NOVANEWS
1 The Independent
Tuesday 14 February 2012
Israel rejects Palestinian hunger-striker’s appeal
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-rejects-palestinian-hungerstrikers-appeal-6912578.html#
Donald Macintyre
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
A Palestinian prisoner who human rights organisations say may be “approaching death” after 58 days on hunger strike has lost his appeal against an order holding him for four months without trial.
An Israeli military appeals court ruled yesterday that Khader Adnan, 33, who is shackled to a hospital bed in the town of Safed, Galilee, will have to serve his full term of detention – even though he has not been told why he is being held.
Mr Adnan began refusing food the day after his arrest at his home in the village of Arrabe near Jenin in the occupied West Bank on 17 December. He continued refusing food after being subjected to what his lawyers say was physical abuse, threats of assault, insults, prolonged interrogation and “unsanitary” conditions of detention.
The case has overtones of the hunger strikes by IRA prisoners in the early 1980s, 10 of whom died after not eating for between 55 and 75 days, according to a British Medical Association study.
Mr Adnan’s wife, Radna, told Human Rights Watch that her husband had been arrested nine times since 1999, and was convicted of being a spokesman for the militant organisation Islamic Jihad.
The rights group said it condemned the armed wing of Islamic Jihad’s attacks on Israeli civilians as war crimes. But it pointed out that Israel has not claimed Mr Adnan has participated in such attacks or been charged with any other crime.
Israel’s prison service has insisted that Mr Adnan is being treated humanely in accordance with his “definition as a security-administrative prisoner”.
2 Ali Abunimah is author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He is a co-founder of the online publication The Electronic Intifada and a policy adviser with Al-Shabaka.
The Electronic IntifadaBooksRSS
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/20122148513674313.html
Starving for freedom: The hunger strike of Khader Adnan
Khader Adnan, currently on hunger strike in an Israeli prison, runs the risk of dying without international help.
14 Feb 2012
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According to Amnesty International, as of December 31 last year, 307 Palestinians were in Israeli administrative detention, including 21 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council that was elected in January 2006 [EPA]
Amman, Jordan – By the time you read these words, Khader Adnan could be dead. After 58 full days on hunger strike, his body is already well past the stage where his vital organs may cease to function at any moment. But Khader Adnan is dying to live.
The 33-year-old Palestinian baker, husband, father, and graduate student has refused food since December 18, a day after he was arrested in a nighttime raid on his family home by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank. He has lost over 40 kgs and his wife Randa and young daughters have described his appearance as “shocking”.
Adnan, whom Israel says is a member of Islamic Jihad, was given a four month “administrative detention” order by the Israeli military – meaning that he is held without being charged for any crime or trial, a practice continued by Israel that dates back to British colonial days.
Yesterday an Israeli military court rejected Adnan’s appeal against the arbitrary detention. Having vowed to maintain his hunger strike until he is released or charged, the judge – an Israeli military officer – might as well have sentenced Khader Adnan to death, unless there is urgent international intervention.
Though the life in his body hangs on by a thread, his spirit is unbroken.
Hundreds of Palestinians join hunger strike
“The Israeli occupation has gone to extremes against our people, especially prisoners,” Adnan wrote in a letter published through his lawyer, “I have been humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason, and thus I swore to God I would fight the policy of administrative detention to which I and hundreds of my fellow prisoners fell prey.”
According to Amnesty International, which has issued two urgent appeals on Adnan’s behalf, as of December 31 last year, 307 Palestinians were in Israeli administrative detention, including 21 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council that was elected in January 2006.
“I hereby assert that I am confronting the occupiers not for my own sake as an individual, but for the sake of thousands of prisoners who are being deprived of their simplest human rights while the world and international community look on,” Adnan wrote in his letter.
In addition to Amnesty, Human Rights Watch too has heard Adnan’s message, calling on Israel to release or charge him.
Adnan’s insistence on his dignity and autonomy and his unwillingness to be broken by an overwhelmingly powerful oppressor contrasts starkly with the increasingly directionless and unprincipled actions of Palestinian leaders who continue to make dubious “reconciliation” deals that go nowhere, and pursue “negotiations” with Israel that have no chance of liberating Khader Adnan, his young daughters and millions of their countrywomen and men from Israel’s occupation, colonisation and apartheid.
Adnan’s fast has drawn support from people all over the world. Hundreds staged peaceful protests outside Israel’s Ofer Prison – where they were met with violence and arrests by Israeli police – and other protests were held as far as Washington DC, New York and Chicago. Many others have fasted in solidarity with Adnan.
Khader Adnan’s struggle reminds us that nonviolence is not the easy choice. It is often the harder one.
Yet the world is still failing to act. The Palestinian prisoner’s group Addameer undoubtedly spoke for many when it declared that it “holds the international community responsible for not taking action to save Khader’s life”. It demanded “that the European Union, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross intervene with Israel immediately before it is too late”.
And there has been silence too from prominent voices such Nick Kristof, the New York Times columnist famous for using individual stories to draw attention to human rights abuses around the world. In a 2010 column titled “Waiting for Gandhi”, Kristof scolded Palestinians for not adopting nonviolent tactics.
Of course Kristof was ignoring or simply ignorant of the rich history and present of such popular resistance in Palestine ably documented by Mazin Qumsiyeh in his recent book, Popular Resistance in Palestine: a History of Hope and Empowerment- which includes hunger strikes. Last Autumn hundreds of Palestinian prisoners spent weeks on hunger strike against punitive Israreli prison conditions, and many are on hunger strike now in solidarity with Adnan.
“If Kristof and others claim to be ‘waiting for Gandhi’ why haven’t they spoken up for Adnan?”
But if Kristof and others claim to be “waiting for Gandhi” why haven’t they spoken up for Adnan? After all it was Mahatma Gandhi himself who when repeatedly imprisoned by the British famously used hunger strikes to draw international attention to his people’s cause.
In more recent memory are the Irish hunger strikes by IRA and Republican prisoners in Belfast’s Maze Prison in 1980-81. Ten of the men – most famously Bobby Sands, just 27 years-old, who endured 66 days – fasted to death. During his strike Sands was even elected a member of the British Parliament – a fact murals on the walls of Belfast still commemorate by affixing the letters “MP” after his name.
The government of Margaret Thatcher refused to yield to the demands of the hunger strikers to be treated as political prisoners. Yet their sacrifice galvanised global support and greatly embarrassed the British, pressure that arguably contributed to eventual peace.
A message of support from Tommy McKearney
Last week Tommy McKearney, who spent 53 days on hunger strike in 1980, sent a video message of solidarity with Khader Adnan. McKearney, himself a former member of the IRA, lived to contribute to peace in his country, just as his comrades did with their deaths.
But Bobby Sands and his comrades need not have died had wiser, more humane policies prevailed at the time. And Khader Adnan need not die today or tomorrow. But it will take the world to speak out now to save him.
The determination, unflinching courage and self-sacrifice of Adnan’s hunger strike has captured the imagination and support of people everywhere. He deserves our respect, but more importantly right now, he needs us to raise our voices.
Ali Abunimah is author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He is a co-founder of the online publication The Electronic Intifada and a policy adviser with Al-Shabaka.
Follow him at: @AliAbunimah
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3 BBC 14 February 2012
Gaza’s only power station closes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17028000
By Jon Donnison
BBC News, Gaza City Political instabiilty in Egypt is believed to have reduced fuel supplies to the power plant
The authorities in Gaza say the Palestinian territory’s only power station has shut down because of a lack of fuel.
The closure is believed to be caused by a shortage in fuel being supplied through smuggling tunnels from Egypt.
Power cuts, already common, are expected to increase. The station provides around 30-40% of Gaza’s electricity.
The rest of the electricity used by the territory is supplied by Israel.
The Gaza Power Company said the strip would soon be “swimming in a sea of darkness”.
Supplies of fuel smuggled into the territory have diminished due to the recent Egyptian political unrest.
Many families and businesses have private generators to avoid the blackouts. But fuel for those is also hard to come by.
This week long queues can be seen outside petrol stations with people worried about filling up their cars.
A statement from the power station called on Egypt to allow more fuel to pass through the tunnels. It also blamed Israel’s continuing blockade of the Palestinian territory.
Hamas came to power in 2007.
Last year Egypt eased restrictions allowing people to travel more easily, but all legal trade is still forbidden and the tunnel industry continues to thrive.
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4 Haaretz
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Israel Project: ‘American Hispanics are the most hostile toward Israel’
The founder of the influential pro-Israel advocacy group, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, is leaving, and the hunt is on to find her replacement.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/the-israel-project-american-hispanics-are-the-most-hostile-toward-israel-1.412851
By Chemi Shalev
The Israel Project recently conducted a public opinion poll in Jordan that shows that ‘things do not look good for the King.’
Americans of Hispanic origin, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, are relatively hostile towards Israel because they are ignorant about Middle East affairs and are influenced by traditional anti-Israeli Catholic views, according to the Israel advocacy group, The Israel Project (TIP).
In a media briefing in New York to mark the resignation of TIP’s founder, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the group’s Executive Director for the Americas, Allan Elsner, said that Israel is more popular among older Americans, Republicans, conservatives and Evangelicals and less popular among “liberal elites”, African-Americans and Democrats. Elsner said that the Israel Project was focusing its efforts on “groups where we have a problem.”
In the global arena, according to TIP’s Executive Director of Global Affairs, Laura Kam, the Project has found anti-Israeli public opinion in Europe difficult to budge and is therefore devoting most of its efforts on the continent to working with local Jewish communities.
At the same time, TIP is rapidly expanding operations in Russia, China and India where people “are less interested in the conflict and more in Israeli innovation,” Kam said. But the same approach of trying to “brand” Israel by highlighting its creativity and innovation is “a complete fiasco” in the United States, according to Laszlo Mizrahi, because Americans “are not interested.” In America, she says, one has to focus on Israel’s “quest for peace, shared values and the common front in the fight against terrorism.”
Laszlo Mizrahi founded the Israel Project ten years ago and turned it into one of the most influential pro-Israel advocacy groups in America, with 75 employees, a $12 million annual budget, a 240,000 strong mailing list and an Arabic media website with 300,000 “likes”, half of them from Egypt.
She does not seem to be a great fan of Israeli hasbara efforts, saying that the government should be spending more money on its public relations. Israel, she once said, “is the only government that puts on TV people with a face for radio, and the only government that puts on radio people with an accent for print.”
She said that her group spends over a million dollars a year on polling and focus groups, pinpointing the messages and words that work most effectively. She said that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress last year was formulated in consultations with TIP, as are other statements put out by the Israeli government. She said that TIP deserves much of the credit for the large support that Israel receives in American public opinion.
Laszlo Mizrahi also revealed that her group had recently conducted a poll in Jordan and that “it does not look good for the king”.
Commenting on her decision to leave an organization with which she is so closely identified, Laszlo Mizrahi said that too many Jewish organizations in America are “dominated by strong people who make decisions for the entire organization.” She said that contrary to other groups, TIP is “performance based and run like a business” by TIP’s board of directors, which includes six million-dollar donors.
Laszlo Mizrahi added that TIP had hired an executive recruiting company that would find her replacement before she departs in five months. She expressed confidence that TIP would continue to function well even after her departure. “But I will always be the founder of the Israel Project,” she added.
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5 Le Monde Diplomatique
‘Don’t ever let the Palestinians feel at ease’
Israel: a mission to disrupt
http://mondediplo.com/2012/02/11israel
by Meron Rapoport
In testimonies collected and published by the NGO Breaking the Silence, we learn what Israeli soldiers did, and were expected to do, in the West Bank and Gaza in the past decade, to impose the occupation
“I’ll tell you when I flipped. We were in action in Gaza… We were in a trench and children got closer and threw stones. The orders were that the moment [a Palestinian] can hit you with a stone, he can hit you with a grenade… so I shot him. He was 12, or 15, something like that. I don’t think I killed him. I’m saying that … to sleep better at night. I flipped when … I talked about it with my friends [and] family: I was fucking aiming [a weapon] at someone and I shot him in the leg, in the ass. Everyone was happy, they made me a hero, they announced it in the synagogue. I was in shock” (1).
In his book If This Is a Man (2), Primo Levi recalls a dream he kept having in Auschwitz; later he learned that many other prisoners had the same dream. He was back home, telling his family about the horrors of Auschwitz, but nobody was listening; they left the table and went away. This was his nightmare: to tell his story and not be heard, or understood.
Gaza is not Auschwitz, and the Israeli soldiers whose testimonies are collected in Occupation of the Territories are not Shoah survivors. Yet they share with Levi the need to tell their stories. Those around them are not interested, they feel threatened by the stories and prefer to ignore them or reinterpret them within their existing ideas of how things work in Gaza, the West Bank, behind the Wall, behind the newly reconstructed checkpoints which look more like international border-crossing facilities than the military outposts of an occupation army.
“What did you want the parents of this soldier to say to him?” said Avihai Stoler, an ex-soldier who helped to collect the testimonies for the book. “‘Don’t worry, kid, you killed a child, so what?’ The parents prefer not to understand his dilemma.”
The book collects testimonies from men and women who have served in the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza in the last 10 years, since the beginning of the second intifada. It is the most comprehensive insider account of Israel’s modus operandi in the occupied territories – not the decisions taken in high places, just the everyday reality of Israeli military control over Palestinian homes, fields, roads, property and time, the lives and deaths of inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza.
Some 40-60,000 Israeli conscripts have served in combat units in the last decade (3). All are likely to have spent some time in the occupied territories (except for those in the air force or navy). Seven hundred and fifty of them were interviewed for this book – 1-2%. The sample is far larger than that needed for an opinion poll or an academic study, so it can’t be denied that this is the way things work.
The ‘normal’ soldier
Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), which collected the testimonies, was founded in 2004 by some Israeli soldiers who had served in or around Hebron and wanted show Israeli society, and the world, what the occupation felt like. At first they tried to publish horror stories: photos of soldiers who cut off the heads of Palestinians killed in battle and stuck them on the barrel of their guns. But later, they understood that cases of extreme cruelty missed the point. “We are not interested in the soldier who abuses an old man at a checkpoint,” explained Michael Menkin, a founder of the group. “We are interested in the soldier who stands beside him, the ‘normal’ soldier.”
Even so, the book chronicles war crimes: a mentally handicapped Palestinian beaten so badly that he bleeds all over; Palestinian passers-by sent to detonate suspected bombs at the top of a minaret because the military robot cannot climb the stairs; the killing of a unarmed Palestinian because he was standing on a rooftop (“Why did I shoot, you ask me today? Just out of pressure. I surrendered to the pressure of the guys,” according to one testimony). There are also the premeditated executions of unarmed Palestinian policemen in revenge for an attack on a checkpoint; the orders from a high-ranking officer on how to deal with a presumed terrorist lying wounded or dead (“You approach the corpse, you put a [gun] barrel between its teeth and shoot”); the stealing, looting or destruction of property.
But “this book is not a Tsahal [army] horror show,” said Stoler. “It is the story of a generation, our generation.” In the first 30 years after the 1967 war, much of the debate within Israel centred on the occupation – the need for it, its evils – but in the last 15 years the word has almost disappeared. Israelis will talk about Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, or just “the territories”, without using the word “occupied”. The word “occupation” became almost taboo, not to be spoken in public. I was working on a television show and one of the guests said that violence in Israeli society was rising “because of the occupation”. My colleagues in the control room were alarmed. They pleaded with me – tell the anchorman to ask the guest to take back the word. As if it had the power to burn them.
There are several reasons. The terrorist attacks of the second intifada gave the army carte blanche, in the view of the Israeli public, to “prevent terrorism”. The futile “peace process” became background music, and convinced Israelis that there was no rush to solve the conflict; it made them feel the conflict was already solved because the Israelis had already agreed to give up the territories, have a two-state solution and grant self-determination to the Palestinians. Israel’s most influential columnist, Nahum Barnea, recently wrote: “The story of the territories is over.” Time ran a cover story in September 2010 titled “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” (4).
‘Our mission was to disrupt’
There is a military factor. Since the beginning of the second intifada, and especially since the construction of the Separation Wall, military control over the Palestinians has become more systematic and “scientific”. The book translates the military jargon, and Breaking the Silence, based on these testimonies, proposes new terminology better suited to the realities: it suggests we talk of “spreading fear among the civilian population” in the West Bank and Gaza rather than “terror prevention”; “appropriation and annexation” instead of “separation”; “controlling every small detail of Palestinian lives” rather than “Life Fabric” (the military term for the road system that serves the Palestinians); and “occupation” rather than “control”.
“Our mission was to disrupt – this was the phrase: to disrupt and harass the lives of the citizens,” reads one of the testimonies. “This is how our mission was defined, because the terrorists are citizens, and we want to disrupt [their] activity, and the operational way to [do this] is to harass the lives of the citizens. I am sure of this.” Harassing the locals and disrupting their lives is not just carelessness or abuse but the cornerstone of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Avihai Stoler, who spent almost three years in the Hebron area, met Israeli soldiers who had detonated explosive devices in the centre of a village “so that they will know we were here”. According to Stoler a “noisy patrol”, “violent patrol”, “manifestation of presence”, “low-key activity”, “Happy Purim”, are all names for a regular type of action: to enter a village or city in force, throw shock grenades, erect makeshift checkpoints, carry out random house searches, remain there for hours or days “to produce a sense of being persecuted, so they will never feel at ease”. Stoler was citing his orders.
Stoler and Avner Gvaryahu served in an elite unit whose activity had been measured (so they were told by a high-ranking officer) by the number of dead terrorists. They are aware that people don’t want to hear what they have to say. Not a single Israeli TV crew came to their book launch, only foreign media. “My father is second generation after the Shoah,” said Gvaryahu; “In his eyes, we are the persecuted.” But both he and Stoler are optimistic; both of them believe that eventually Israeli society will understand what is being done on its behalf and will change, because it is society that needs fixing, not the army. “I was once interviewed by a Colombian journalist,” said Stoler. “She asked me what all the fuss was about: in Colombia soldiers chop off insurgents’ heads on a daily basis and nobody pays attention. But I think Israeli society wants to be moral. This is what drives us forward; without this collective will there is no point in our action.”
Israeli society was taken hostage, said Gvaryahu. The hostage takers “have an interest which is not ours, they don’t have a face, and we [got] Stockholm syndrome, we fell in love with our kidnappers. It is easy to say that the settlers are our kidnappers, the face behind the scene. I don’t think so. The only face behind the kidnapping is our own.”
Original text in English
Meron Rapoport is a journalist at Haaretz, Tel Aviv
(1) Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence, an NGO), Occupation of the Territories, chapter 1, testimony 45, Tel Aviv, 2010.
(2) Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, Everyman, 2000.
(3) Israel does not publish official data on its armed forces. In 2004 the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated there were 85,000 conscripts in the Israeli army. Assuming 10-15% were combat troops, this means 10-15,000 conscript combat soldiers. Military service in Israel is three years, so it is fair to assume that 40-60,000 Israeli conscripts have served in the Occupied Territories over the past 10 years; www.globalsecurity.org/milit…
(4) Karl Vick, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace”, Time, 2 September 2010.
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6 Today in Palestine
February 13, 2012
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/f_shadi/message/3402
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7 Love under Apartheid—Palestinians tell their individual stories in 6 separate 5 minute videos
http://loveunderapartheid.com/