the establishment, building, and ownership of a communications infrastructure is in and of itself a deeply political decision.
Controlling copper
The Palestinian-Israeli technological relationship, like their political and economic relationship, has largely been one of Israeli control and restrictions and Palestinian dependence. After 1967, the Israeli regime owned, managed, controlled and maintained telecommunications systems in the occupied territories and imposed strict legal and military restrictions on infrastructure and use. Despite the fact that Palestinians paid income, value-added, and other taxes to the Israeli government, the state telecommunications provider, Bezeq, was neither quick nor efficient in servicing Palestinian areas and users. Whatever existed of a telecommunications infrastructure prior to Israeli occupation was rarely maintained or upgraded, and what was built in Palestinian areas was done in a manner that would render any future Palestinian network dependent on Israel ‘s. For example, all switching locations for telecommunications traffic were established outside areas that might eventually be handed over to Palestinian control. This meant that telephone calls made between Gaza City and Rafah would be routed through Ashqelon , calls between Nablus and Jenin through Afula. All international phone calls would similarly be routed through Israel .
It would not be until the second round of the Oslo Accords signed in 1995, that Palestinians were promised direct domestic and international telephone and internet access. But, crucially, while the Accords stated that the Palestinian side had the right to build and operate a separate and independent telecommunications system, the agreements also set the conditions within which an independent system would be rendered impossible. Palestinians could adopt their own standards and import certain equipment only when the Palestinian network would be fully independent from Israel ‘s. This would become a catch-22. Until today, the Palestinian network is not independent. Until today – despite the ‘death’ of Oslo – Israeli legitimises the limitations it imposes as abiding by the Accords and in the process, keeps the Palestinian network dependent.
Israel handed over responsibility for the telecommunications infrastructure in the Territories to the PA in 1995. The PA awarded Paltel ( the Palestine Telecommunications Company) a licence to build, operate and own landlines, a GSM cellular network, data communications, paging services and public phones. The reliance on Israel for most domestic connections and all international connections did not however end with the advent of Paltel. Nor would many other aspects of Palestinian telecommunications ever come under the full control of Paltel or the PA.
Strategic allocation
Israel continues to determine much that shapes Palestinian telecommunications, from the allocation of frequencies to where infrastructure can be built, from how much bandwidth is allocated for internet use to what kind of infrastructure equipment can be imported and installed. Despite the advent of Palestinian telecommunications companies (Paltel’s cellular subsidiary Jawwal, its internet subsidiary Hadara, and as of 2009 a second cellular provider in the West Bank, Wataniya), local landline calls within the Gaza Strip are still routed through Israel ; many local calls within the West Bank equally so. International calls in or out of the Palestinian Territories on land or cellular networks are switched in Israel – the international dialling code awarded to Palestine by the ITU remains mostly symbolic. The majority of Palestinian internet traffic is routed through switches outside the Territories. Even on the ubiquitous cellular phones, calls must touch the Israeli backbone. Paltel, Jawwal, Hadara and Wataniya rely on Israeli permissions for the placement, number and strength of routers and exchanges; the range of their signals and the equipment they can use is limited by Israeli restrictions; the allocation of their bandwidth is decided by the Israeli Ministry of Communication – not the Palestinian one.
Landline, cellular telephony and internet infrastructures are forced to be segregated from yet dependent on Israeli networks. While each technology requires different mechanisms to operate, the entire underlying structure of Palestinian telecommunications is occupied.
In the realm of the internet (which parallels landline infrastructure as opposed to cellular telephony), it is the Israeli authorities that determine how much total bandwidth Hadara can have. Similarly, it is Israeli providers who sell bandwidth capacity to Hadara, and do so at substantially higher rates than to ISPs ( internet service providers) within Israel . For Palestinians then, it is invariably slower and more expensive to surf the internet than it is for an Israeli. The combination of higher costs, slower speeds and limitations imposed on technologies results in a bondage of bandwidth. In the Gaza Strip for example, Hadara is still waiting for permission for an internet trunk-switch to allow internet traffic to circumvent Israel . Internet networks are continually ‘shutdown’ for various reasons, whether because of Hadara’s failure or delay in paying its Israeli providers, for Israeli-defined ‘security’ issues, or a supposedly inadvertent manoeuvre by a military bulldozer. But the entirety of the telecommunications infrastructure is open to Israeli (state and military-sanctioned) ‘hacking’.
Signals are jammed and hacked into by the IDF. The most notorious example was during the 2008-09 war on Gaza , when the Israeli military sent hundreds of thousands of text messages and voice mails to cellular and landline users in the Strip warning of impending bombings. But these practices have occurred in the West Bank as well, and during both moments of heightened violence as well as on an everyday basis.
It is not just the end-user but also the telecommunications infrastructures themselves that are subject to the occupation’s logic. Although former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan stated that Israel would hand over the land-line infrastructure in Palestinian areas intact, the IDF severed the main north-south connection in the Strip and went so far as to bury parts of that line under the rubble of the Kfar Darom settlement. In some cases, the destruction has been widespread and debilitating, most obviously during the 2008-09 assault on Gaza , when damage to Paltel’s network in Gaza was estimated at more than US 10m. Both the purposeful destruction of equipment and the prevention of its importation and installation limit the development of high-tech infrastructure.
Digital occupation
The mechanisms of digital occupation are exercised through the disruption of everyday life, not simply during exceptional moments of violence. On any “normal” day, a Palestinian’s phone call is routed through Israel , his signals are jammed whenever a drone passes overhead (sometimes as often as every 15 minutes), his phone service may be shut down or tapped, and his internet connection surveilled. And for these interruptions the Palestinian user must pay nearly twice as much as his Israeli counterpart. These kinds of limitations are combined with “legal” and military measures that further contain Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure. These include confiscating and forbidding the import of equipment, illegal competition by Israeli providers (most notoriously in the realm of cellular telephony), limited bandwidth, limitations on what equipment can be installed where, delay of approvals, and purposeful destruction of machinery and infrastructure.
All of these limitations reinforce territorial barriers on high-tech flows, inhibit the development of Palestinian infrastructure, and perpetuate Palestinians’ economic dependence and de-development (and hence the uneven economic relationship). They also, in a word, keep Palestinian networks open to hacking.
Paltel has become one of the largest, most successful Palestinian corporations – through practices that have been both criticised and hailed as monopolistic and neo-liberal. Today Paltel’s market capitalisation represents more than half of the value traded on the Palestinian stock exchange, contributes to approximately one third of the PA’s tax income, and its revenues account for approximately 10 per cent of the Palestinian GDP. Most of Paltel’s growth has been through its cellular and internet subsidiaries, Jawwal and Hadara, respectively. And Israel has had much to gain from these as well.
Paltel, Jawwal and Hadara have no choice but to purchase telecommunications capacity from the Israeli market. That Palestinian infrastructure is made to rely on the Israeli backbone and suppliers means that Israeli firms financially benefit from Palestinian telecommunications uses. Collectively, Israeli companies accumulate Palestinian-generated revenues at a number of points: Israeli operators surcharge calls between Jawwal phones and Israeli land and cellular numbers. Since all international calls, all calls to the West Bank, and many intra-Gaza calls and internet traffic are routed through Israel , Israeli operators collect “termination charges”. As one Paltel executive lamented to me in an interview in 2006, “Paltel is one of Bezeq’s biggest customers”. This hasn’t changed. In fact, the continued growth of the Palestinian telecommunications sector has certainly helped deepen the pockets of Bezeq and other Israeli telecommunications firms.
The source of power
Across the Palestinian territories, it is the Israeli regime and its apparatus (the government, the police force, the military, the intelligence services, the high-tech industry, all with incestuous ties to each other) that is the site of power. The PA, Paltel, Paltel’s subsidiaries and other Palestinian high-tech firms are secondary. It is the Israeli state apparatus that decides whether, when, and where Palestinians may install, manage and maintain infrastructure, just as it is the Israeli apparatus that limits and destroys that infrastructure. That any aspect of Palestinian infrastructure is hacked into then, is the responsibility ultimately of the Israeli regime.
Finally, what the events of last week also highlight is not ‘hacking’. Hacking in its historical roots refers to the breaking into computers, accessing administrative controls and other similar practices, under the ideological-political umbrella of the liberalist ideals of freedom of speech, the pursuit of technological beauty, of the desire to ‘free’ and keep code ‘open’. The shutdown of the Palestinian network is instead reflective of an act of cyber terrorism – whose intent of undermining the security of a digital network is explicitly malicious and destructive. In the case of Palestine , the mal-intent was not simply the purposeful target of the digital network, but the right to sovereignty as well.
Helga Tawil-Souri is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University . Her book Digital Occupation is forthcoming.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
