Dorothy Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Dear Friends,

In item 1 Ben White defends Adalah against smears by the European Jewish Congress, and does so very well.

Item 2 is one of the best argued and absolutely correct case setting things right regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.  You may recall that a few days ago I mentioned an article that set the whole conflict as resulting from the differences between Bibi and Barak (Obama), and stated that I felt that it was not worth sending, but gave you the link in case you wished to check it out.  Phyllis Bennis responds to that op-ed and does so excellently.  She puts the blame elsewhere.  I agree with her 100%.  There is also another article on the conflict by Dennis Ross.  I did not expect to agree with it, as I am all too familiar with Ross’s views.  By comparison to Bennis, Ross comes out looking silly—regardless of his intention, in the end he simply ‘reveals’ how to keep the occupation going more smoothly,  Here’s the link in case you are interested

How to break a Middle East stalemate

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-unfreeze-a-middle-east-stalemate/2011/12/21/gIQAdhZdfP_story.html

Item 3 shows that Israel, either via private companies or otherwise, gets its finger in many pies.  This particular pie is Latin America, and the finger is security Israeli style.

In item 4 Iyad Burnat reports of Friday’s weekly protest demonstration at Bil’in.

Item 5 is ‘Today in Palestine’ for January 6, and item 6 is a link to the latest from Mondoweiss.

That’s it for tonight.  Am still hoping that the war on Iran will not happen.  Keep your fingers and toes crossed.

Dorothy

 

1The smear against Adalah

The Guardian

Wednesday, January 4, 2011

 

This smear against Israeli human rights activists is all too familiar

Adalah defends Palestinian rights. The European Jewish Congress attack on it reflects a wider pattern of bullying

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/04/israeli-human-rights-activists-adalah

Ben White

‘Adalah is a legal rights centre in Israel that works to promote and defend the rights of Palestinian citizens.’ Photograph: APAimages/Rex Features

Last week, the president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC) launched an extraordinary attack on an Israeli human rights organisation, Adalah, comparing the NGO to the far-right French National Front and British National party.

Moshe Kantor, who heads the umbrella organisation for elected representatives of Europe’s Jewish communities, was responding to a leaked EU document that expressed concern for Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens (EJC declined to comment for this article). Claiming that the report had used Adalah as a source, Kantor said:

“Adalah, an extremist organisation on the margins of society, openly declares a radical political agenda to change the nature of the state of Israel and has worked alongside some of the most radical elements in the region. It is like using sources from Front National to understand French society or the British National party to understand British society.”

Adalah is a well-established legal rights centre in Israel that works to promote and defend the rights of Palestinian citizens (“Israeli Arabs”). It has special consultative status with the UN’s economic and social council (ECOSOC), and has received funding over the years from the likes of Oxfam, New Israel Fund and Christian Aid.

Just last month, as Adalah co-founder Hassan Jabareen received an award for his work, the NGO was described by retired Israeli supreme court judge Ayala Procaccia as working “to advance human rights” with “outstanding intellectual power” and “high moral commitment”.

Why, then, would the EJC president compare this respected defender of minority rights to a party that Britain’s prime minister has previously described as “a bunch of fascists”?

In a disturbing parallel with the attacks on NGOs in Israel itself, the answer lies in Adalah’s record of defending Palestinian rights against human rights abuses and discrimination perpetrated by the Israeli government.

Kantor’s rhetoric is all too familiar for human rights defenders in Israel in recent times. Last July the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, described a number of human rights groups as “terror organisations”. Pressure groups such as NGO Monitor boast of “naming and shaming” those (like Adalah) who they say are “demonising Israel”.

There are now legislative moves to restrict foreign funding of human rights groups, in a move that a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa says is “strikingly similar” to laws that applied during the apartheid era. The “targets” of the law in both cases are “those consistent voices of conscience which had become a problem for the regime”.

Two aspects of Adalah’s work cause particular offence for some of Israel’s apologists. First, it challenges a status quo that discriminates against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, by pursuing legal cases to the highest levels in the country’s courts.

Adalah has highlighted the root causes of discrimination by proposing a “democratic constitution” for Israel “based on the concept of a democratic, bilingual, multicultural state”. The perception of equality as a threat, Adalah notes, is “characteristic of colonial regimes”, not of a genuine democracy.

The second aspect is that Adalah works through the Israeli courts and at the UN to protect civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories on the basis of international humanitarian law and seeks accountability for war crimes – for example, during the attack on Gaza three years ago. This is deemed beyond the pale for those leading the offensive against Israeli human rights organisations.

Kantor’s comments reflect a wider pattern, where even small efforts to do something constructive about challenging human rights abuses or discriminatory practices in Israel are met with smears, bullying and over-the-top bluster.

Documenting the facts and confronting injustice has never been without consequences (particularly for Palestinians) but the climate of paranoia and retribution is steadily growing.

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2 LA Times

Friday, January 6, 2012

Obama’s real Israel problem — and it isn’t Bibi [Blowback]

http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2012/01/blowback.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpinionLa+%28L.A.+Times+-+Opinion+Blog%29

Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, responds to The Times’ Jan. 2 Op-Ed article, “Bibi and Barack.” Bennis is the coauthor of “Ending the U.S. War in Afghanistan: A Primer” and the author of “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.”

Aaron David Miller is right: President Obama does have an Israel problem. But Miller is wrong about the roots of the problem.

The problem isn’t Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his Likud Party, or even Israel’s current extreme right-wing government. Israel’s fundamental policy toward the Palestinians is the problem, and that policy has hardly changed, despite the seemingly diverse sequence of left, right and center parties that have been in power.

Just look at the occupation of the territories seized in 1967 — the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Settlement building, along with all the land and water theft that goes with it, began just weeks after the Six-Day War. And a right-wing government wasn’t in power; it was Mapai, the left-wing precursor to today’s Labor Party. The right wing wouldn’t come to power until almost three decades after Israel’s founding, when Menachem Begin led the Likud coalition to victory in 1977.

Settlement construction and expansion started right after the war and continued under all the leftist (in the Israeli context) governments. By the time Likud came to power 10 years after the 1967 war, there were already more than 50,000 Israeli settlers living in Jews-only settlements in the occupied territories, most of them in occupied East Jerusalem, with smaller numbers in the West Bank and Gaza. Settlement expansion advanced under Labor, Likud and Kadima-led governments. Now there are more than 600,000 settlers living illegally in Palestinian territory, divided between the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

As Moshe Dayan, a former defense and foreign minister, explained, the settlements were necessary “not because they can ensure security better than the army but because without them we cannot keep the army in those territories. Without them the [Israel Defense Forces] would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population.”

The different parties, prime ministers and officials sometimes used different language. Some repeated the words the international community wanted, a “land for peace” deal and “two states”; others insisted that only “peace for peace” or “Jordan is Palestine” was acceptable. Some spoke loudly in defense of settlements, while others only whispered.

But there was no diversity of substance. What happened in the real world, the “facts on the ground,” continued regardless of which party was in power.

Other things continued too — settler violence against Palestinians, expropriation of Palestinian land and water, illegal closures, collective punishments including massive armed assault, arrest without charge, extra-judicial assassinations and the siege of Gaza.

Of course, that’s just in the occupied territories. Inside Israel, Arab Israelis — those who survived the dispossession of 1947-48 — live as second-class citizens. They have the right to vote, but they are subject to legalized discrimination in favor of the Jewish majority. The Israeli human rights organization Adalah reported to the United Nations more than 20 such discriminatory laws, the most important of which deny Palestinian citizens equal rights on issues of immigration and citizenship as well as land ownership. And outside, the Palestinian refugees, now numbering in the millions, have been denied their internationally guaranteed right of return by Israeli governments of every political stripe.

The whole range of Israeli political parties has continued to implement these same policies. They may talk a different talk, but they all walk the same walk.

What none of these governments is prepared to acknowledge is what it will take for a real solution, one that is lasting, comprehensive and just: human rights and equality for all based on international law. It shouldn’t be more complicated than that. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies everyone has the right to return to their home country, no exceptions; that everyone has the right to live in safety, no exceptions; that everyone has the right to an equal say in the government that rules their country, no exceptions.

Every law should treat all citizens the same, no exceptions. Every government has the obligation to live up to the treaties it has signed, including the U.N. conventions on human rights, against racism, the Geneva Conventions and more. Israel has signed them all. Yet not one Israeli government, of any party, has implemented them.

As long as the United States provides the Israeli government more than $3 billion in aid every year, regardless of those violations, and protects Israel from being held accountable in the U.N., regardless of those violations, no Israeli prime minister has much reason to change. That’s Obama’s Israel problem — not Netanyahu. Changing U.S. policy should provide the solution.

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3.  Al Jazeera

Friday 06 Jan 2012

 

Private security and ‘the Israelites of Latin America’

An Israeli defence consultancy is assisting with dirty work in Colombia previously monopolised by the United States.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012157415226260.html

Belen Fernandez

 

Global CST, a defence industry firm, got close to Colombian President Santos over a period of years [EPA]

Much fuss has been made in recent years in neoconservative circles in the US and among Israeli foreign ministry officials, regarding the danger to global security posed by an alleged Islamist infiltration of Latin America.

A pet factoid wielded by self-appointed experts on the matter is that it is currently possible to travel by air from Caracas to Tehran with only one stop in Damascus. Lest policymakers and the general public fail to respond with adequate alarm to such news, the severity of the threat is underscored via invented links between Muslims in Latin America and every potentially unfavourable regional trend, resulting in a spectre of Islamo-narco-socialist crime cartels menacing the southern border of the US.

In a WikiLeaks cable from the US embassy in Bogota dated December 1, 2009, a rather unexpected entity joined the usual lineup of Latin America-based threats. The cable discusses the manoeuvres in Colombia of the Israeli firm Global Comprehensive Security Transformation (Global CST), founded by Major General (Res) Israel Ziv – former head of the Operations Directorate of the Israeli military – and contracted to aid in the fight against both criminal organisations and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as to evaluate potential perils emanating from Ecuador and Venezuela:

“Over a three year period, Ziv worked his way into the confidence of former [Colombian] Defense Minister [Juan Manuel] Santos by promising a cheaper version of USG [US government] assistance without our strings attached. We and the GOC [government of Colombia] learned that Global CST had no Latin American experience and that its proposals seem designed more to support Israeli equipment and services sales than to meet in-country needs”.

It is not clear why the US government should express surprise at the apparent failure to address “in-country needs” when its own Latin American experience includes the multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia, inaugurated more than a decade ago ostensibly as a means of curbing drug production and trafficking. In 2009, I spoke with farmers in the southern department of Putumayo who outlined in-country effects of the plan, such as repeated airborne fumigation of their subsistence crops, livestock, water supplies and children.

A substantial portion of Plan Colombia funds went to US-based private security contractors. Today, 97 per cent of cocaine that reaches the US reportedly hails from said country.

As for the strings that are allegedly attached to official US assistance, Amnesty International has objected to the fact that “the State Department continues to certify military aid to Colombia, even after reviewing the country’s human rights record” – which happens to hold the distinction of being the worst in the hemisphere.

Global CST’s experience

Ziv’s contention regarding the international relevance of his background in the Israeli military – “We felt that our experience could contribute tremendously to the world security and the world peace [sic]” – is, meanwhile, challenged by the following passage from the Bogota cable:

“In February 2008, [Colombian National Police] sources reported that a Global CST interpreter, Argentine-born Israeli national Shai Killman, had made copies of classified Colombian Defense Ministry documents in an unsuccessful attempt to sell them to the [FARC] through contacts in Ecuador and Argentina. The documents allegedly contained high value target (HVT) database information. Ziv denied this attempt and sent Killman back to Israel”.

Colombia’s new scheme to reach reconciliation

Ziv’s denial becomes less compelling in light of the fact that Global CST has lent its services to both the armed forces of the nation of Georgia as well as to Georgia’s breakaway republic of Abkhazia. The firm’s peaceable aims are furthermore called into question by the arms and training it reportedly provided to the Guinean military junta responsible for massacring pro-democracy protesters in Conakry in 2009.

Present on the board of Global CST is former Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh, whose recent efforts on behalf of peace have included defending the mass slaughter of Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead because Hamas had failed to “bring… investors to Gaza”. The former minister did not explain how investors were expected to navigate an Israeli military blockade when smaller items such as pasta and pencils were not permitted passage.

‘The Israelites of Latin America’

The encroachment of Global CST into the imperial realm of the US government was facilitated by Juan Manuel Santos, current president of Colombia, who has explained that the firm was recommended to him during his term as defence minister by his friend, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

In a promotional video for Global CST, Santos characterises the company as follows: “They are people with a lot of experience; they have been helping us to work better. It’s like the person who is in the gym, and when you go and you do the exercise he tells you how to do it better.”

More effusive praise is offered on behalf of the athletic trainers in a video for an Israeli television programme – in which Santos announces: “We’ve even been accused of being the Israelites [sic] of Latin America, which personally makes me feel really proud.”

This pronouncement occurs shortly after the programme’s narrator has described Colombia’s 2008 raid into Ecuador and assassination of FARC second-in-command Raul Reyes. The narrator’s Hebrew assessment of the operation is transcribed with English subtitles: “All of a sudden, the methods that proved efficient in Nablus and Hebron begin speaking Spanish.”

In addition to a shared pride in illegal extraterritorial targeted killings, there are other reasons Colombia might qualify as the Israel of Latin America. For starters, the late Carlos Castano Gil – father of modern Colombian paramilitarism – acknowledged copying the paramilitary concept from the Israelis during a training excursion to Israel in the 1980s.

In matters requiring the displacement of human beings from land, the Zionist example is undoubtedly invaluable, though the Colombians unfortunately lack the option of citing Biblical endorsement of territorial claims. In both locales, the liberal application of the term “terrorist” provides convenient justification for the elimination of excess sectors of the populace, be they Palestinians in refugee camps or Colombian peasants whose existence infringes on the designs of international corporations vis-a-vis area resources.

That the death and destruction wrought by the Jewish state and the paragon of military-paramilitary collusion that is the state of Colombia quantitatively and qualitatively outweighs that wrought by their respective nemeses has meanwhile not jeopardised their positions as top recipients of US military aid.

Military creativity

The necessity of casting victims in the role of aggressors has resulted in a range of creative military performances in both the original Israel and its Latin American apprentice. In 2008, Colombian soldiers were revealed to have murdered possibly thousands of civilians and then dressed the corpses in FARC attire in order to receive bonus pay and extra holiday time.

Juan Manuel Santos was serving as defence minister under President Alvaro Uribe when the “false positives” scandal broke. Despite this and other details – such as that, since Uribe’s assumption of office, more trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined – Santos managed to comment on the aforementioned Israeli television programme that fear “no longer exists” in Colombia and that “now we feel free”.

As for Israeli military creativity, spokeswoman Avital Leibovitch explained in the aftermath of the 2010 massacre on the Mavi Marmara – part of the Freedom Flotilla endeavouring to break the Gaza siege – that the victims of the incident were not the nine slain Turkish humanitarian activists – but rather the commandos who had shot them.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry dutifully uploaded a Flickr photo set entitled “Weapons found on Mavi Marmara”, which underscored the violent tendencies of the seafarers and consisted of images of water bottles, kitchen knives, screwdrivers, keffiyehs, and a slingshot decorated with pink and purple stars and the word “Hizbollah”. That the slingshot was not actually “found on Mavi Marmara” but rather resurrected from an irrelevant archive is suggested by the label accompanying the image, according to which “This photo was taken on February 7, 2006 using a Nikon D2Xs”.

Colombians were given the opportunity to defend their position as the Israelites of Latin America when, upon completion of Uribe’s presidential term in 2010, he was recycled into the post of Vice-Chairman of the UN panel tasked with investigating the flotilla massacre. The resulting report – which determined that a group of flotilla activists had engaged in an “extreme level of violence”, and which upheld the validity of the Israeli siege of Gaza in spite of the UN’s own classification of the siege as illegal – presumably benefited from Uribe’s professed notion that human rights organisations often serve as fronts for terrorists.

The peace community of San Jose de Apartado

Defending her position as de facto Colombian paramilitary of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, meanwhile, Mary O’Grady reported an alliance between FARC terrorists and “peaceniks” in a 2009 article about the Colombian peace community of San Jose de Apartado, affiliated with various NGOs.

The peace community, which I visited that same year, was founded in 1997 in the Uraba region in northwestern Colombia as a response to decades of armed conflict. Employing a system of collective work groups dedicated to the cultivation of crops ranging from miniature bananas to cacao, the community rejects collaboration with all armed actors: military, paramilitary and FARC guerrillas alike. Nevertheless, as of its twelfth anniversary in 2009, it had suffered 184 assassinations out of a population of approximately 1,500.

Twenty-four assassinations have been attributed to the FARC, while the remainder is attributed to the armed forces and/or paramilitary formations. Such calculations render all the more ludicrous O’Grady’s advertisement of the claim that “the peace community helped the FARC in its effort to tag the Colombian military as a violator of human rights”.

Community co-founder Maria Brigida Gonzalez – whose 15-year-old daughter Elisena was murdered in her sleep in 2005 by members of the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade, which claimed Elisena was a FARC combatant – speculated to me that the ultimate purpose of such attacks was “to sow terror so that we all flee and the land’s resources can be exploited”.

Colombia as regional security model

In a WikiLeaks cable from March 2009, the US embassy in Bogota specified that the region of Uraba was one of “17 strategic focus areas” within one of “two key swathes of territory” in Colombia where Global CST was assisting the Uribe government in “achiev[ing] irreversibility” in the battle against the FARC. Nine months later, the same embassy sounded the alarm that the firm had infringed on US territory.

It is doubtful, of course, that the Israelis will usurp the US legacy in Colombia, one ironic manifestation of which was contained in the email update I received last year from the peace community listing recent instances of harassment and killing of area residents: “John Kennedy as assassinated the afternoon of Wednesday, May 11 when he left his house to meet some neighbours for a game of soccer.”

Whether or not Colombians start naming their offspring David Ben-Gurion, the fact that the country has been applauded by the US State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank as a regional role model in confronting security threats ensures the fortification of a system in which profits depend on the perpetuation of insecurity.

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in Nov. 2011. She is an editor at PULSE Media, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Guernica Magazine, and many other publications.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

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4 From friends-of-freedom-and-justice-bilin-owner@lists.riseup.net; on behalf of; Iyad Burnat [majdarmajdar@gmail.com]

Saturday, January 7, 2011

four people were injured in the village of Bil’in
Bil’in – Palestine-Friday Loyalty to Martyrs Today four people were injured as well as dozens others that were tear gassed by Israeli Soldiers in the village of Bil’in, west of Ramallah. Samir Burnat (36 years old) was shot with two rubber-coated metal bullets in the right leg. Kefah Mansour (30 years old) was also hit by three rubber-coated metal bullets in the right leg. Ibrahim Burnat (30 years of age) was hit by two rounds of said bullets in the right leg. Finally, Mohammed Hamad (19 years) was rushed to the hospital after being hit with a stone in the spine. Dozens of cases of asphyxiation due to tear gas were reported. The weekly march organized by the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Bil’in comes on the first anniversary of the martyrdom of Jawaher Abu Rahma. Participants included the Governor of Ramallah and Al Bireh Laila Ghannam, and many representatives of national movements, including members of the Executive Committee of the PLO. Members of the political offices of Palestinian factions were also present as were dozens of Palestinian, Israeli, and international peace activists. The march began after the Friday prayers from the center of the village in direction of the recently liberated land . Participants flew Palestinian flags, banners of the Palestinian factions, and yellow banners with the image of the captive leader Marwan Barghouti. Protesters chanted national slogans calling for the departure of the occupation and destruction of the apartheid wall. Protesters equally demanded the liberation of political prisoners, and urged Palestinians to continue the popular struggle.Upon arrival to the Abu Lemon area several protesters broke through the barbed wire, as settlers looked on from behind the wall. Soldiers then opened fire on the participants, using rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas. At one point, occupying forces attempted to arrest the protesters, chasing them with military vehicles. The progress of the vehicles was halted by protesters. In total, four people were hit by rubber-coated metal bullets and dozens of cases of suffocation were reported on the part of peace activists. Mohammed Hamad and Ibrahim Burnat were transferred to a local hospital. Injuries were also treated in the field by ambulance crews.
Iyad Burnat
http://www.bilin-ffj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=380&Itemid=1
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5.  Today inPalestine

January 6, 2012

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/f_shadi/message/3370

6.  The latest from Mondoweiss

http://mondoweiss.net/

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