Dorothy Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS
Dear Friends,
 
Today’s 3 major Israeli newspapers all finally remembered Khader Adnan.  Perhaps the fact that he has recently received a fair amount of attention in the international press induced them or whoever had put the gag on his case to relent.  In any event, the Haaretz piece is below (item 2).  The Jerusalem Post and Ynet published the Reuters’ report on Adnan [Ynethttp://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4190972,00.html
Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=258281 ]
 
I have found no more recent updates than the ones included below and in ‘Today in Palestine’ [item 7].  I think that there is a good chance that if he dies, which is not unlikely (though I hope not), his death is very likely to ignite a fire much larger than Israel’s authorities had counted on.  The situation is volatile.  Adnan is right.  It’s bad enough being incarcerated for fictional charges, but at least ones that can be fought out in court.  But Administrative Detention (a British leftover from the Mandate  period) is criminal.
 
The terrible tragedy of the bus crash yesterday left 9 children and 1 adult dead and many more injured http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/10-killed-as-palestinian-children-s-bus-truck-collide-near-jerusalem-1.413257
 
As for the items below, there are 7.
 
Items 1 and 2 pertain to Khader Adnan—item 1 being a Donald Macintyre
report and commentary on Adnan, comparing him to Bobby Sands, the first of 10 Irish men who died as a result of their hunger strike in prison under the British.  Item 2 reports that thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in Gaza and the West Bank protesting the mistreatment doled out to Adnan.
 
Item 3 relates indirectly to Adnan’s case.  A former Palestinian political prisoner relates his experience in jail under Israeli control.
 
Item 4 is the OCHA report Protection of Civilians Weekly Report
 
In item 5 Mazin Qumsiyeh lists events and activities and reports that might interest you.
 
Item 6 is long but is one of the better analyses on the present situation with Iran.  Phyllis Bennis writes “We’ve seen the threats against Iran before.”  One thing that is not clear to me is that at the end she calls for a nuclear free Middle East.  I’m all for that.  But why only the ME?  Why not a nuclear free world?
 
Item 7 is Today in Palestine for February 17.  It begins this time with a section on Gaza.  The section on Adnan, which comes later, contains items 1 and 2 above.  Truth is that I had checked earlier and had not found ‘Today’ for the 17th, so thought to send this without it.  But a few minutes ago it was on the internet, and only then I saw that there was duplication.  Truth is that I’m just too lazy to remove the first 2 items and redo this.  I apologize.
 
I hope to wake up tomorrow to more positive news, particularly about Khader Adnan.
 
Goodnight,
Dorothy
+++++++++++
1 The Independent
Friday, 17 February 2012
 
Khader Adnan: The West Bank’s Bobby Sands
Khader Adnan’s two-month hunger strike has made him a hero among Palestinians outraged by Israel’s policy of arbitrary detention
 
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/khader-adnan-the-west-banks-bobby-sands-6988943.html#
 
Donald Macintyre
 
It was only after talking with lucidity and animation for an hour about her husband’s 61-day hunger strike that Randa Jihad Adnan’s eyes, visible though the opening of her nekab, filled with tears. Until then, this articulate 31-year-old graduate in sharia law from Al Najar University in Nablus, the pregnant mother of two young daughters aged four and one and half, had described with almost disconcerting poise the two months following the arrest of her husband, Khader Adnan, on 17 December.
 
He was seized at 3.30am by some of the scores of Israeli military and security personnel who surrounded the family home in a West Bank village south of Jenin, and is now being held in the Israeli Rebecca Ziv hospital in Safed. On Wednesday she was allowed to visit him with the children and her father-in-law.
 
There they found him, weak and extremely thin, his beard unkempt and his fingernails long. He was shackled by two legs and one arm to his bed, and was connected to a heart monitor. Though mentally alert, he could speak only with difficulty. “I was shocked,” she said yesterday. “I couldn’t speak for about three minutes, and it was the same for my daughters.”
 
Mrs Adnan is convinced that the Israeli authorities only allowed the visit because they wanted the family to put pressure on her husband to end his hunger strike. He had started this on 18 December in protest at his arrest, his treatment and the subsequent detention order served on him.
 
“My father-in-law said to him: ‘We want you to stay alive. You cannot defeat this state on your own.’ He told him he wanted him to end the strike. I told him I wished he would drink a cup of milk. But he said: ‘I did not expect this from you. I know you are with me all the time. Please stop it.” Mrs Adnan said yesterday: “I know my husband. He will not change his mind. I expect him to die.”
 
The day before the visit, a Red Cross delegation had gone to her home to warn her that her husband’s heart could fail “at any minute”. They told her that he was suffering from muscular atrophy, which was affecting his heart and stomach, that his pulse was weak, and that his life was now in extreme danger.
 
Physicians for Human Rights issued a medical report this week supporting a petition to the Supreme Court for his release. In it the group said that even though Mr Adnan had agreed to be treated with an infusion of liquids and salts, augmented by glucose and vitamins, he had refused to end his hunger strike and was in “immediate danger of death”. The report added that a fast “in excess of 70 days does not permit survival”.
 
The Supreme Court petition, for which no date has been set for a hearing, is the last judicial chance to save his life as Mr Adnan has said he will not end his fast until he is released from his four months of administrative detention. A military appeals court ruled this week that he must remain in detention until May.
 
Mr Adnan, 33, a mathematics graduate who runs a bakery in nearby Qabatya, has long been politically active. He has been convicted for being a spokesman of Islamic Jihad, one of the most militant Palestinian factions. And he has been arrested numerous times by Israel, and at least once by the Palestinian Authority, since leading a student demonstration in 1999 at Bir Zeit University against the visiting French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
 
But his family insists that he has never been involved in violence; nor has he been charged with it. Indeed, on this occasion, he has not been charged with any crime. His hunger strike has focused growing attention on the practice of administrative detention, in which Palestinians can be held without trial and on the basis of secret intelligence dossiers which are not shown to the defendant or his lawyers.
 
With international groups like Human Rights Watch demanding his release, and almost daily demonstrations in his support outside the Ofer military court near Ramallah, his case is fast taking on some of the political resonances of Bobby Sands, the most famous of the 10 IRA prisoners who died on hunger strike in prison in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s. Sands, an elected MP, died after 66 days without food.
 
Sitting with her older daughter, Maali, in front of a poster of her husband proclaiming “I reject administrative detention and I will continue the hunger strike until I am released”, Mrs Adnan said that he is determined to continue his fast. His resolve has been hardened, she said, not only by his summary arrest and its circumstances (he was seized while in the lavatory) but by his treatment during interrogation. She claimed her husband had been held for seven-hour periods – interspersed with one-hour breaks – on a short chair with his hands tied behind its back, causing him intense discomfort, and that parts of his beard had been torn out by interrogators.
 
She said he had also been subject to psychological pressure, which his lawyers told her he raised in one of his several military court appearances. “They told him bad words about me. They said ‘your wife is not pure’. They told him ‘now you have been arrested she is free to do anything.'” She says he told the military court that one interrogator later admitted to him: “We know you love your wife and that she loves you. That’s why we said things against her.”
 
Mrs Adnan, who said that her husband had repeatedly declared that “my honour is more precious than food”, added that her only hope now is that Israel will decide “to whiten its face in the world by releasing him”. She said that it is for him to take the final decision, and that when she urged him to drink milk she was mainly carrying “a message from his mother.”
 
Mr Adnan’s sister – also called Maali – tentatively acknowledged the possibility that her brother might yet be persuaded that he had done enough to transmit his message to the world protesting about the use of administrative detention without trial or charge. But, saying that Mr Adnan was a model father who “loves life”, she added: “I am not sure that he wants just to deliver a message. He also wants to end the administrative detention. We have so much faith in Allah to get him out of this situation. We believe that God will not let him down.”
 
Randa Adnan recalled that her husband told one of his lawyers: “I do not want to go to oblivion or death. But I am a man who defends his freedom. If I die it will be my fate.”
+++++++
2  Haaretz
Friday, February 17, 2012
 
Thousands rally in Gaza, West Bank in support of Palestinian jailed in Israel
‘We are all Khader Adnan,’ chant Palestinians in Gaza, referring to the Islamic Jihad leader who is on the 62nd day of a hunger strike to protest his detention by Israel.
 
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/thousands-rally-in-gaza-west-bank-in-support-of-palestinian-jailed-in-israel-1.413543
 
By Reuters
Tags: Palestinian Gaza West Bank
Several thousand Palestinians rallied in Gaza and the West Bank on Friday in support of jailed Islamic Jihad leader Khader Adnan, who is on the 62nd day of a hunger strike to protest against his detention by Israel.
 
“We are all Khader Adnan,” chanted crowds gathered in the Gaza Strip, with activists from the main political parties joining forces in a rare display of Palestinian unity.
 
Adnan, 33, has been refusing to eat since mid-December following his arrest in the occupied West Bank. He is being held under so-called “administrative detention”, which means Israel can detain him indefinitely without trial or charge.
 
The Islamic Jihad group, which advocates the destruction of the state of Israel, has said it will escalate violence if Adnan dies, following reports that his health was deteriorating.
 
“We will pursue our Jihad and resistance. We will sail in the sea of blood and martyrdom until we land on the shore of pride and dignity,” top Islamic Jihad leader Nafez Azzam said during a Friday sermon at Gaza’s oldest al-Omari mosque.
 
The Physicians for Human Rights group in Israel (PHR), which has been monitoring Adnan’s condition in an Israeli hospital, said on Friday he was “in immediate danger of death”, adding that he had suffered “significant muscular atrophy”.
 
The Israeli army has said in a statement that Adnan was arrested “for activities that threaten regional security”. It has not given further details.
 
Adnan owns a bakery and a fruit and vegetable shop in his West Bank village, Arabeh. He has served as a spokesman for the Islamic Jihad, which describes him as a local leader.
 
More hunger strikes
 
At least 5,000 people took to the streets of Gaza, waving a mix of black Jihad flags, the green flags of Islamist group Hamas and the yellow flags of the secular Fatah movement of
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
 
Witnesses said hundreds had also demonstrated in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.
 
Palestinian officials said many other prisoners in Israeli jails had started hunger strikes to support Adnan, including Hassan Salama, a senior armed commander of Hamas who is serving life terms for masterminding suicide bombings against Israelis.
 
Palestinian prisoners have regularly staged hunger strikes in the past to try to gain better conditions or to denounce the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories.
 
However, such protests usually end quickly and officials said no-one had persisted for as long as Adnan, who is married with two children and whose wife is expecting a third infant.
 
The Islamic Jihad’s Azzam accused Arab states and Western powers of ignoring Adnan’s protest. “Shame on the nations of hundreds of millions (of Muslims) for the fact that Khader Adnan is still in prison,” he said in his Friday sermon.
 
Hamas, which governs Gaza, said it was pushing the Arab League and Egypt to press for the release of Adnan.
 
“The Palestinian people, with all its components and its factions, will never abandon the hero prisoners, especially those who lead this hunger strike battle,” said Hamas’s top authority in the Mediterranean territory, Ismail Haniyeh.
 
The PHR rights group said Adnan could die even if he broke his fast. “There is a risk to his health even if he starts eating now because his system has got used to not having any food at all,” a spokesman said.
+++++
3 Friday, February 17 2012 +972blog
Independent commentary and news from Israel & Palestine
Ex-political prisoner shares journey though Israeli jails
There were 4,937 political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centers in November 2011 according to Adameer, a Palestinian non-governmental organization. Yazan Abdulhadi was one of them before he was released on November 28, 2011, between the two swaps of the deal between Israel and Hamas to free Gilad Schalit (not as part of the deal). On January 7, 2012, he agreed to give an interview that would be published in +972 Magazine. The conversation took place in Ramallah, at Café Pronto.
By Alexis Thiry
Yazan spent 15 months in Israeli prisons, accused of being a member of a student union affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which Israel claims is a terrorist organization. Israel can arrest any member of an illegal political group in the West Bank, based on a British law enacted during the time of the mandate.
His is the story of many Palestinians arrested for what Israel calls security concerns, but actually for political activity, in Area A, which is officially under full Palestinian civil and security control.  Sharing his experience in prison, he says, remains a “duty as long as there is a Palestinian prisoner still in the occupation’s prisons.”
His point of view as an insider helps reveal details of interrogation methods and living conditions in Israeli prisons.
Ramallah. August 9, 2010.
Abdulhadi was 22 years old when Israeli forces arrested him in the early morning of August 9, 2010. “My arrest came as no surprise for me since it was part of a broader campaign targeting university students with a political background,” he explained. Some of his “comrades had already been interrogated,” and his name, he says, was on a list. About 15 men, including a member of the intelligence, turned his room upside down searching for subversive books and evidence.
Handcuffed and eyes covered, he was escorted to a military vehicle that took him to a detention center located in the Israeli settlement of Beit El near Ramallah. After answering questions about his health, he was transferred to Jerusalem for interrogation. “Three or four of the policemen came into the room, and asked me to undress, which I refused,” Yazan said. “They threatened me with an electronic device, and they gave me an orange uniform similar to what you see on television.”
Jerusalem interrogation center. August-September 2010. 54 days of isolation.
“You are hiding something, you are a terrorist, you are a Nazi, you want to drink our blood,” the interrogators said, according to Yazan.
The investigation conducted by Israel’s Internal Security Agency (Shin Bet) about the student movement lasted 15 days in total, during ten of which he was refused legal advice. Yazan said his interrogators did not use physical torture but psychological pressure, such as blackmail, saying things like: “If you don’t talk, you father will!”, “If you don’t help us you will spend the rest of your life behind bars… If you don’t talk, we will give you to the Palestinian Authority intelligence for interrogation, and who knows how you will be treated over there.”
Yazan said he was made to sit on a chair for ten hours at a time, and not allowed to sleep, then given 30 minutes to rest in his cell before answering more questions by ten different officers from the intelligence agency.
During and after his interrogation, Yazan related that he was put in complete isolation for 54 days. His cell was two square meters, with no sunlight. The only people allowed to see him were the lawyer appointed by the Palestinian Minister of Prisoner’s Affairs, and Red Cross representatives, visiting every Monday. Neither of them was allowed to see either the interrogation room or the cell. Though he is skeptical about the authority these figures hold within the Israeli prison regime, they did provide some emotional support.
“Even lawyers don’t have much authority. It is known that your sentence is already a decision of the intelligence, not of the court,” Yazan said. “It [the legal representation] is like a decoration. During my interrogation, one of the officers told me I would be sentenced for one or two years, which was right.”
Meeting the Red Cross was his “lucky day”, he said. They brought some messages to his family. “I remember a lady who came one day and asked me if they gave me new clothes, and I said yes, they did yesterday. She laughed before telling me they always do that to show that prisoners are well treated.”
Ashkelon Prison. November 2011.  Nine months.
“Hearing stories about prison is nothing compared to what you experience,” Yazan said.
Since the Israeli authorities could only prove Yazan’s membership in an illegal organization based on the evidence the soldiers found in his room, and from previous confessions of other prisoners, the evidence was deemed insufficient to continue the interrogation. His case was finally sent to the military court where he was tried for membership in a student union affiliated with  the PFLP. Before he was convicted, he was transferred to a prison in Ashkelon, which was unusual: many of the prisoners there were serving long sentences in this facility, for conviction of charges of violence – they are known in Israel as prisoners with “blood on their hands.”
His trial started in November 2010 and ended in March 2011. The sessions took place twice per month in Ofer Prison, an incarceration facility near Ramallah. “Going there is a 15-hour journey during which you cannot possibly eat, smoke, or go to the toilet.” The guards ensuring the transfer between Ashkelon and Ofer have a reputation of being brutal and provocative, and stories of maltreatment circulate among prisoners, he said.
Birzeit University provided another lawyer for the trial, in addition to the one previously provided by Palestinian authorities. Since so many students get arrested, the university charges no fees if the defendant has no criminal background. Since Yazan knew the Shin Bet had already settled his case, he was advised to agree to a list of charges that equated to a sentence of 15 months.
As he spoke of daily life in Ashkelon, Yazan mentioned that Fatah and Hamas militants imprisoned there had separate cells to prevent tensions. Yazan did not live with conservative Muslims: “Personally, as a leftist, my lifestyle couldn’t possibly match with a Hamas prisoner who prays five times a day.”
He explained that nine other prisoners lived with him. Six of them were serving life sentences, three of whom were released after the Schalit deal. His most atypical cellmate was a Samaritan Palestinian. He said he was serving six life sentences for being part of the Palestinian resistance in Nablus where the small community of Samaritans, whose faith is closely related to Judaism, still exists despite the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
In prison, communication with the outside world is limited and closely controlled. Visits are regulated by Israeli authorities, and Yazan said they decided arbitrarily which prisoner can be visited. He was one of the luckiest. The Red Cross organized transportation for his mother and sister to see him. His other sister could not obtain clearance, because they had changed their family names when they married, lowering their eligibility for permits.
Prisoners listened regularly to a popular radio broadcast program in which a speaker reads messages posted by families. The show is the most effective bond prisoners have with Palestinian territories, since only one letter out of five reaches either the family or the prisoner, due to censorship.
“I got lucky because my brother in-law is employed at Radio Amwaj, and kept me posted on air about my family,” Yazan said.
Yazan related conversations he had with prisoners who had been incarcerated for 18 years. “He started to ask me some questions about Facebook.  I tried to explain, but…he was getting more and more confused about the technology. Some prisoners did not see the face of a woman for 30 years. How can they possibly understand that today young women are going to university?”
Ketsiot Prison. 21 days of supportive hunger strike.
Yazan Abdulhadi completed his 15 months sentence in Ketsiot between October and November 2011, during which he went on what is known as a “supportive strike.”  He explained there are two kinds of hunger strikes: The open strike signifies that you are prepared to fast even if you put your life in danger. The supportive strike is meant to express solidarity with those on open strike, but does not reach the same level of commitment.
There are currently some 20 Palestinian prisoners living in absolute isolation for “security reasons”, some of them for about 15 years. One of the goals of the hunger strike was to protest this solitary confinement. Another demand was to cancel the informal “Schalit policy” stating that “everything that Schalit did not have in captivity, Palestinian prisoner should not have, such as free Hebrew courses.” It is a retaliatory policy aiming to make Palestinian prisoners aware of what Schalit has been through.
“Now he is back home, and the pressure on the prisoners is just increasing,” Yazan said.
After 21 days of open strike in November 2011, an agreement was eventually signed with Israel to stop the practice of putting prisoners in solitary confinement. To date, the terms have not been honored.
Still, Yazan thought the hunger strike was a success: “Even if it didn’t end the case of isolation, it gave the prisoner a new spirit, it means we can put pressure on the authorities, just as they put pressure on us.” Yazan said.
Ramallah. 2012.
Yazan was released by the IDF on November 28, 2012. He spent 15 months in total in Israeli prisons, including four months in the Meggido and Ketsiot prisons. “Celebrating my liberation with my friends and family was one of the most intense moments of my life,” he said.
He now wants to put his student activism on hold until he graduates from university. He says he has had enough for the moment. “The question is not whether or not I have the right to be political. I do have the right to carry on, but the intelligence is watching released prisoners, and my only purpose now is to finish university.”
His experience left him bitter. “What I did was just selling books, and fighting for a less privatized education,” Yazan said. “I don’t understand the connection between that and security matters. I think Israel has a problem with organizations raising national consciousness.”
Alexis Thiry is a French-language editor of the Palestine News Network based in Bethlehem in the West Bank. His blog is called Des Visages et des couleurs
++++++++
 
4 OCHA Published: 2012-02-17
Protection of Civilians Weekly Report | 8 – 14 February 2012
 
Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip resulted in the killing of a Palestinian civilian and the injury of a child, as well as in property damage. Over 40 Palestinian-owned structures were demolished and a total of 126 people were displaced in Area C and East Jerusalem due to the lack of permits, the largest number in a single week in more than seven months.
http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_protection_of_civilians_weekly_report_2012_02_17_english.pdf
 
 
United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
Mac House
P.O.Box 38712
Jerusalem
Tel:++ 972-2-5829962/5853
Fax:++972-2-5825841
email:ochaopt@un.org
www.ochaopt.org
 
+++++++
 
5 From humanrights on behalf of Mazin Qumsiyeh [mazin@qumsiyeh.org]
February 17, 2012
 
We try in these emails to provide information that lead to action or directly ask you to take action based on conviction for our common humanity.  Convictions without action is not conviction.  Please try to take at least one action of compassion per day (or at least every other day). As a minimum, even from the safety of your keyboard, you can email letters to media and politicians (in other words not just messages to those
already converted) pressuring them to end wars and conflicts.   If one
tenth of those getting these messages act in this manner then that is 5000 actions per day.
 
 
 
Israeli Apartheid Week is around the corner.  Mobilize, organize, attend, spread the wordhttp://apartheidweek.org
 
 
 
*One single democratic state in Palestine: A Republic of all its citizens!
http://www.1not2.org (Hebrew, English, Arabic)*
 
 
One state conference at Harvard University March 3-4, 2012: The purpose of this conference is to bring students from across Harvard University together to enrich academic discussions about possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The aim is to explore the merits of a one-state solution, a framework in which Israelis and Palestinians can share a liberal democratic state. http://www.onestateconference.org/
 
 
 
Israel bars Al-Quds University doctors from practicing in East Jerusalem
 
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-bars-al-quds-university-doctors-from-practicing-in-east-jerusalem-1.412538
 
[I teach at Al-Quds University and Israel does not like the fact that it is called Al-Quds and is located in Abu-Dis (a suburb of Arab Jerusalem) so the apartheid system is punishing the graduates as a form of pressure/retaliation]
 
 
 
Israelis and others suppoprt United Methodist divestment from Israel” See names of 140 Israelis, statement from Jewish Voice for Peace and others here https://www.kairosresponse.org/Endorsement_Statements.html
 
 
 
Youth against Settlements program of activities next week in Hebron/Al-Khalilhttp://www.youthagainstsettlements.org/
 
 
 
Christ at the Check Point Conference, Bethlehem 5-9 March 2012 http://www.christatthecheckpoint.com/
 
 
Video: Shit Zionists Say (satire but scarily true) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyXD_Kq3q4U
 
 
 
Global March to Jerusalem (March 30) http://www.gm2j.com/
 
 
 
Welcome to Palestine Campaign (April 15-21) http://bienvenuepalestine.com/  and http://palestinejn.org/
 
 
Boycott Israel- Boycott Apartheid http://www.bdsmovement.net
 
 
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
 
Striving to stay human
 
http://qumsiyeh.org
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++++++
 
6  Al Jazeera
Friday, February 17, 2012
 
Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.
 
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/201221510012473174.html
 
RSS
 
 
We’ve seen the threats against Iran before
 
Although political brinkmanship with Iran is nothing new, escalating tensions do not bode well for the region.
 
Intelligence confirms that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons – which leads to speculation that the sabre-rattling is because Israel wants to remain the sole regional nuclear hegemon [EPA]
 
Here we go again with the Iran hysteria. It is tempting to think this time will be just like previous periods of sabre rattling against Iran. But there are significant new dangers. The Arab Spring, Israel’s position, changes in the regional and global balance of forces, and national election campaigns, all point to this round of anti-Iranian hysteria posing potentially graver risks than five or six years ago.
 
We have seen all this before. The US ratchets up its rhetoric, Israel threatens a military attack, escalating sanctions bite harder on the Iranian people, Iran refuses to back down on uranium enrichment. But at the same time, top US military and intelligence officials actually admit Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has not decided whether to even begin a building process.
 
There is certainly a big dose of déjà vu. In 2004 Israel’s prime minister denounced the international community for not doing enough to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In 2005 the Israeli military was reported to “be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran”. In 2006 the House Armed Services Committee issued a report drafted by one congressional staffer (an aide to hard-line pro-war John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN), claiming that Iran was enriching uranium to weapons-grade 90 per cent. That same year a different Israeli prime minister publicly threatened a military strike against Iran. In 2008, George W Bush visited Israel to reassure them that “all options” remained on the table.
 
 
Would the US back an Israeli attack on Iran?
 
The earlier crisis saw a very similar gap between the demonisation, sanctions, threats of military strikes against Iran, and the seemingly contradictory recognition by US, Israeli, United Nations and other military and intelligence officials that Iran actually did not possess nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapons programme, or even a decision to try to develop nuclear weapons.
 
The 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) determined that even if Iran decided it wanted to make a nuclear weapon, it was unlikely before five to ten years, and that producing enough fissile material would be impossible even in five years unless Iran achieved “more rapid and successful progress” than it had so far. By 2007, a new NIE had pulled back even further, asserting “with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme … Tehran had not started its nuclear weapons programme as of mid-2007”. The NIE even admitted “we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons”. That made the dire threats against Iran sound pretty lame. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that Newsweek magazine described how, “in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document”.
 
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA – the UN’s nuclear watchdog) issued report after report indicating it could find no evidence that Iran had diverted enriched uranium to a weapons programme. The UN inspection agency harshly rejected the House committee report, calling some of its claims about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons activities incorrect, and others “outrageous and dishonest”. And outside of the Bush White House, which was spearheading much of the hysteria, members of Congress, the neo-con think tanks, hysterical talk show hosts, and much of the mainstream media went ballistic.
 
Then and now
 
All of that sounds very familiar right now. Military and intelligence leaders in Israel and the US once again admit that Iran does not have nukes. (Israel of course does, but no one talks about that.) Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asked and answered his own Iran question: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. admitted the US does not even know “if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons”. The latest 2011 NIE makes clear there is no new evidence to challenge the 2007 conclusions; Iran still does not have a nuclear weapons programme in operation. According to the Independent, “almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions.” Former head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said “it is quite clear that much if not all of the IDF leadership do not support military action at this point.” But despite all the military and intelligence experts, the threat of war still looms.
 
“Republican candidates pound the lecterns promising that … Iran will accept international inspectors – as if the IAEA had not maintained an inspection team inside Iran for the last many years.”
 
 
Republican candidates pound the lecterns promising that “when I’m president…” Iran will accept international inspectors – as if the IAEA had not maintained an inspection team inside Iran for the last many years. We hear overheated rumours of Iranian clerics promising nuclear weapons to their people – as if Iran’s leaders had not actually issued fatwas against nuclear weapons, something that would be very difficult to reverse.
 
Some strategic issues are indeed at stake, but the current anti-Iran mobilisation is primarily political. It doesn’t reflect actual US or Israeli military or intelligence threat assessments, but rather political conditions pushing politicians, here and in Israel, to escalate the fear factor about Iranian weapons [however non-existent] and the urgency for attacking Iran [however illegal]. And the danger, of course, is that this kind of rhetoric can box leaders in, making them believe they cannot back down from their belligerent words.
 
Israel at the centre
 
One of the main differences from the propaganda run-up to the Iraq war is the consistent centrality of Israel and its supporters, particularly AIPAC in the US, in this push for war against Iran. Israel certainly jumped aboard the attack-Iraq bandwagon when it was clear that war was indeed inevitable, but US strategic concerns regarding oil and the expansion of US military power were first and primary. Even back then,Israel recognised Iran as a far greater threat than Iraq. And now, Israelis using that alleged threat to pressure US policymakers and shape US policy – in dangerous ways. During this campaign cycle, Obama is under the greatest pressure he has ever faced, and likely ever will face, to defend the Israeli position unequivocally, and to pledge US military support for any Israeli action, however illegal, dangerous, and threatening to US interests.
 
 
Inside Story – Will Israel attack Iran?
 
Iran simply is not, as former CIA analyst and presidential adviser Bruce Reidel makes clear, “an existential threat” to Israel. Even a theoretical future nuclear-armed Iran, if it ever chose that trajectory, would not be a threat to the existence of Israel, but would be a threat to Israel’s longstanding nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. That is the real threat motivating Israel’s attack-Iran-now campaign. Further, as long as top US political officials, from the White House to Congress, are competing to see who can be more supportive of Israel in its stand-off with Iran, no one in Washington will even consider pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law and human rights regarding its occupation and apartheid policies towards Palestinians. Israel gets a pass.
 
Israel is more isolated in the region than ever before. The US-backed neighbouring dictatorships Israel once counted on as allies are being challenged by the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Egypt’s Mubarak was overthrown, the king of Jordan faces growing pressure at home, and the threats to Syria’s regime mean that Israel could face massive instability on its northern border – something Bashar al-Assad and his father largely staved off since Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
 
Syria moves to the centre – two struggles in one
 
The calamity underway in Syria is also directly linked to the Iran crisis. There are two struggles going on in Syria – and unfortunately one may destroy the potential of the other. First was Syria’s home-grown popular uprising against a brutal government, inspired by and organically tied to the other risings of the Arab Spring, and like them calling first for massive reform and soon for the overthrow of the regime. Syria is a relatively wealthy and diverse country, in which a large middle class, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, had prospered under the regime, despite its political repression. As a result, unlike some other regional uprisings,Syria’s opposition was challenging a regime which still held some public support and legitimacy. The regime’s drastic military assault on largely non-violent protests led some sectors of the opposition to take up arms, in tandem with growing numbers of military defectors, which of course meant waging their democratic struggle in the terrain in which the regime remains strongest: military force. The government’s security forces killed thousands, injuring and arresting thousands more, and in recent weeks even the longstanding support for Assad in Damascus and Aleppo began to waver. Simultaneously, attacks against government forces increased, and the internal struggle has taken on more and more the character of a civil war.
 
 
Israel’s nuclear capabilities
 
The further complication in Syria, and its link to Iran, is that it has simultaneously become a regional and global struggle. Syria is Iran’s most significant partner in the Middle East, so key countries that support Israel’s anti-Iran mobilisation have turned against Syria, looking to weaken Iran by undermining its closest ally. (Perhaps because the Assad regimes have kept the occupied Golan Heights and the Israeli-Syrian border relatively quiet, Israel itself has not been the major public face in the regionalisation of the Syrian crisis.) But clearly Saudi Arabia is fighting with Iran in Syria for influence in the region. The Arab League, whose Syria decision-making remains dominated by the Saudis and their allied Gulf petro-states (such as Qatar and the UAE), is using the Syria crisis to challenge Iran’s rising influence in Arab countries from Iraq to Lebanon. And of course the US, France and other Western powers have jumped on the very real human rights crisis in Syria to try to further weaken the regime there – in the interest again of undermining Iran’s key ally far more than out of concern for the Syrian people.
 
(Anyone uncertain about the hypocrisy of Washington’s claimed human rights concerns, as well as its willingness to embrace the Assad regime in the wake of 9/11, need only look to the case of Maher Arar. A Canadian engineer arrested at JFK airport, Arar was accused of “links to terrorism” and subjected to extraordinary rendition by US security agencies that sent him to Syria for almost a full year of interrogation and torture. A two-year Canadian investigation found him innocent of any terror links, and paid him $10 million in compensation for Canada’s role; but for the US, Arar remains a suspect prohibited from entering the country.)
 
Diminishing US power
 
Facing economic crisis, military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the loss or weakening of key client states in the Arab world, the US is weaker and less influential in the Middle East. But maintaining control of oil markets and US strategic capacity are still key regional goals for the US, which means that military power remains central. The nature of that military engagement is changing – away from large-scale deployments of ground troops in favour of rapidly expanding fleets of armed drones, Special Forces, and growing reliance on naval forces, navy bases and sea-based weapons. Thus the US backs Saudi intervention in Bahrain to insure the US Fifth Fleet maintains its Bahraini base; Washington’s escalating sanctions give the West greater leverage in control of oil markets; the Iranian rhetorical threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (only in desperation since it would prevent Iran from exporting its own oil) is used to justify expansion of the US naval presence in the region. Along with the possibility of losing Syria as a major military purchaser and regional ally, concerns about those US strategic moves played a large part of Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria.
 
“If Israel makes good on its threat of a military strike … there is little reason to imagine that Iran would respond only with words.”
 
 
 
In Iran, the pressure is high and the sanctions are really starting to bite, with much greater impact felt by the Iranian population, rather than the regime in Tehran. The assassination of Iranian nuclear experts, particularly the most recent murder of a young scientist which was greeted by Israeli officials with undisguised glee and barely-disguised triumph, are more likely aimed at provoking an Iranian response than actually undermining Iran’s nuclear capacity. So far, Iran has resisted the bait. But if Israel makes good on its threat of a military strike – despite the virtually unanimous opposition of its own military and intelligence leadership – there is little reason to imagine that Iran would respond only with words. The US and Israel are not the only countries whose national leaders face looming contests; Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its president face huge political challenges as well.
 
The day after
 
The consequences of a strike against Iran would be grave – from attacks on Israeli and/or US military targets, to going after US forces in Iran’s neighbours Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, to attacks on the Pentagon’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, to mining the Strait of Hormuz … and beyond. An attack by the US, a nuclear weapons state, on a non-nuclear weapons state such as Iran, would be a direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran might kick out the UN nuclear inspectors. The hardest of Iran’s hard-line leaders would almost certainly consolidate ever greater power – both at home and in the Arab countries, and the calls to move towards greater nuclearisation, perhaps even to build a nuclear weapon, would rise inside Iran. Indeed, the Arab Spring’s secular, citizenship-based mobilisations would likely lose further influence to Iran – threatening to turn that movement into something closer to an “Islamic Spring”.
 
 
Empire – Targeting Iran
 
Negotiations and a nuclear weapons-free zone
 
At the end of the day the crisis can only be solved through negotiations, not threats and force. Immediately, that means demanding that the White House engage in serious, not deliberately time-constrained negotiations to end the current crisis – perhaps based on the successful Turkish-Brazilian initiative that the US scuttled last year. That means that Congress must reverse its current position to allow the White House to use diplomacy – rather than continuing to pass laws that strip the executive branch of its ability to put the carrot of ending sanctions on the table in any negotiations. And it means an Iran policy based on the real conclusions of US intelligence and military officials, that Iran does not have and is not building a nuclear weapon, rather than relying on lies about non-existent nuclear weapons, like the WMD lies that drove the US to war in Iraq.
 

In the medium and longer term, we must put the urgent need for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East back on the table and on top of our agenda. Such a multi-country move would insure Iran would never build a nuclear weapon, that Israel would give up its existing 200 to 300 high-density nuclear bombs and the submarine-based nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and that the US would keep its nuclear weapons out of its Middle East bases and off its ships in the region’s seas. Otherwise, we face the possibility of the current predicament repeating itself in an endless loop of Groundhog Day-style nuclear crises – each one more threatening than the last.

 
Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her books include Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN.
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7 Today in Palestine
Friday, February 17, 2012
 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/f_shadi/message/3406
 

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