NOVANEWS
Dear Friends,
Just 9 items tonight—none of them about Iran, but it is much on the Israeli news these days, and the war drums keep getting louder. For once I agreed with Danny Ayalon this evening (a very rare event). He said that the best war is the one that has been avoided. May he keep war from our doors and yours!
Item 1 is about more Israeli expansion, this time with the intent to cut the West Bank off from Jerusalem.
Item 2 is the UN OCHA weekly Protection of Civilians report for December 14-20th.
Item 3 tells us that Israel has 101 different types of permits to interfere with Palestinian freedom of movement.
Item 4 is a Haaretz editorial which says loudly and clearly what should be obvious to all who are familiar with settler violence on the one side and solidarity with Palestinian resistance on the other: there is no room to compare the two, as PM Netanyahu has. And indeed there isn’t, the one being violence unadulterated, the other being non violent by choice.
Item 5 is a personal revelation by a Palestinian—“How I became a terrorist.” It tells us how Occupation and all that goes with it can impact on Palestinian youngsters.
Item 6 reacts to the recent segregation of women from men policy’s that have had most Israeli women in a furor, saying what also is self-evident: ‘Israel’s treatment of women is hardly that of a democracy.’
In item 7 the Palestinian Authority is putting the quartet on notice. If by January 26 nothing moves, the Palestinians are going back to their original plan of appealing to the UN for recognition of the Palestinian State.
Item 8 is perhaps the most important, certainly the most serious of all the preceding. Remember a few days ago when I reported on the joint venture by Cornell and the Technion I raised the question of how much this had to do with the Technion’s R&D in military industry. Well the report below does not specifically address this question, but it does detail the degree to which the Technion is involved in the arms industry, and also raises questions about its discriminative acts.
Item 9 is of course Today in Palestine for December 22.
Hoping that war will not come—not now, not for awhile, not ever. Nothing is more destructive. Humans must learn to avoid it.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1 Haaretz
Friday, December 23, 2011
Israel gearing for effective separation of East Jerusalem Palestinians
State whitewashing construction plans between Jerusalem, Ma’aleh Adumim.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-gearing-for-effective-separation-of-east-jerusalem-palestinians-1.403034
By Nir Hasson
Tags: Jerusalem Jerusalem division Palestinians West Bank Israel settlements
Last week, a new border crossing was opened in East Jerusalem’s Shoafat neighborhood, to little fanfare. Two days later, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat asserted that Israel should relinquish Palestinian neighborhoods of the capital that are beyond the separation barrier, despite the fact that their residents carry Israeli identity cards.
Some people view these events as two pieces of the same puzzle. A third piece is the resumption of work on separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.
Put the pieces together, and you get a picture of Israel erecting, at enormous expense, a major system of roads and checkpoints that would allow for the total separation of Palestinians and Israelis while also enabling the construction of Mevasseret Adumim, a neighborhood that would connect Ma’aleh Adumim to Jerusalem.
The new crossing at Shoafat, which replaced the old military checkpoint, resembles a border terminal between two countries more than it does a security checkpoint. Its generous proportions include five lanes for vehicles and a lane for pedestrian traffic.
In the days leading up to and following the opening, an intolerable stench hung over the pristine terminal, testimony to the “skunk truck” and its cargo of liquid stink, which the Border Police used to drive away Palestinians demonstrating against the new crossing. But the protesters’ efforts were in vain, and the terminal is operating according to plan. It may even improve the quality of life of Palestinian Jerusalemites living in and around Shoafat, by reducing their travel time to and from the rest of the city.
The Shoafat crossing joins other big crossings built in the Jerusalem area over the past several years. They mainly serve the 70,000 or so Palestinians with Israeli residency who were cut off from the city by the separation barrier. These neighborhoods turned into pockets of crime and anarchy, with no government and crumbling infrastructure. It is their inhabitants that Barkat wants to sever from his city.
“The municipal boundary of Jerusalem and the route of the separation fence must be identical to allow for proper administration of the city,” Barkat told a conference at the National Security College last week.
On Thursday, the mayor’s office announced a plan “for the municipality and the Civil Administration to trade responsibility for providing services to residents in the area between the security barrier and the municipal boundary.” Until now, the Civil Administration’s domain has been confined to the West Bank.
On the face of it, excising these areas would be relatively simple. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are Israeli residents because Israel defines their neighborhoods as part of Jerusalem; thus in theory, changing the city’s municipal boundary would simultaneously cancel their residency. It would also do wonders for Jerusalem’s demographic balance, from the perspective of the city’s Jewish majority.
But anyone familiar with the situation knows it is not so simple. The announcement would be followed by a rapid migration into Jerusalem of tens of thousands of Palestinians who do not want to lose their residency, and the rights to receive social services and to work and study in Jerusalem that go with it.
“We are Jerusalemites, we’re used to Jerusalem,” said the director of a maternity hospital in Kafr Aqab, which lies on the other side of the separation fence. “If something like that happens, everyone will want to move to within the city. People will live on the street if they have to.”
Some observers view the Shoafat terminal and Barkat’s recent remarks as just a small part of the broader picture being sketched out in Jerusalem’s West Bank hinterlands. According to Col. (res. ) Shaul Arieli, a member of the Council for Peace and Security and one of the leaders of the Geneva Initiative, the Israeli government is spending hundreds of millions of shekels on plans to establish Mevasseret Adumim in the area known as E1.
Roads, electricity lines, traffic circles and lots for development have already been put in place in E1. Everything needed for the neighborhood’s construction is there, but because of American pressure, all work in the area halted in 2007. Both the Americans and the Palestinians claim that building in E1 would in effect cut the West Bank into two sections and make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state with any kind of reasonable territorial contiguity.
Arieli and others argue that Israel seeks to solve the problem by means of an advanced traffic control system that would provide rapid travel between Ramallah and Bethlehem on one hand and between Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem on the other. In the last few months, work was resumed on this road system in two places: the new access road to Ma’aleh Adumim, and in the vicinity of Metzudat Adumim, where a few years ago a highway was built with a wall in the middle – the eastern side for settlers, the western side for Palestinians.
The roads meet up at Hazeitim Interchange, on the Jerusalem-Ma’aleh Adumim road. The interchange, which is nearly complete, is designed to fulfill three purposes: to enable people from Ma’aleh Adumim to reach the capital without having to stop at a checkpoint; to enable settlers from the northern West Bank to do the same, and to enable Palestinian travel between the northern and southern parts of the West Bank.
That final point will enable Israel to claim that building in E1 does not harm Palestinian territorial contiguity. “They’re preparing the ground for this possibility,” Arieli said. “It’s not clear when they’ll decide to carry it out. But it’s enough for there to be a terror attack on the road: They’ll close the road and say it’s for reasons of security.
“This [road] complex is burning through a sea of money and a sea of people to serve a plan based on a delusional working assumption: that [East] Jerusalem will remain under our sovereignty, and greater Ma’aleh Adumim, including E1, will as well,” Arieli added.
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2 |
UN OCHA oPt [ISR@LISTS.OCHAOPT.ORG]; on behalf of; OCHAoPt [ochaopt@UN.ORG] |
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Protection of Civilians Weekly Report14 – 20 December 2011
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For the entire report see
http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_protection_of_civilians_weekly_report_2011_12_23_english.pdf
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3. Haaretz
Friday, December 23, 2011
Israel has 101 different types of permits governing Palestinian movement
Over the decades permit regimen grows into vast, triple-digit bureaucracy.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-has-101-different-types-of-permits-governing-palestinian-movement-1.403039
By Chaim Levinson
Tags: West Bank Palestinians Israel settlements Shin Bet UN
Israel’s Civil Administration issues 101 different types of permits to govern the movement of Palestinians, whether within the West Bank, between the West Bank and Israel or beyond the borders of the state, according to an agency document of which Haaretz obtained a copy.
The most common permits are those allowing Palestinians to work in Israel, or in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Over the decades, however, the permit regimen has grown into a vast, triple-digit bureaucracy.
There are separate permits for worshipers who attend Friday prayers on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and for clerics working at the site; for unspecified clergy and for church employees. Medical permits differentiate between physicians and ambulance drivers, and between “medical emergency staff” and “medical staff in the seam zone,” meaning the border between Israel and the West Bank. There is a permit for escorting a patient in an ambulance and one for simply escorting a patient.
There are separate permits for traveling to a wedding in the West Bank or traveling to a wedding in Israel, and also for going to Israel for a funeral, a work meeting, or a court hearing.
The separation fence gave rise to an entirely new category of permits, for farmers cut off from their fields. Thus, for instance, there is a permit for a “farmer in the seam zone,” not to be confused with the permit for a “permanent farmer in the seam zone.”
Human rights organizations have challenged the permit regime on various grounds.
According to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, international agencies operating in the West Bank waste an estimated 20 percent of their working days on permits from the Civil Administration – applying for them, renewing them and sorting out problems.
The checkpoint-monitoring organization Machsom Watch claims that the Shin Bet security service uses the permit regime to recruit informers. Palestinians whose permit requests are rejected “for security reasons” are often invited to meetings with Shin Bet agents, who then offer “assistance” in obtaining the desired permits in exchange for information.
Guy Inbar, spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, said in response that the Civil Administration is aware of the issues raised in the article and intends to evaluate them in the coming year as part of its streamlining program.
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4 Haaretz
Friday, December 23, 2011
No room to compare Binyamin to Bil’in
It’s true that the settlers are also rising up against what they see as injustice: the evacuation of settlement outposts, but these outposts are patently illegal.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/no-room-to-compare-binyamin-to-bil-in-1.403057
Haaretz Editorial
Ever since dozens of settlers rioted at the Binyamin Brigade’s base in the West Bank last week, several people, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have compared the rioters to those who gather weekly at Bil’in to protest the separation fence. Netanyahu compared the two again this week, during the lighting of the first Hanukkah candle at the brigade’s headquarters. This is an unfounded and outrageous comparison.
For several years now, Bil’in has been the scene of a stubborn protest by Palestinians and their Israeli and foreign supporters against the fence, which has split the village in two and dispossessed the residents of their land. Their struggle was even acknowledged by the High Court of Justice, which ordered the government to adjust the barrier’s route. And the demonstrations at Bil’in do sometimes get violent, both because the Israel Defense Forces and the Border Police take harsh measures against the protesters and because the protesters throw stones.
Over the past few years, more than 20 Palestinians have been killed while protesting against the barrier in several Palestinian villages. The latest was Mustafa Tamimi, who was killed this month in Nebi Saleh by a tear gas canister fired directly at his head. Dozens of protesters have been hurt or arrested, some for lengthy periods.
Thus any comparison between them and the rioting settlers is certainly groundless with regard to how the IDF and Border Police deal with the two groups: They display leniency and turn a blind eye to pogroms conducted by settlers, while using harsh, violent and sometimes even deadly measures against the left-wing demonstrators.
Moreover, in contrast to the settlers, the Bil’in demonstrators do not take their wrath out on innocent people through “price tag” attacks. They do not harass or threaten their neighbors, don’t uproot orchards, don’t torch synagogues, fields and houses and don’t set cars on fire. They are fighting against what they consider a crying injustice – and which even the High Court of Justice has at least partially recognized as such.
It’s true that the settlers are also rising up against what they see as injustice: the evacuation of settlement outposts. But these outposts are patently illegal, and the High Court of Justice has ordered them dismantled.
Therefore, there is no room for such a comparison. A vast gulf lies between Bil’in and Binyamin.
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5. Haaretz
Friday, December 23, 2011
How I became a ‘terrorist’
At 16, entering the steel gates of the Israeli military prisons, I could never go back to my former life. Levinger’s outpost, his settler violence, permanently changed my life.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/how-i-became-a-terrorist-1.403062
By Abdelrahman Al Ahmar
The first time I was attacked by an Israeli settler, I was 14 years old. I was walking to school when an armed man wearing a skullcap, standing near some Israeli soldiers, pulled my pack off my back and threw it in the mud. That wasn’t last month, nor was it near a new outpost in Nablus. Rather, this happened 30 years ago, on the main road running through Bethlehem, near Deheisheh refugee camp, where I lived. The settler was not just any alienated, disaffected man. He was, I learned later, the father of the national religious settlement project – Rabbi Moshe Levinger.
In those days, the settlers and the Egged buses on their way to and from the nascent settlements in the area would drive right by the camp. Their vehicles were often the targets of many rocks: Who among us wanted armed Israelis using our roads? Levinger wanted to show us who was boss. At first he would stop his car, and chase and try to attack us. He would scream at the soldiers stationed on the road to arrest and beat the kids. Soldiers would then fire tear gas and play cat-and-mouse with us in the camp’s alleys.
Emboldened by army support, Levinger and his fellow “pioneers” would enter the camp and open fire randomly. Clashes would ensue. The soldiers would then run after us and make arrests while Levinger and his friends would return to their cars and drive home to their settlements. The violence became a daily event.
This is what life was like for me and my friends during these years. For Levinger and his nationalist movement, it constituted a disruption of their commute to and from Jerusalem. To placate these champions of Zion, the Israel Defense Forces finally erected a nine-meter-high fence, topped with barbed-wire, around Deheisheh. The camp’s thousands of residents now had a single way in and out, and it was guarded by soldiers, making it like living in a prison. A 7 P.M. curfew was in place for years.
The settlers had won: They had taken over the only thoroughfare serving Deheisheh and the entire southern West Bank, and put us Arabs in a cage. Realizing his invincibility, the father of the settler movement – not a fringe group of radical-right outcasts, but Levinger himself – then set up an “outpost,” a new settlement, across the road from the camp. He brought in a mobile home and topped it with an Israeli flag, declaring it the first settlement near Rachel’s Tomb. Guarded by IDF soldiers, he invited his pioneer friends and held loud parties into the night, while we remained under curfew.
As is the case today in Hebron, the soldiers would put Deheisheh under daytime curfew when the settlement was visited by like-minded delegations. Every day brought a new nightmare – clashes, curfews, tear gas, school closures.
Our homes were raided nightly, and we saw our friends, mothers, sisters being attacked. With the support of the Israeli army, this man, the beloved rabbi of the national religious settler movement, was tearing our lives apart. We saw no end in sight, just more Israelis about to move into our neighborhood and make our lives hell.
So a group of us kids – six of us, ages 13 to 16 – organized and fought back the only way we knew how: with rocks and a few improvised bottles filled with kerosene, with a wick stuck in them. We threw them at his outpost and at the soldiers who were allowing it to wreck our childhood. No one was hurt.
And in the middle of a freezing winter night, just a few days after we organized, a plainclothesman from the Israeli security services, backed by a large contingent from the army, raided our homes and took us all away to interrogation, torture and prison. Lea Tsemel, our Israeli attorney, pleaded with the military judge that, “they’re just kids.” The judge responded by sentencing all six of us to four to six years in prison for terrorist activities. My mother fainted in the courtroom: Her first-born son, for whom she had waited years, was taken away from her for good.
For good, because, at age 16, entering the steel gates of the Israeli military prisons, I could never go back to my former life. Levinger’s outpost, his settler violence, permanently changed my life. I and my friends were now “terrorists,” and for the next 20 years, we would be caught up in the revolving door of Israeli interrogations and administrative detentions.
Ultimately, Levinger’s outpost was dismantled by the army, which decided it was too hard to protect against the other rock-throwing kids of Deheisheh.
I’m 44 now – the age of the Israeli occupation – married with four children. I am finishing my legal clerkship, on my way to becoming a lawyer. Yet Levinger’s pioneering actions – not fringe at all, but acts of the mainstream, core settler movement – still haunt me. Where I can move and go is restricted, as my name is still in the “computer.” I’m a security threat if I attend the birth of my child at a hospital in Jerusalem, and am refused a visa to visit my aging mother-in-law in New York because, according to U.S. authorities, I “have the potential to engage in terrorist activities.”
Should I have acted differently then? I suppose that if an Israeli settler pulled my bag off my back and threw it in the mud today, I’d probably file a complaint. Violence by either side is a major part of the problem, not the solution.
The settlement project at its core, not on its fringes, was and remains rotten and inherently violent. We Palestinians struggled long to stop this project, which violates the most basic tenets of international law, and for this, we were labeled terrorists. Today, Israeli society may be paying the price existentially for the settlement project, but we Palestinians have paid the price with our bodies, our lives and our futures.
Abdelrahman Al Ahmar is from Deheisheh refugee camp. Today he is the elected deputy mayor of the Doha municipality, near Bethlehem and Deheisheh.
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6 Guardian
Friday, December 23, 2011 15.00 GMT
Israel’s treatment of women is hardly that of a democracy
A ‘dignified’ dress code and gender segregation show Israel is fast becoming bigoted about dissent and difference
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/23/israel-treatment-women-democracy
Rachel Shabi
A woman on a bus looks out at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man in Jerusalem, Israel. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty
While we’ve been distracted by alarmism over newly elected Islamist leaders enforcing hijabs and bikini bans in the Arab world, Israel is already embroiled in attempts to rein in this unruly matter of female “immodesty”.
Last week, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on businesses in the southern town of Sderot signing up to a “dignified” dress code – whereby female employees must be “modestly” clothed. So far 20 stores have adopted this long-sleeves directive, initiated by a religious group which says it did not actively threaten to boycott non-signatory shops – but which, nonetheless, has considerable buying power. Not surprisingly, the women subjected to this new code have described it as religious coercion.
This is on top of some other instances of an apparent increase in ultra-religious modesty decrees. There have been recent religious pronouncements that men should walk out of army ceremonies where women are singing (immodestly, of course); along with attempts to erase women’s faces from billboard advertising and increased attempts to impose gender-segregated queuing in stores.
Last week, religiously imposed gender segregation of buses prompted a stand-off, as a female passenger simply refused to move to the back – despite requests to do so from the bus driver and a police officer called in to sort out the dispute. Dozens of public bus lines used by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) sector have been gender-segregated for years. Israel’s supreme court tried to reverse this practice a year ago, but balked at actually banning the “women at the back” policy – making it more a voluntary issue.
The woman who stood up to it all sparked a round of indignation at these religious dictates in the Israeli media – and from Israeli leaders, including prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who issued some generic outrage premised on those favourite politico buzzwords: unity and coexistence.
Netanyahu is in a coalition that includes dominant religious parties – a support base he isn’t likely to antagonise. Israeli governments are adept at making the right noises over religious enforcements in public spaces, but meanwhile doing nothing to seriously tackle the flourish. Underpinning this is the matter that, while Israel might be secular on the streets, it has never been secular as a state – with fundamentals from birth to death managed in some way by rabbis.
But this vocal protest premised on liberal, secular values is an easy run for Israel’s leaders. Gender rights is one of the cornerstones of Israel’s self-image as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Officials championing the subject can rely on solid support from mainstream Israelis – still a non-Orthodox majority – who worry that the Haredi sector’s influence over public norms is getting out of hand. Part of the public fight-back includes a plan, on New Year’s Day, for a mass boarding of gender-segregated buses to challenge this arrangement.
Pointedly, there is a big difference when it comes to defending another component of Israel’s “only democracy” calling card: freedom of expression. In that frame, the Israeli government is currently trying to pass a series of laws that salute the spirit of McCarthy, while large sections of the public seem to have approved the line that any criticism of the country is basically treason.
But it seems unlikely that these trends are unrelated. Israel is increasingly becoming a place that’s bigoted about dissent and difference. If the landscape as a whole is more aggressively intolerant, why shouldn’t that include the Haredi sector, too?
7. LA Times
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Palestinian Authority gives Mideast peacemakers an ultimatum
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/12/palestinian-authority-gives-mideast-quartet-an-ultimatum.html
REPORTING FROM BETHLEHEM, WEST BANK -– The Palestinian Authority on Thursday gave the so-called quartet of Middle East peace negotiators an ultimatum: It will resume its campaign for statehood recognition if there is no movement in the peace process in the next month.
“If nothing happens by Jan. 26, we are going back to our international campaign for recognition,” said Nabil Shaath, a senior official in the administration of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The quartet -– the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations -– had given the Palestinians and Israel until Jan. 26 to submit proposals for borders and security.
The Palestinian Authority has submitted its proposal, but Israel has said it will submit its proposal only at the negotiating table. The Palestinians insist that there will be no negotiations before Israel stops all settlement activities, a move that does not appear imminent.
With the peace talks deadlocked for more than a year, the Palestinians went to the United Nations in the fall asking for full membership. They currently have observer status in the international body.
The move angered the U.S. and its allies, which demanded that the Palestinians return to the negotiating table.
The quartet announced its latest initiative on Sept. 23, shortly before Abbas submitted the membership application to the U.N.
Shaath complained that the Palestinian issue is not a U.S. priority, and warned, “We might as well go back to international activism and national unity.”
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8. Mondoweiss
December 23, 2011
Israeli university gaining a toehold in Manhattan specializes in weapons development
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/israeli-university-gaining-a-toehold-in-manhattan-specializes-in-weapons-development.html
by Allison Deger on
The IDF used a Rafael weaponized variation of this Hermes 450 drone in Operation Cast Lead. Both Elbit and Rafael have partnerships with Technion. (Photo: The Registar)
On Monday, December 19, New York City and Cornell University announced a “historic” partnership with Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where the two universities will build an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, supported by a $100 million capital gift from New York City. The project was also funded by a $350 million gift from an anonymous donor (now revealed to be philanthropist Charles Feeney).
Following the city’s decision, Israeli Consul General Ido Aharoni spoke with The Jewish Week about the engineering campus project, stating, “this is of strategic importance in terms of positioning Israel not only in America, but all over the world, as a bastion of creativity and innovation.” Technion is a major educator in the field of science–the university produces approximately half of the leadership of Israeli NASDAQ companies. But what was not discussed in the bid run-off, is Technion’s entrenchment in systems of militarism and discrimination. These systems of violence and discrimination in education, practiced in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, respectively, raise ethical and legal questions for New York City in entering a contract with Technion.
An April 2011 report by Tadamon, a Montreal-based activist organization titled Structures of Oppression: Why McGill and Concordia Universities must sever their links with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, investigates these issues: Technion’s links to Elbit Systems Ltd. (an Israeli military security and surveillance company) and Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd. (founded in 1948 as part of the Israeli Ministry of Defense), the technologies developed at Technion, and the school’s discrimination towards Palestinian students–by way of institutionalized preferential treatment towards active duty and reservist IDF students.
Elbit’s computer vision, eye tracking device developed with Technion. (Photo: Elbit Systems Ltd.)Elbit Systems Ltd.
A multi-billion dollar company that provides security equipment to the IDF, including “unmanned aerial and ground vehicles,” Elbit’s current partnership with Technion is a joint-venture since 2008, the Visions Systems Research Initiative, which according to Elbit, designs “an advanced eye tracking laboratory that enables real-time measurement of gaze and eye movement.” WhoProfits.org reported:
The company supplied UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to the Israeli army, which are in operational use in during combat in the West Bank and Gaza. The cameras in these UAV are manufactured by Controp Precision Tehnologies.
The security contractor previously has lost contracts with the Norwegian Finance Ministry and Danske Bank because of Elbit’s work with the IDF in the West Bank occupation. WhoProfits.org researched Elbit’s security contracts with the Jerusalem section of the wall, where Elbit provides “surveillance cameras in the Ariel section and for the A-ram wall,” which constitutes a violation of international law.
Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd.
An Israeli government-owned weapons producer and major Israeli employer, Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd., has provided the IDF with security services since the 1970s, and is partnered with Technion through a specialized degree program. Tadamon chronicles the academic/weapons producer partnership:
The company has maintained a research and project-based relationship with Technion for many years. In 2001, Technion announced a three-year in-house MBA program tailored specifically for Rafael managers. In partnership with Rafael, students and faculty members of the Technion’s Faculty of Aerospace Engineering launched a ‘two-stage research rocket’ in May 2006. The Ramtech rocket took five years to build, and was completed by approximately 20 different students under the supervision of Technion Professor Alon 21 Gany and Yitzhak Greenberg from Rafael (also a Technion graduate).
Rafael produces medium range missiles that outfit Elbit drones, used during the 2008-9 Israeli assault on Gaza. The unmanned aerial vehicles, weaponized by Rafael, were used in cases of indiscriminate violence on civilians and internationals, including 87 deaths in Operation Cast Lead, as reported by Human Rights Watch.
From the 2009 Human Rights Watch report:
Israel’s primary armed drones are the Hermes, produced by the Israeli company Elbit Systems Ltd., and the Heron, produced by Israeli Aerospace Industries. The Hermes can stay aloft for up to 24 hours at altitudes of up to 18,000 feet and has an array of optical, infrared, and laser sensors that allow the operator to identify and track targets as well as to guide munitions in flight. The Hermes carries two Spike-MR (medium range) missiles, sometimes called the ‘Gil’ in Israel, produced by the Israeli firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. The Heron drone, which can fly for up to 40 hours at 30,000 feet, has similar optics to the Hermes and can carry four Spike missiles. In Gaza, Israel used both the Hermes and Heron drones armed with the Spike, though it may have also used other missiles.
Technion Develops Weapons