Dorothy Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Dear Friends,

Tonight brings you 7 items, most of which are critical.  The one exception is item 2, but even that implies a large degree of criticism.  I was not searching for critical articles.  They just happen to be what I found, or, more accurately, they happen to be ones that I found that I thought would interest you.

 

Item 1 is a first of sorts—Britain’s deputy PM, Nick Clegg, declares Israeli settlement construction to be “vandalism.”  About time!

 

In item 2 the PCHR commends the PLO for requesting a conference on the 4th Geneva convention as relating to Palestinians in the OPT.

 

In item 3 Merav Michaeli claims that “In Israel, some are more equal than others.”  How true!  Her op-ed does not deal with Palestinians, but surely this is no less true for Palestinian citizens of Israel, who decidedly do not have the same rights as Jews.  I am sure that Michaeli would agree.  But her focus is primarily on the new law that allows Israel to hold ‘infiltrators’ in prison 3 years.  I can see the prisons filling up fast!

 

In item 4 Ofra Ben Artzi writes about the “Guilt of the [military] Judges.  Would that they would feel guilty!  That, of course, is not the case.

 

Item 5 discusses the government’s intention to establish national parks in East Jerusalem, and reveals the actual purpose of these.

 

In item 6 Mark DeVine examines the real purpose of the supposed reason for the law recently passed refusing to allow Palestinian citizens of Israel to live in Israel with spouses from the OPT.  He focuses on what is really meant by the reason given for rejecting the right to live together, given as ‘security’ and shows to what it applies.  DeVine ends on a positive note.  May it come to pass.

 

In item 7 Professor Francis A. Boyle deals with the issue of “Oil, Dollar Hegemony, and Islam,”  but does not end on a positive note.  This rather longish analysis begins with a brief history of the negative aspect of US foreign policy then brings us up to the present, finding that an attack on Iran might possibly lead to a 3rd world war, and not only that, but a nuclear one.  I wonder if any riches in the world would justify such a horror?

 

Perhaps tomorrow will bring happier thoughts.

 

All the best,

Dorothy

++++++++++

1 Haaretz

Monday, January 16, 2012

Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister: Israeli settlement construction is ‘vandalism’

 

Nick Clegg makes statement during press conference with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who begins a three country European tour to consult the stalled peace talks.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/britain-s-deputy-prime-minister-israeli-settlement-construction-is-vandalism-1.407630

By Danna Harman and The Associated Press

Tags: Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas Israel settlements

 [as could be expected, Israeli officials did not like Clegg’s remarks

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16585237 ]

 

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said on Monday that Israeli settlement construction is “vandalism.” Speaking at a press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Clegg went on to accuse Israel of undermining attempts to broker a Middle East peace deal by continued settlement construction.

“Once you’ve placed physical facts on the ground that makes it impossible to deliver something that everyone has for years agreed is the ultimate destination… it is an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise on which negotiations have taken place for years and years and years,” Clegg said, referring to settlement construction.

Abbas was meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy as part of the Palestinian leader’s three country European tour, which takes him from London to Berlin to Moscow this week.

He is expected to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other officials on Tuesday and Wednesday, and with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev Thursday. According to a statement from Abbas’ office, the objective of the trip is for the Palestinian leader to “consult with foreign leaders on the exploratory talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators that have been taking place in Amman.”

Abbas’ tour comes as a Jan. 26 Quartet deadline for the resumption of peace talks looms nearer, and following remarks by the Palestinian president concerning “measures” the Palestinians would take against Israel if this most recent attempt to revive negotiations fails.

+++++++

2

PCHR
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

Press Release

 

Ref: 5/2012

Date: 16 January 2012

 

PCHR Welcomes PLO Approach to Swiss Government Requesting the Convening of a Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention

[The 4th Geneva Convention relates to the Protection of Civilian Persons in time of War; the text can be found at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/380 The concern of the PCHR is human rights, and therefore the subject of the 4th Geneva convention with relation to the Palestinians is close to its heart. Dorothy]

 

 

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) welcomes the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) recent contact with the Swiss Government requesting the convening of a conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention. The conference is intended to address the measures necessary to enforce the Convention in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and to ensure its respect. This move is essential in light of the systematic violations of international humanitarian law perpetrated by Israeli forces in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), and the pervasive impunity which accompanies these violations.

 

The request for this conference originated recently in a General Assembly Resolution of 5 November 2009, issued in accordance with the follow-up to the Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (the ‘Goldstone Report’). Since that date, PCHR has consistently advocated for a conference, highlighting the urgent need for accountability in the oPt. The PLO’s recent move, although overdue, must be encouraged; it is necessitated by the ongoing, systematic violations of international humanitarian law, and the inaction of the Israel and the international community with respect to the pursuit of accountability. It is PCHR’s firm belief that a genuine legal approach must be adopted in order to address systematic violations of international humanitarian law, and to ensure the protection of innocent civilians.

 

The High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention may undertake a number of measures intended to enforce, and ensure respect for, international humanitarian law. PCHR notes that this is a legal obligation arising from, inter alia, Articles 1 and 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Coercive measures open to the High Contracting Parties include: the non-renewal of trade agreements; a reduction or suspension of public aid; and a restriction or ban on the trade of arms, military technology and scientific cooperation. The High Contracting Parties must also uphold their obligation under Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to search for and prosecute those suspected of committing grave breaches of the Convention, regardless of their nationality.

 

Two previous conferences of the High Contracting Parties have been convened with the intention of ensuring Israel’s respect for international humanitarian law, on 15 June 1999 and 5 December 2001. However, in both these instances States’ obligation to ensure respect for

international humanitarian law was sidelined in the name of political interests. In particular, the conferences were suspended following, in particular, heavy American political pressure using the resumption of peace talks as a pretext.  PCHR notes that the requirements of international humanitarian law cannot be ignored, be it for political expediency, or any other reason. The obligation to ensure respect for the Fourth Geneva Convention binds all States, under “all circumstances”. The shortcomings of previous conferences must not be repeated.

 

It is evident that if the rule of law is to be respected, it must be enforced. The history of the occupation has clearly shown that as long as Israel is allowed to continue acting as a State above the law, it will continue to violate international law. It is innocent Palestinian civilians, the ‘protected persons’ of the Fourth Geneva Convention, who will continue to suffer the horrific consequences.

 

The convening of a conference of the High Contracting Parties offers a welcome opportunity to ensure that international humanitarian law remains capable of serving those it is mandated to protect. PCHR stresses that it is imperative that this conference be held, and that it result in practical measures intended to ensure respect for the Fourth Geneva Convention in the oPt.

For more information, please see PCHR’s memorandum: ‘Ensuring Respect for the Fourth Geneva Convention: Convening a Conference of High Contracting Parties

[for

 Public Document

**************************************

For more information please call PCHR office in Gaza, Gaza Strip, on +972 8 2824776 – 2825893

PCHR, 29 Omer El Mukhtar St., El Remal, PO Box 1328 Gaza, Gaza Strip. E-mail: pchr@pchrgaza.org, Webpage http://www.pchrgaza.org

+++++

3  Haaretz

Monday, January 16, 2012

In Israel, some are more equal than others

When the regime is not restricted, when equality pertains only to those whom the court likes, then the ‘infiltrators’ who can be held for three years without trial can easily be those who infiltrated a public park to protest and to sleep in.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/in-israel-some-are-more-equal-than-others-1.407510

By Merav Michaeli

When you read about new laws that will reduce human rights in Israel, you probably have thought to yourselves: Oh well, they only apply to Arabs (and Africans ) and so everything else will be okay.

Indeed, the Citizenship Law is a huge blow to the family rights of Arab women and men, you may have thought – but it is essential for preserving security. It’s true that the new legislation against infiltrators turns refugees into criminals simply because they are in Israel – but it is essential for preserving a Jewish majority here. These are undemocratic laws, which not only do not protect equality, but create discrimination – but they are still necessary for protecting the Jewish state. And, you may be thinking, since the Jewish majority is the top priority of the government, the Knesset and the Supreme Court, such non-democratic legislation will not actually affect us, we Jews living in Zion.

Well, you had better think again.

The designated president of the Supreme Court, Asher Grunis, makes it clear in ruling on the petition against the Citizenship Law that he is opposed in principle to extending the meaning of rights mentioned in the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom, since “the result is likely to be contempt for the constitutional rights.” According to this logic, contempt is apparently not evident in the statement by Justice Miriam Naor in this ruling – that a citizen has a right to family life, but who said it has to be realized in his own country? – but rather is found in the acceptance of this right as part of the human right of dignity and freedom.

An upside-down world.

On Sunday, the police – using unnecessary force – evacuated the tent city in the Hatikva quarter of Tel Aviv, which was a protest encampment but also the living quarters of people who have no other home. Unlike the demonstrators who pitched “symbolic” tents this summer, and then dismantled them and went home at the end of that particular chapter of the protest, a number of tents remained for those who had nowhere else to go. But the Tel Aviv municipality, which is so ecologically minded and concerned about “the only green lung available to the residents of the neighborhood,” insisted that these people be evacuated.

When the tent-dwellers went to court over the evacuation – stating that the Hatikva residents actually support them and their struggle, that their right to protest was being infringed and, mainly, that according to law it is the municipality and not only the Housing Ministry that is authorized and supposed to “provide housing for people of limited means” – they were rejected by the judge.

The reason: the principle of equality that the authority has to uphold, so as “not to create a situation of discrimination in favor of those who have chosen to live in tents, as compared with the situation of other, homeless people who did not take the law into their own hands and set up a tent city in a public park.”

That’s right: We are talking about the right to equality when it comes to not having a roof over your head – the right to equality among all those who have nothing. Judge Avigail Cohen also hit the nail on the head with respect to the logic of Justice Naor, and stated that “a person’s right to a place to live … does not mean the right to live precisely in Tel Aviv.”

Perhaps a person should be a resident of one town, live in another – and set up a family in a third country? Then all of his rights will be upheld according to these latest rulings.

Justice Aharon Barak earlier misused the principle of equality when he ruled in 2004 that social workers who had not been paid a salary for a year (! ) because of a municipal deficit, could not receive their wages directly from the Social Affairs Ministry because this would constitute a blow to the equality of other municipal workers who do not get a salary. Six years prior to that, Justice Mishael Cheshin emptied the term “substantive equality” of substance when he explained that perhaps Muslim religious services need not receive the same budgets as Jewish religious services.

So don’t be so sure. Justice Edmond Levy quoted Prof. Gualtiero Procaccia, who wrote that “the legal system is merely a reflection of society, and if society is altered, then by itself the legal system is altered, for better or worse. Only the internal forces of the society can prevent its deterioration.”

When the regime is not restricted, when equality pertains only to those whom the court likes, then the “infiltrators” who can be held for three years without trial can easily be those who infiltrated a public park to protest and to sleep in.

++++++++++

4. The guilt of the judges

By: Ofra Ben-Artzi

11 January 2012

It has recently been reported that the IDF Military Advocate General opposes the Prime Minister’s initiative to put violent Jewish settlers on trial in military courts (Haim Levinson and Tomer Zarhin, Haaretz 27 December 2011). Indeed, those courts have quite a different role. For years my comrades and I have been monitoring the military courts at Ofer and the Russian Compound, which hear the cases of Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories. From the hundreds of trials that we have reported on we have learned that the role of the military judges in the Israeli system to control the Palestinian population goes beyond a mere rubber-stamp. They give a judicial seal of approval, without which the Occupation would have ended long ago.

In order to understand the scene in court you have to know the scenes that go along with it. It all starts with the scene of the arrest, where soldiers act with overt brute force. They seize Palestinians and put them into detention in operations that look like kidnappings to the Palestinians. The next scene takes place in concealed interrogation rooms, where Israel Security Agency (ISA – Shin Bet) agents interrogate the Palestinians using “special” methods.

The interrogations produce “confidential reports” that are shown to the judge for the purpose of repeated extensions of detention, until the Palestinian is “ripe” to move on to the next scene – the court. Nearly 100% of Palestinian suspects (according to the report of the military courts for 2010) proceed from there to the last scene – prison. About a million Palestinians have made this journey since June 1967.

The military judges who have deprived an entire nation of its freedom and criminalized the majority of its members for nearly half a century now are no less violent than the soldiers and the interrogators. On the contrary; the judges exploit their positions of honour, their educations and the intellectual authority they get from being perceived as principled people to wreak havoc in violation of international law. Those judges, who diligently and knowingly strive to dress the Occupation in a cloak of law and justice, are worse than the other actors, who at least not do not pretend to be what they are not. The soldier and the interrogator do what they have been taught to do, whereas the military judge pretends to “promote justice and the integration of the rule of law.” (Quote from the website of the IDF Military Advocate General) http://www.law.idf.il/320-en/Patzar.aspx But that is just a pretense, because there can be no justice in a territory where two justice systems exist side-by-side – one for the occupied indigenous population and another one for the colonizing occupiers. When we watch the hundreds of children and minors who pass like a flock of sheep before a female judge, the injustice cries out to the heavens.

In the Russian Compound in Jerusalem the role of the judges is to authorize the prolongation of detention for interrogation purposes at the request of the ISA. In Israel a suspect can be interrogated for 24 hours without seeing a judge – in the Russian Compound a Palestinian can may undergo eight days of interrogation before seeing a judge, and 21 days before meeting with a lawyer.

We have been present at the trials of dozens of Hamas members who were put on trial after the Palestinian Authority elections in 2006. We saw them brought for trial in their masses – from someone who just waved a flag at an electoral rally all the way up to members of parliament and ministers. They were accused of purely political crimes, defined as “membership”, “activity”, or “holding a position” in an “unauthorized association”. It happened ex post facto, after legal elections the legitimacy of which was recognized by the whole world including Israel. Was there even one judge who did not go along with it?

If Fatah and Hamas reconcile, then Fatah is liable to go back to being an illegitimate hostile entity. Will there then be one judge who will refuse to give that a stamp of approval? Based on what I have read on the website of the Military Advocate General (MAG), it must be assumed that the answer is no: “At the end of the day, our objective is to contribute to the sec0urity of the State and in our unique way to gather the terror activists of the various factions in prison.” Thus a military prosecutor describes the “procedures in the military courts in Judea and Samaria” (from a blog on the MAG website). This young prosecutor is likely to become a military judge one day. In the face of such a coalition the inferior status of the Palestinians and their defence counsels is clear, and it is no wonder that the outcome is a 99.76% rate of conviction.

The author is a member of Mahsom Watch.

Translated from Hebrew by George Malent

++++++

5 Independent commentary and news from Israel & PalestineCategories

 Monday, January 16 2012

News Analysis Life Images Activism Voices

+972blog

http://972mag.com/national-parks-in-east-jerusalem-a-new-method-in-the-occupation-toolkit/32931/

‘National Parks’ in East Jerusalem: New tool in occupation toolkit

The establishment of national parks in East Jerusalem may sound like a nice idea that fosters the preservation of natural reserves – but in reality, it is a crafty method the Israeli government and its institutions have found to keep East Jerusalem under Israeli control and prohibit Palestinian territorial contiguity, rights and independence.

By Zvi Benninga

Since 1967, the overarching objective of the state of Israel regarding Jerusalem has been to secure it as a Jewish city. The borders of the city, which demarcate an area a bit bigger than the city of Paris, were drawn in order to control the most land with the least number of Palestinians. But, alas, the Palestinians were there to stay and over the years the population has increased over 300,000, nearly 40% of the city’s residents.

Israel has since instituted policies aimed at repressing the Palestinian residents of the city, curtailing the natural growth of their neighborhoods and ensuring Jewish demographic majority and dominance throughout the city. They have done this by building mega settlement-neighborhoods beyond the Green Line such as Gilo and Har Homa; by revoking the residency of thousands; by supporting extremist settlements in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods (complete with gun-toting state-funded private security); by failing to formulate master plans in East Jerusalem, withholding building permits and then demolishing houses which are declared illegally-built. All of these policies ensure Jewish territorial contiguity between Jerusalem and the settlements in the West Bank while eliminating any chance for Palestinian territorial contiguity that would allow an independent and viable Palestinian state.

Necessity being the mother of invention, Israel always comes up with new ideas for how to implement its strategy. An increasingly common method in recent years is the creation of new national parks. It seems there are already five of these parks in East Jerusalem and more on the way, while West Jerusalem does not have even one. These parks, operated by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA), a governmental body, enables the state to appropriate private Palestinian land while avoiding the international rebukes which overt settlement building brings about. Under Israeli law the state does not even have to compensate the owners for land on which national parks are built. A real bargain: “steal one, get one free.” The INPA is headed by a number of high-profile settlers including its general manager, Saul Goldstein, who was previously the head of the Gush Etzion regional council, and Evyatar Cohen, placed in charge of the Jerusalem branch of the INPA and formerly employed by Elad, the settler organization which runs the “City of David” National Park in the middle of the Palestinian village of Silwan in East Jerusalem.

The Mount Scopus Slopes ‘National Park’

Within a week, yet another political “national park” is to be established – this time on land of the residents of Issawiya (Mount Scopus, where Hebrew University is located) and A-Tur (on the Mount of Olives). The INPA and the Jerusalem Municipality have already begun work on what is called the “Mount Scopus Slopes” park, which is being built directly on land belonging to Palestinian residents of A-Tur and Issawiya, and may even entail the demolition of approximately 50 Palestinian homes and structures. Over the past decade, the residents of A-Tur and Issawiya sought, with the help of the Israeli planning rights organization, Bimkom, to submit development plans to the Israeli courts. These plans – which seek recognition of the rights of Palestinian residents in these two neighborhoods to initiate their own building and development plans in cooperation with the authorities- were neither accepted nor rejected by the courts. Despite the extensive resources and research that went into them, they were never even discussed.

The Mount Scopus Slopes park is strategically located such that it will create Israeli territorial contiguity between the Old City and the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in what is known as the area of E1.

E1 Plan Map (Photo: Ir Amim)

The US government has consistently opposed Israeli building in E1, since it will permanently seal off any chance for a Palestinian state in the West Bank with a capital in East Jerusalem – which means the end of the two-state solution. The US government’s opposition to Israeli activity in E1 has been unequivocal, not only under the Obama administration, but under the previous Bush administration as well. In October 2005, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated: “We have told the Israelis in no uncertain terms that [settlement in the E1 area] would contravene American policy.” Building a “national park” in E1 is the Israeli government’s ill-disguised attempt to circumvent clear-cut American opposition to settlement in E1. It is apparent that the goals of this park are political and not ecological.

According to many planners and urban development experts there is no special ecological interest in these areas, which are located in the middle of two Palestinian villages. Indeed, according to a member of Jerusalem’s city council, Meir Margalit, “This national park is a farce. There’s nothing there but rocks and thorns, certainly nothing to justify a national park. The only reason for such a plan is to seize lands and hold them as a reserve for a future settlement, while suffocating the Palestinian neighborhoods.”

More than just suffocating Palestinian growth, the specific placement of this “national park” corresponds neatly with the agenda of some of leaders of the settlement movement and the government: the creation of facts on the ground. Although the project is still pending final approval Jerusalem municipality tractors, trucks and bulldozers have begun construction work on the project.

The residents of Issawiya and A-Tur have decided to fight for their right to live on and develop their land. The joint struggle against this expulsion is not only a moral duty but also a chance to strengthen genuine partnership between Israelis and Palestinians who are working for a free civil society in our area. Please Join us in supporting them:

For more information,see Bimkom’s in-depth report about National Parks in East Jerusalem

Zvi Benninga is an activist in the Solidarity movement and a medical student at Hebrew University.

5 Al Jazeera

Monday, January 16, 2012

Mark LeVine

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012114143038377629.html

The “Palestinian demographic bomb” is a myth created to continue discrimination against Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs.

Israel’s Separation Wall and hundreds of checkpoints prevent travel between the occupied Palestinian territories and the state of Israel for most Palestinians and Israelis [GALLO/GETTY]

Irvine, California – Say what you will about Israel’s High Court of Justice, it knows how to name a decision.

In titling last Wednesday’s legal decision, upholding the controversial Citizenship Law that prevents Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from living in Israel “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide”, the court’s majority well summed up the existential predicament Israel faces today – indeed, has always faced – as it attempts to be both Jewish and democratic.

“National suicide” is, of course, an incredibly loaded term in the Israeli context. In the historical shadow of the Holocaust, Chief Justice Asher Grunis’s appellation immediately raised the spectre of an existential threat to the Jewish people, or nation (Am Yisrael), being posed by the mere possibility of Palestinian Arabs joining Israeli society through marriage.

Right-wing lawmakers such as National Union chairman Ya’acov Katz have declared that the law would protect Israel from “the threat of being flooded with two-to-three million Arabs from outside its borders”. But such claims are utterly nonsensical. The true number, as Grunis and the five other Justices who joined the 6-5 majority surely know, would be in the low thousands.

So why would they argue that allowing Palestinian spouses to become Israeli, which as the decision’s title clearly admits is a basic human right, constitutes an act of “national suicide” for Israeli Jews?

To answer this question, we need to consider other possible meanings of the national suicide claim. We could imagine that the justices believe that recognising such marriages would accelerate the already “dangerous” trend towards demographic equality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, based on higher fertility rates among Palestinians.

The only problem with this oft-repeated claim is that it’s false; the growth rate among the Palestinian population of Israel has actually slowed in the past decade, while those of religious Jews has exploded.

The true meaning of human rights

Simply put, the threat of a Palestinian “demographic bomb”, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has called it, is little more than a contrivance to justify the further exclusion of Palestinians from full citizenship rights within Israel.

But accurate or not, the average Jewish Israeli is likely not spending much time parsing the logic or statistical foundations of the High Court’s decision – because they understand the deeper meaning of the argument underlying the decision’s title: to extend full human rights to Palestinians will lead inevitably to the “national” – that is, political – suicide of Israel as a Jewish state.

Why?

Because to recognise that Jews and Palestinians can become one in the most intimate way possible – through love, sex and children – is to open Israeli Jews to the possibility that there is nothing essential that separates them from Palestinians, that as human beings with deep roots in this land, Palestinians have the same human rights as Israeli (or diaspora) Jews.

Once people accept this reality, Zionism – which, at its core, is based on the exclusive Jewish claim of rights to and sovereignty over the Land of Israel – loses whatever remains of its moral and political legitimacy.

Israel’s unwanted citizens

Such a recognition, then, would spell the death knell, not of Israeli Jews as people, but of Zionism as a viable political ideology.

Indeed, the High Court’s decision reveals the paradox at the heart of Israel’s political foundations – that its very claim to be both democratic and Jewish has always been a lie, because no state which privileges, through law, power and policies, one group over others simply because of the most basic identity (religion, ethnicity or gender, for example) of its members, can be democratic in any meaningful sense of the term.

And so, with all the sadness and regret that such an occasion deserves, Justice Grunis declares that “a small group – those men and women in Israel’s Arab minority who want to marry residents of the region – must pay a heavy price for greater security for all Israelis, including their own”.

This language is crucial for two reasons: first, its unquestionable racism reveals the cancer at the heart of contemporary Israeli political ideology – not among the hilltop settler youth attacking Palestinian shepherds or the haredim who spit on pre-teen Jewish girls – but at the very heart of Israel’s political and juridical establishment.

If the highest judge of Israel’s highest court can stoop to such a decision, then Israel is not heading “down the slope of apartheid”, as Haaretz editorialised in criticising the decision – it’s already there. And the chances of it climbing out are slim indeed.

Second, the language reveals Justice Grunis’ understanding that, thanks in good measure to the past six decades of Israeli policy, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention the majority of Palestinian refugees) are citizens of nowhere. They are merely “residents” of “regions” whose future is still in dispute; a purgatory which Israeli courts have played a major role in sustaining through innumerable decisions that have legalised and institutionalised – at least as far as the Israeli state is concerned – occupation, settlement, expropriation of land and resources and the stripping of basic human rights from Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line.

Apartness to apartheid

This “apart-ness” from Israeli Jews and the full benefits of citizenship that accrue only to them, is of course the core principle of apartheid as a political and territorial system. And it is the “heavy price” that must be paid “for greater security for all Israelis, including their own”.

“Their”, of course, refers only to Israeli Jews – not their Palestinian fellow citizens.

The indigenous population as the ultimate “other” against which a national identity must be forcibly constructed is a basic trope of almost every national identity that has emerged on the soil of a conquered people. In Israel’s case it goes back not merely to the beginning of Zionism, but to the construction of the earliest Hebrew/Israelite identity in the biblical era, as recounted in the Hebrew scriptures.

In Before Israel: The Canaanites as Other in Biblical Tradition, one of the most underutilised articles on the deep history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Robert L Cohn argues that there are two primary origin myths through which ancient Israelites understood their interactions with the native Canaanite population of the land they believed to have been promised and given to them by God.

The more well-known narrative, which he terms the conquest and settlement arche (origin myth), is located primarily in the Books of Joshua and Judges. In it, the Canaanites are depicted as the dangerous “other” who exist both before and within the People of Israel. To justify their dispossession by the People of Israel, they were described as “horrendous sinners” and “defilers” of the land; a belief that had to be constantly reinforced since the Canaanites were not merely continuing to live among Israelites, but were sharing their most intimate practices – from sex to worship – with them.

Indeed, the cultural and linguistic overlap between Canaanite and Israelite societies meant that Israelite religious and political leaders had to spend significant energy to ensure that the members of the tribes who defined themselves through their exclusive worship of only one God kept themselves apart from their polytheistic (or at least more theologically syncretistic) neighbours.

At the same time, they had to discourage any attempt to see or treat Canaanites as part of the Israelite community, or even as a legitimate presence in the land the Israelite tribes believed had been given to them by God.

“[After the occupation, Israel faced a problem]: how to keep the conquered population from corrupting and weakening the still fragile national identity?”

What is interesting is that there is another, earlier, arche surrounding the Canaanites, this one from the Book of Genesis. In these earliest descriptions of Canaanites, they are not yet a conquered people, but rather the legitimate masters of their land. God’s promise to Abram – he had not yet become “Abraham” by entering into a direct covenant with God – was to give the land to him and his descendants in the future, after generations of suffering and servitude at the hands of others.

For the moment, as Cohn points out, Abram and his family were “the aliens, the wanderers, the endangered”, while Canaanites the legitimate occupants of the land.

This is one of the most powerful, yet disheartening insights of the Bible: that without power, without sovereignty and a state or government that can wield violence over others, people becomes aliens in their own land, or even worse, wanderers outside the bounds or protection of any political community. In short, “Palestinian”, which is the best contemporary description for the existence of Jews during their almost 2,000 years of exile between the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

The price of conquest

With the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the initiation of the settlement project by Jews in the Occupied Territories, Israelis were faced with a similar problem to that faced by their Israelite ancestors: how to keep the conquered population from corrupting and weakening the still fragile national identity while exploiting the people, territory and resources for the benefit of the core community?

Israeli settlements continue to expand on illegally annexed Palestinian land [GALLO/GETTY]

The deeper and more entrenched the occupation became in the decades after 1967, the more integrated Palestinians became into Israeli society, and thus the more of a threat they constitute to the “national” existence of Israel as a Jewish, yet ostensibly democratic state.

Oslo was supposed to solve this problem by creating two ethnically and territorially differentiated states. [If I recall correctly, the Oslo accords do not include a Palestinian state D].  But the peace process and its policy of “integration through separation” could neither slow down the continued territorial integration of the West Bank with Israel, nor offer the kind of globalised cosmopolitan identity that would overcome and heal the divisions and imbalances in power and rights between the two communities.

And so Chief Justice Grunis is right when he warns that Israel is headed for “national suicide” if it grants Palestinians the human rights they deserve; not physically, but as a viable polity.

The main question is whether, in an even more dystopian version of Thelma and Louise, Israel will take Palestine with it over the ledge – and whether Palestinian national identity imagined as a mirror image of an exclusive Zionist Israeli identity has become so weakened and corrupted through a century of conflict and occupation that it has neither the political nor ideological power to bring independence and justice to Palestinians.

Not suicide, but reinvention

The irony that Justice Grunis fails to note is that the only way for Israel to avoid suicide is precisely to respect and protect fully the human rights of everyone living in historic Palestine/Eretz Yisrael, without exception. It is only through a reinvention of Israeli national and political identity based on an open and holistic vision that Israelis Jews can ensure they retain their fundamental rights, as the country inevitably evolves away from a two-state system and towards a common, if conflicted, existence.

This is, not surprisingly, the same dilemma facing Israel’s Arab neighbours. But with the exception of Tunisia, which is just now celebrating the first anniversary of Ben Ali’s flight from the country, no governing elite has been willing to allow the real empowerment of their citizens through a real democratic process that is grounded in respect for the fundamental human rights of all citizens.

Whether in Tel Aviv, Cairo, Manama, Sanaa or Damascus, oppressive governments deploying chauvinistic identities that set neighbours against each other might survive in the near term. But the very ideology and tactics deployed to preserve them will ultimately cost the regimes, and the communities they claim to be protecting, their futures.

In choosing power over human rights, Israel is merely leading the way towards a future that has no place for Zionism or the region’s other repressive and chauvinistic political systems and identities, against which millions of citizens across the Arab world have rebelled in the last year.

Indeed, if the new year is anything like the one just past, the coming Arab Spring will see more and more of the supposed beneficiaries of the status quo reaching out beyond their narrow interests to begin the hard work of constructing a common future.

This will be the lasting legacy of the still inchoate revolutions of the last year, and it’s a future that not only Arabs and Israelis, but the world, has a powerful stake in helping to build.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

 

Follow him on Twitter: @culturejamming

6  Forwarded by Anwar

Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BOY20120115&articleId=28661

by Prof. Francis A. Boyle January 15, 2012

 

Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America’s manifest destiny to rule the world.

Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the twentieth century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain – in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against the Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal conditions from which they still suffer today- all in the name of securing America’s so-called place in the sun.

And today at the dawn of the twenty first century, the world witnesses the effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Moslem states and peoples, surrounding central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy which is total nonsense.

For the past two hundred and sixteen years, the imperialist foreign policy of the United States of America since its foundation, has been predicated upon racism, aggression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third millennium of humankind’s parlous existence, nothing has changed about the operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack upon Iran.

Now the topic today is the Middle East Agenda : Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam. So, I’m only going to limit my comments to that subject. We have to begin the story with the Arab oil embargo in nineteen seventy-three. As you know in nineteen sixty-seven, Israel launched an illegal and preventive war against the surrounding Arab states, stole the land and ethnically cleansed the people. But eventually Egypt offered a Peace Treaty to Israel which Israel rejected and the Egyptians and the Arab states decided then to use force to recover their lands.

Israel almost collapsed, the United States and Europe came to their support by providing weapons and in reaction the Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States and Europe, and brought their economies to their knees. Whereupon, the then U.S Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger threatened them and said, this will never happen again, and if you do, we will prevent it. And it was not just a threat. The United States government then at that time, planned, prepared and conspired, to steal the oil of the Persian Gulf. They did not have the military capability to do this at that time, to carry out the Kissinger threat, which was also then repeated by the Ford administration, and the Carter administration under Harold Brown and Brzezinski.

So they put into planning an interventionist force, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing Arab oil fields, and that was called the rapid deployment force. And it took ten years of training, planning, positioning, and supply to build that interventionist force of that capability and eventually it was called the U.S. Central Command. The purpose of the U.S. Central Command is to steal and control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. And that’s exactly what the U.S. Central Command proceeded to do in the Bush Sr. war against Iraq, their first military expedition.

And as we know, that war exterminated probably two hundred thousand Iraqis. Half of them innocent civilians. Simply wiped out in a bombing campaign and a military expedition of unprecedented dimensions. But remember, it took fifteen years for the Pentagon and three different administrations both Republicans and Democrats to get the capability to do this. And then, when that genocide or conflict was over, what happened? The United States carved Iraq up into three pieces with their air force, the so-called no-fly zones, a zone for the Kurds in the North, a zone for the Shi’ah in the South, and the Sunni in the middle. Why? To destroy Iraq as an effectively viable state.

In his book, Clash of Civilizations, Huntington from Harvard who advised the Pentagon and advised the state department pointed out that the only Arab state with the capability to lead the Arab world and challenge the United States and Israel was Iraq. And so Iraq had to be destroyed, to maintain the domination of the United States and its proxy, Israel. And remember after nineteen seventy-three, whatever it was before then, Israel is nothing more than a catspaw of the United States. They do what America tells them to do. Otherwise Israel is nothing more than a failed state.

In addition then, to destroying Iraq as a state, carving it up into three pieces, was the decision to debilitate and destroy the Iraqi people. And so they continued the genocidal economic sanctions on the people of Iraq, that my colleagues, Denis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, so courageously resisted and finally resigned as a matter of principle, calling them by what they really were, genocide. The United States and Britain maliciously and criminally imposed genocidal sanctions on the people of Iraq, that killed approximately 1.5 million Iraqis, all of whom were innocent civilians.

And when U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the five hundred thousand dead children, she said that she thought the price was worth it. Now, I could have taken that statement to the International Court of Justice, and filed it against the United States as evidence of genocidal intent against the people of Iraq in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. And indeed I offered to do so to the then President of Iraq, but for whatever reasons he decided not to take these claims to the International Court of Justice.

And now, as you see, he is on trial in a total kangaroo court proceeding in Baghdad that is completely controlled and dominated by the United States government. So, 1.5 million Iraqis died as the result of these genocidal sanctions. And then came September 11. And we know for a fact that the Bush Jr. administration knew that a major terrorist attack was going to be launched on the United States. And they let it happen anyway deliberately and on purpose. Why? They wanted a pretext for war. And not just one war but for a long war which they are talking about today.

Indeed, from my research the war plans drawn up by the Pentagon for the war against Afghanistan were formulated as early as 1997. Enormous military forces fielded by that same U.S. Central Command, were already in and around and surrounding the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean before September 11. This war had been planned against Afghanistan. And armed, equipped, supplied, trained and war-gamed and ready to go. They just needed the pretext and that was September 11. Why? The United States wanted access to the oil and natural gas of Central Asia.

That had been a Pentagon objective since at least before the collapse of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety-one. And the Nine Eleven attack gave them the pretext to make this major grab for the oil and gas of Central Asia. And they are there today with their bases, with their troops, in the surrounding countries in Central Asia. And of course in the process, obliterated, we don ‘t even have an estimate of the Muslims in Afghanistan who were killed in the air bombardment, twenty, twenty five thousand, maybe more, and tens of thousands of others starved to death and still suffering today.

But that, as we know from all the records was only the first step in the process. They wanted to finish the job in Iraq. And so immediately after September 11, Bush ordered Rumsfeld to update and operationalize the plans for attacking and invading Iraq. It had nothing at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. We in the peace movement in America had been saying that all along. The United Nations had determined there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These were lies designed to scaremonger the American people and Congress into supporting an illegal war of aggression, a Nuremberg crime against peace, against Iraq. And they told whatever lies and broke what international laws they had to break in order to attack Iraq.

And today the estimate, again we don’t know. Perhaps two hundred thousand people in Iraq had been killed outright by the United States, Britain, its allies, Australia in Iraq. And again, most of them civilians. Clearly if you add up what United States government has done to Iraq from August of 1990, when it imposed the genocidal economic embargo until today. The United States and Britain have inflicted outright genocide on the Muslim and Christian people of Iraq and they are predominately Muslim as we know.

Now comes the third step in the Pentagon’s pre-existing plan, to control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It’ s sounds a bit like the plan that Hitler and the Nazis had in the 1930″s. Does it not? First go into Austria, then go into Czechoslovakia, then go into Poland. So first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Iran. And so now Iran is going to be the next victim of these outright criminals unless you and I can stop them.

Right now there are three aircraft carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf. And whenever they had put three aircraft carrier task forces over there, it’ s always to prepare for an attack. And according to Seymour Hersch, the award winning journalist, it will probably be an aerial bombardment, along the lines of what they did to Yugoslavia in 1999. As you remember there, seventy eight days of aerial bombardment by the United States and NATO with no authorization from the Security Council. Clearly illegal. Killing again, we don’t know the exact number outright, four to five thousand innocent civilians. And targeting civilian infrastructure, all up and down, from which the people still suffer today. The use of depleted uranium ammunitions, outbreaks of cancer are documented today.

So this is what, is being planned right now as we speak; an attack upon Iran. Using jet fighter aircraft, fighter bombers, on these three aircraft carrier task forces, using cruise missiles on submarines and of course Israel will be involved and have a role to play, doing exactly what the Americans tell them to do. In addition, it appears that if they attack Iran, they will also attack Syria. Yesterday, if you heard President Bush’s press conference in Vienna, he threatened Syria, right? There’s no other word for it. He threatened Syria.

These Neo-Conservatives want to take out Syria as a favour to Israel. Remember, many of these Neo-Conservatives are affiliated personally and professionally with the Likhud Party in Israel and Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, the man who exterminated twenty thousand Arabs in Lebanon, most of them, not all of them were Muslims. And in addition, slaughtered two thousand completely innocent Palestinian women, children and old men at Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon, the man who went to Haram Al-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam, where Muhammad, (Peace Be Upon Him) ascended into heaven, and desecrated the Haram on September 28th, 2000, and deliberately provoked the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and has inflicted death and destruction on the Palestinian people since then. Close to thirty seven hundred Palestinians since then alone have been killed..most of them shot down like dogs in the street, and what has the Muslim world done about this?

My Palestinian friends tell me that they are worried that the government of Malaysia might recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations with Israel. I certainly hope this is not true. We must treat the criminal apartheid regime in Israel, the same way the world treated the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa. If the United States attacks Iran, they will probably attack Syria with the Israeli air force and they will attack Lebanon to take out the Islamic resistance movement in southern Lebanon – Hezbollah that defended the legitimate rights of Lebanon and the Lebanese people and expelled the invading longstanding occupying Israeli army that had the full support of the United States government for over twenty years.

So they could attack Iran, Syria, Southern Lebanon and inflict yet another round of ethnic cleansing on the suffering Palestinian people. Remember Sharon and Likhud believe that Jordan is Palestine. And they want to drive as many Palestinians as possible out of their homes and into Jordan.

So if the United States as reported by Hersh and other reliable sources, goes ahead and attacks Iran, we could see warfare erupt all the way from Egypt to the border with India. This whole area convulsed in warfare. And who will be the primary victims of this war? Muslims. The United States could not care less about Muslim life. Look at the demonization and victimization of Muslims that we have seen inflicted by the United States and its surrogate, Israel. Look at Guantanamo, where six hundred Muslim men have been treated like dogs in a kennel. Pretty much the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Look at Abu Ghraib and the sadism and sexual exploitation and perversion of Muslims by their American captors. And the same thing has been done in Baghram in Afghanistan. And when Professor Sharif Bassiouni, the UN special rapporteur filed the report with the Security Council against US practices in Afghanistan, the Americans had Kofi Annan fire him. Just as they had Kofi Anna fire Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for human rights, when she protested what was going on down in Guantanamo.

The United States could not care less about Muslim life. And the same is true for the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel. They would be happy to use nuclear weapons against Iran. They would be happy to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against Muslims in Iran. It would create no problem at all for them. Indeed, I went to school with these Neo-Conservatives at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz was there, Chalabi, Khalilzad, Shulsky, all the rest of them. I went through the exact same program. Their mentor, Professor Leo Strauss. And who was his teacher in Germany and his sponsor? Professor Carl Schmitt who went on to become the most notorious Nazi law Professor of his day, justifying every atrocity that the Nazis inflicted on everyone.

We must understand that these Neo-Conservatives are in fact Neo-Nazis. They have espoused the Nazi doctrine of Schmitt and Strauss and Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the ‘superman’. They are the supermen, and the Muslims are the scum of the earth.

Now, I do not believe the United States will initially start bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. But if things get out of control they are fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons. And here in our materials, you have the Pentagon’s Joint Publication 3-12, which you can get on the internet.. just do a Google search and read it. And you will see there dated fifteenth March 2005; nuclear, tactical nuclear weapons have been fully integrated into United States conventional forces.

So if Iran were to defend itself, human wave attacks, whatever, they will be happy to use nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Remember, these Neo-Nazis, Neo-Cons want to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They want to use tactical nuclear weapons, to be able to say to the rest of the world, you do what we tell you to do or else look what we did to the Iranians.

It’s a very serious situation. And this could even get further out of control. Remember that before Bush invaded Iraq, President Putin of Russia said that if he invades Iraq he could set off World War Three. Well, I interpreted that as an implicit threat. Even the famous American news broadcaster Walter Cronkite said that if Bush invaded Iraq he could set off World War Three. Two weeks ago we had the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; China, Russia and Iran. So again, if Bush were to attack Iran, he very well could set off a Third World War, a nuclear war. And that is where you come in.

Francis A. Boyle is a leading American expert in international law. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare & Terrorism. And Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

 

Francis A. Boyle is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Francis A. Boyle

————————–

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BOY20120115&articleId=28661

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *