Kairos Palestine, Jerusalem  -  18 April 2010

Kairos Palestine expresses its outrage and dismay about a new Israeli military order that will categorize tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank as “infiltrators” – ostensibly because they lack the proper permits – and give military officers sweeping control over their deportation. We condemn this action and call upon churches worldwide to publically demand the revocation of the order regarding “Prevention of Infiltration” (Amendment No. 2) issued by the Israeli military authorities.

The new order (signed in October 2009 but not publically released; scheduled to take effect on April 13, 2010) amends an order issued in 1969 after Israel officially occupied the West Bank and Jerusalem. The new amendment redefines an “infiltrator” as “a person who entered the Area unlawfully following the effective date, or a person who is present in the Area and does not lawfully hold a permit” (amendment to section 1.1.B), making him/her:

a) subject to almost immediate deportation,

b) potentially subject to a jail term of up to seven years, and

c) responsible for funding his/her own detention and deportation.

Furthermore, the military may delay an individual’s appearance before an appeals committee for up to eight days, despite the fact that it may command his/her expulsion within 72 hours of the order, which means, in effect, that people may be deported without any kind of legal hearing (cf. Amendment to section 3 C.D).

Who exactly will the Israeli military target as “infiltrators”? As Amira Hass of Ha’aretz reports, “the order’s language is both general and ambiguous” about this matter. Indeed, the Israeli NGO HaMoked, Center for the Defense of the Individual, remarks that the declaration is so vague that it could permit “the [Israeli] military to empty the West Bank of almost all of its Palestinian inhabitants.”

That said, the amended order suggests that the new definition of “infiltrator” will apply first and foremost to:

• Gazans living in the West Bank whose addresses are still registered in the Gaza Strip and to to their West Bank-born children and

• to Palestinians who relocated to the West Bank under family reunification provisions.

Many other sectors may be targeted as well:

• Jordanians residing in the West Bank;

• Palestinian residents of Jerusalem;

• foreign-born spouses of Palestinians and

• foreign citizens working in the West Bank, particularly with NGOs and Human Rights groups.

The implications of the new order are multi-faceted. It is:

• A flagrant display of military power;

• a destructive and cynical command that reduces thousands of people into “illegal aliens” in their own homes;

• a threat that, regardless of the extent of its implementation, will confine Palestinians in their villages and further sever them from vital economic, health, education, and social centers and is

• “another improper step toward creating demographic changes in the West Bank and entrenching a regime which discriminates between people on the basis of religion and nationality” as it has been written in a joint letter sent to Ehud Barak by a group of nine NGOs.

The above factors will create greater fear and insecurity among Palestinians, which, in turn, may lead to violence and endanger any prospect for a peace with justice in the whole region.

In addition to defying basic human rights, the military order also arrogantly violates various terms of international law, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting the forcible transfer/deportation of protected civilians in an occupied territory, and the principle of self-determination stipulated by general international law.

Kairos Palestine calls on churches worldwide, church related organizations, Christians and the wider international community to condemn these shameful developments and work to restore the justice that is both our calling and our right. We further call you to take bold action:

• To support us and intervene in this latest encroachment on Palestinian rights;

• to contact Israeli officials and denounce the military order;

• to contact your own national embassies in Palestine/Israel, as well as Israeli embassies in your own countries, and urge them to pressure Ehud Barak and other members of the Israeli government to prevent its enactment.

• to inform the wider public in your different communities and networks and the media about these inhumane actions.

In every case, please emphasize that the order will not only wrongly criminalize thousands of people, but also that it will further damage efforts towards peace with justice in Palestine/Israel.

Special Thanks to : uruknet.info

By Alan Hart

March 26, 2010

That U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had the courage to tell AIPAC’s conference that Israel’s continued construction of Jewish housing on occupied territory is undermining both the prospect for peace and America’s credibility and own best interests was good news. The bad news is that this and other Obama administration expressions of concern are 42 years too late.

There’s no mystery about when the U.S. should have taken the lead through the UN Security Council in putting Israel on notice that it would not be permitted to settle any of the Arab land it grabbed in the 1967 war. Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967 ought to have contained a diplomatic reading of the riot act to the Zionist state on the matter of settlements.

As I have noted in a number of previous articles and my book ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS, Resolution 242 was, actually, a disaster for all who were seriously interested in working for a just and lasting peace. By stating that Israeli armed forces were required to withdraw “from territories” occupied in the conflict – i.e. not the territories or better still all territories – Resolution 242 put the Israelis in the diplomatic driving seat, leaving them free to be the ones, and the only ones, who would determine (on a take it leave it basis backed by brute force) the extent of any Israeli withdrawals. This fatal flaw in 242 effectively gave Israel’s leaders a veto over any peace process.

Despite that, Resolution 242 need not have been a complete disaster for peacemakers if a statement had been inserted into its text to this effect… That Israel should not seek to settle or colonise the occupied territories, and that if it did the Security Council would enforce international law and take whatever action was necessary to stop the illegal developments.

Question: Why did the text of Resolution 242 not contain such a statement of Security Council intent? The answer I give in the forthcoming Volume 3 of the American edition of my book (www.claritypress.com), is this.

Those responsible for framing Resolution 242 were very much aware that Israel’s hawks were going to proceed with their colonial venture come what may – in determined defiance of international law and no matter what the organised international community said or wanted. And some if not all of those responsible for framing 242 were resigned to the fact that, because of the history of the Jews and the Nazi holocaust, Israel was not and never would or could be a normal state. As a consequence, there was no point in seeking to oblige it to behave like a normal state – i.e. in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the UN. Like it or not, and whatever it might mean for the fate of humankind, the world was going to have to live with the fact that there were two sets of rules – one for Israel and one for all other nations. Because of the way Israel was created – without legitimacy in international law – The System now had a double standard built into it, and because the political will to confront Zionism did not exist, there was nothing anybody could do to change that reality.

In my view a conclusion invited is that Zionism’s in-Israel leaders are not the main villains in the story. They, the main villains, are successive American and other Western leaders who lacked the will and the courage not only to call and hold Zionism’s monster child to account, but to do what was in the best longer term interests of their own countries.

I have the impression (of course I could be wrong!) that President Obama would like to break this mould. I even think there’s a possibility that, in the privacy of his own mind, he might already have told himself that he will do so in a second term, if he has one. (Though Obama signalled his displeasure at having to meet with Netanyahu by insisting on no photographs, I thought it was a mistake for the President to meet with him. As with Biden’s arrival in Israel, Netanyahu’s arrival at the White House was preceded by the announcement of the go-ahead for more illegal Jewish construction in occupied Arab East Jerusalem. There could not have been a more pointed “Up Yours, Mr. President!” Israeli gesture). But what if President Obama tried and was not allowed by the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress to succeed? Would that necessarily mean that the Zionist state was and would remain a monster beyond control, with catastrophic consequences for the region and the whole world, including the Jews of the world?

Perhaps not.

There is today a new factor in the equation. It is the concern being raised in public by some of America’s top military men.

The United States Central Command, Centcom, is the military headquarters responsible for US security interests in 20 countries across the greater Middle East.

On 16 March, Centcom’s head, General David H. Petraeus, appeared before the Senate Armed-Services with a prepared testimony. It included this: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbours present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the Middle East and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”

Petraeus also briefed Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and apparently told him, among other things, that Washington’s “impotence” in the face of Israel’s ongoing colonisation of the occupied West Bank was the greatest cause of Arab anger.

As noted by Paul Rogers in an article for OpenDemocracy published on 18 March, America and Israel: a historic choice, “the very arm of the United States federal government which has the closest links with Israel – namely, the military – is now suggesting that Israel is the source of some of its own key problems in the middle east.”

The significance of what Petraeus said was, as Rogers also noted, heightened by the fact that the criticism came not from retired generals, not remote from the strategic frontline; “but from the very US military command that has been fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for most of the decade… This elite forms a core element of the US military-industrial complex which in five decades of close cooperation with Israel has furnished its ally with sophisticated weapons-systems, undertaken many joint exercises, provided huge amounts of aid; and in turn depended on Israel for crucial assistance in its war in Iraq.”

This military intervention in the “What to do about Israel?” debate now gathering momentum in America, made me wonder if the stage is being set for a showdown, at some point, between the Zionist lobby in its many manifestations and the occupant of the White House, whoever he is, with the military on his side.

So perhaps, even after 42 years, coming up for 43, it’s not too late.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East.
His Latest book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, is a three-volume epic in its American edition.  He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told attendees at the AIPAC conference on Monday that the US commitment to Israel is “rock-solid,” but Clinton did criticize Israel for continuing to build settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. In a defiant speech hours after Clinton’s address, Netanyahu rejected US criticism and vowed to continue building settlements. We speak with Norman Finkelstein, author of the new book, This Time We Went Too Far

Source Democracy now

Tim King Salem-News.com

ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf, was arrested while negotiating with the Israelis, to allow a woman they had been shot to get to the hospital.

ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf

(AN NABI SALEH / SALEM) – Israel’s daily efforts to violently quell the call for peace among Palestinian people and their growing list of supporters, is reaching epic levels. Israel according to multiple reports, is increasingly its abuse of women in an open fashion. This is the story of a young woman named Huwaida Arraf?.

We reported on 20 March that a demonstration in An Nabi Saleh Friday saw a sharp spike in violence and collective punishment from the Israeli military. In the course of an unarmed peaceful demonstration, 25 people were injured by Israeli police and the Israeli Defense Forces, who are said to have intentionally shattered the windows of cars and homes, while arresting three.

A volunteer for the humanitarian aid group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Ellen Stark, was shot by Israeli forces at nearly point blank range with a rubber bullet as she stood with medics. The bullet shattered a bone in Ellen’s arm and became lodged inside of her.

Co-Founder of ISM Huwaida Arraf, was arrested while negotiating with the Israelis, to allow Ellen through the military line to get to the hospital.

The ongoing debate centers around the group’s efforts to preserve Palestinian land, which is disappearing by the day under Israeli aggression.

According to Ellen Stark, “we were standing on Palestinian land, in support of the village who’s land has been confiscated but we weren’t even demonstrating yet.”

Not only were twenty five people shot, and medical services initially denied; others were taken into custody under what turn out to be illegal conditions, according to ISM counsel.

The three who were arrested were 33-year old Huwaida Arraf, along with 23-year old Omar, and 22-year old Amjad. Huwaida was released last night at around 6:45 p.m. from Neve Tirtze prison in Ramle.

She said, “Save for minor cuts and bruises, I am OK.”

Huwaida was arrested Friday at around noon as she tried to get the Israeli soldiers to stop shooting at people in Nabi Saleh, a small village of about 400 people. This is in the wake of ISM volunteer Ellen Stark being shot in the arm.

“We were in Nabi Saleh for a weekly demonstration by the villagers against the theft of their land. Simultaneous demonstrations were taking place in Jerusalem and in a number of villages throughout the West Bank. In Nabi Saleh, the demonstration took the form of people walking down a hill towards the confiscated land.”

She says they yelled repeatedly, “Stop shooting…a woman has been injured and needs medical attention”.

Huwaida made her way back up the hill to the road the soldiers stood on, yelling at them the whole time.

According to multiple reports, these Israeli soldiers were actually shooting down at the women, some already injured, from up high, fully aware that they were climbing rugged terrain, which created terrible difficulty they said, especially while trying to avoid a barrage of tear gas and bullets.

Huwaida said that when she and other members of the International Solidarity Movement reached the road the soldiers turned their guns on her, but she just kept talking and walking towards them.

“We have a woman that has been shot; she needs help. Stop shooting. There is no reason to be shooting at people like this. You are in THEIR village.”

For this offense, Huwaida was handcuffed and thrown in a jeep. She would later accused of: (1) attacking a police officer; (2) cursing at the military and police; (3) obstructing the operations of the military; and (4) being in a closed military zone.

Most people arrested by Israeli police, especially Israeli citizens and foreigners, are taken to an Israeli police station; that is what the actual law calls for. But Israel maintains separate laws and policies for the legal treatment of people who are Jewish, and those who are non-Jewish.

Huwaida was taken to the illegal settlement of Halamish where she was held for nearly eight hours outside in the cold. He says two other Palestinians from Nabi Saleh, Omar and Amjad were also arrested and brought there.

“The soldiers and border police were particularly abusive to Omar and Amjad, pushing them around, forcing them to stand for hours, handcuffed and blindfolded and every few minutes yelling at them to lift their heads, so they couldn’t rest or fall asleep. When I protested this abuse I was told to ‘shut the f*** up’” and if I didn’t, I would get the same treatment. I responded, ‘I don’t really care, but it’s sad that you feel you have to treat people so inhumanely.’ ‘Shut the f*** up!’

Huwaida says at one point, when Omar couldn’t feel his hands or move his fingers anymore due to a combination of tight plastic cuffs and the cold, they were taken into a building supposedly to be checked by a doctor. To make the illegal arrest more unseemly, the acts were carried out by an Israeli military officer.

With Mairead Maguire

“The same officer who kept telling me to shut up, abusing his power because he can, ordered us to stand facing the wall. I refused this unnecessary measure and show of macho bullying, and was dragged back outside, lifted by my arms, while still cuffed behind my back, and then thrown on the ground. The dehumanization of Palestinians was not only evident amongst the soldiers, but also the Jewish settlers. Since we were held outside in the settlement, we were exposed to settler youth who surrounded and hurled profanities at us.”

So where will this lead?

A lawyer for the International Solidarity Movement, says that the arrests were illegal; stressing that Huwaida should have been taken before a judge the same day she was arrested.

Huwaida said, “Israeli citizens and internationals have that right. Palestinians don’t. I was separated from Omar and Amjad at about 2:00 in the morning as after we were interrogated I was taken to a women’s prison in Ramle, and they to the Ofer military prison. In the end I was detained for 31 hours then released. If I had not been released I would have come before a judge last night.”

It will likely be at least another week before Omar and Amjad will be allowed to see a judge. At that point they will be accused of violence because they were protesting, unarmed, against the confiscation of their land.

The world is beginning to display a genuine outrage toward the violent behavior of Israel; whose politicians and sympathizers always lament their own fate and safety, while literally treating people with a total and complete disregard for accepted standards of humanity, at times as bad or worse than any group in history. Israel, based on historical records and traditional criteria, is a terrorist government. Their chief ally in the genocide of the Palestinian people, is the United States of America. It is a matter of great shame for many Americans,

Israel somehow continues to commit genocide while building museums against the very idea, on a daily basis.

There appears to be a twisted and dirty level of complicity involving the U.S. and the myriad acts committed by Israel that are clearly illegal under international law. Israel in the opinion of many, is a rogue state that must me stopped before more people die. No amount of past historical grief excuses an outward lack of humanity. Israel’s leaders should all face an international tribunal for war crimes and be locked up for a very very long time.

It is not about their religion, it is about their actions.

In Huwaida’s arrest at An Nabi Saleh Friday, she says the heavily armed soldiers that invaded the small village immediately began shooting tear gas and rubber coated steel bullets.

But in the eyes of the Israeli government, the soldiers that damaged 10 Palestinian homes and injured 25 people in Nabi Saleh aren’t the violent ones. The unarmed protesters that they shot; people like Huwaida, Omar and Amjad, are. Huwaida believes Omar and Amjad are likely to have to pay a fine and/or post a hefty bail to be released, if they are not held for months first.

“The police released me right before I was scheduled to come before a judge. This is likely because they had nothing to bring before a judge. I probably should have refused release and challenged their actions in court, but I really didn’t want to make a big deal out of my arrest, when so many other worse things are happening.”

Huwaida says as bad as the arrest was, it is important to remember that there are many good things are happening also.

“Solidarity actions around the world are on the rise, the BDS movement is gaining more support every day, and the spirit of the Palestinian people is high. Israel expects to be able to continue stealing land and resources, subjugating the indigenous people, and using violence to subdue any kind of protest from the colonized and their supporters. We don’t have the weapons Israel has to fight back, but we have our spirit and our voices with which we will fight. Israel should be under no illusion that it can intimidate or break us.”

She took the time to thank everyone for their concern and support. The struggle of these people is seeing an increasing level In solidarity.

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Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com’s Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines.

Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation’s only truly independent high traffic news Website. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

Theodoros Pangalos Greek MP

The deputy prime minister of Greece has sent back to the Israeli Embassy in Athens three bottles of wine given to him as a gift, because they were produced in the Golan, which “belongs to Syria” and is “illegally occupied.”

The embassy had given the wine to Theodoros Pangalos – MP for the socialist party PASOK and responsible also for co-ordination of the foreign policy and defense committee in the Greek government – as a gift for the Christmas holidays with the wishes of Israel´s ambassador to Greece, Ali Yihiye.

In a letter sent to the embassy with the returned wine, Pangalos said he was taught not to steal and not to accept products of theft.

“I have been taught since I was very young not to steal and not to accept products of theft,” he wrote. “So I cannot possibly accept this gift and I must return it back to you.

“As you know, your country occupies illegally the Golan Heights who belong to Syria, according to the international law and numerous decisions of the international community,” Pangalos added.

Referring to atrocities that occurred during the Second World War and the Balkan War, the socialist MP said: “Actions such as those of these days of the Israel military in Gaza remind the Greek people of holocausts such as in Kalavrita or Doxato or Distomo and certainly in the ghetto of Warsaw.”

While he called for an end to Hamas´s terrorist activities, he compared Israel´s action in Gaza to Nazi Germany´s army.

My hope is that Israel will find security into its internationally recognized borders and the terrorist activities against Israel territory by Hamas or anybody else will be contained and made impossible, but I also hope that your government will cease practicing the policy of collective punishment, which was applied on a mass scale by Hitler and his armies.”

Source: (© 1995 – 2010 The Jerusalem Post. 01/22/10)

I

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

The National

April 05. 2009

Nazareth, Israel // The new administrations in the United States and Israel could collide over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, threatening to strain their close, long-standing relationship. The White House under Barack Obama has made conciliatory gestures towards Tehran, culminating in a video statement from the president a fortnight ago in which he appealed for a “new beginning” in relations between the two countries. But since Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as Israeli prime minister on Tuesday, he has preferred to highlight the military option as a way to prevent what Israel and the United States have claimed are Iranian plans to acquire a nuclear warhead under the guise of a civilian energy programme. Statements from Mr Netanyahu and his officials over the past few days have been designed to suggest that Israel is preparing to launch such a strike, even if it contravenes the wishes of the White House. The public differences between Israel and the United States on Iran have accelerated since Israel’s military intelligence chief, Amos Yadlin, published an assessment last month that Tehran had passed the “point of no return” in developing nuclear technology. He concluded that sanctions had failed and that, if Tehran gave the go-ahead, its scientists had the technology to assemble a warhead within a year or so. The US director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, has dismissed such claims as a “worst-case” scenario. The National Intelligence Estimate, the consensual assessment of the 16 leading US intelligence agencies, advised in 2007 that Iran had most probably abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, after the United States ended the military threat from neighbouring Iraq by toppling Saddam Hussein. The estimate’s publication scotched Israeli hopes that George W Bush, president at the time, would agree to a military attack. The Bush administration, nonetheless, maintained an openly hostile stance towards Tehran that accorded with Israel’s own posture. Mr Obama, however, has softened the US position, offering dialogue and seeking to ease tensions between the two countries that have dominated since an Islamic revolution overthrew the shah three decades ago. On Wednesday Mr Obama made a break with his predecessor by issuing a statement – jointly with Dmitry Medvedev, his Russian counterpart – recognising Iran’s right to a civilian nuclear programme. The pair asked that Tehran restore confidence in the “exclusively peaceful nature” of its project. In its latest report, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it had strictly monitored the uranium Iran is enriching for its energy programme and could verify that none had been diverted to military use. The United States is expected to use the diplomatic track to press for restraint from Tehran, with the threat of further sanctions later in the year if it believes Iran is failing to comply. In opposition, Mr Netanyahu was outspoken in denouncing the Iranian regime. He compared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, to Hitler and repeatedly argued that Tehran was planning a holocaust with nuclear weapons against Israel. He was also dismissive of the existing sanctions against Iran. Analysts had expected Mr Netanyahu to tone down his rhetoric in office, particularly given the policies of the Obama administration. So far, however, he has chosen to do the precise opposite. A recent editorial in Haaretz, a left-wing daily newspaper, warned that Mr Netanyahu’s approach threatened to damage relations with Washington: “While the Americans are actively seeking a way to start a dialogue, Israel is preaching confrontation and the toppling of the government in Tehran.” Hours before he was sworn in, Mr Netanyahu gave an interview to The Atlantic, a US magazine, whose online article was headlined “Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran – Or I Will”. The author, Jeffrey Goldberg, called Mr Netanyahu’s “challenge” to the White House “unusually blunt”. He did not directly quote the prime minister’s warning, but reported his saying in their interview that Mr Obama “must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons – and quickly – or an imperilled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself”. The article quoted an unnamed aide to Mr Netanyahu saying that Israel’s time limit for acting was calculated in months, “not years”, adding that Israel had the military capability to overcome Iran’s defences and might launch an attack even without a green light from the United States. Aluf Benn, a political commentator with Haaretz, noted last week: “Politicians in touch with Netanyahu say he has already made up his mind to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.” This view was backed by Amir Oren, an analyst close to the Israeli military, who reported on Friday that Israeli officials hope to persuade the White House to turn a blind eye to an Israeli strike next year, possibly in the summer. By then the bulk of US forces would be out of neighbouring Iraq, offering fewer targets for revenge attacks. Israel, Mr Oren reported, would also have installed interception systems to offer a protective umbrella both against long-range missiles from Iran and retaliatory rocket fire from Hamas and Hizbollah, which Iran supports. Gen David Petraeus, the top US commander in the Middle East, told Congress last week that Israel was assuming the worst about Iran. “The Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it.” Although Israeli officials play up the supposed threat of annihilation from a nuclear-armed Iran, the major concern is that an Iranian bomb would end Israel’s exclusive possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and undermine its dominance of the region. Iran might then be able to force major territorial concessions on behalf of the Palestinians. Mr Netanyahu hinted at this during his interview. A nuclear-armed Iran, he said, would “create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area”.

Analysis by Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron demonstrate against Israeli "apartheid," 30 March 2009. (Mamoun Wazwaz/MaanImages)

Hazem Jamjoum, The Electronic Intifada,
In recent years, increasing numbers of individuals around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week ( http://apartheidweek.org/). Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians. This has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in which Palestinians were identified as victims of racism (the US, Israel, Canada and Italy have already announced that they will not participate because of the potential for criticism of Israel).

Many of the writings stemming from this analysis work to detail levels of similarity and difference with apartheid South Africa, rather than looking at apartheid as a system that can be practiced by any state. To some extent, this strong emphasis on historical comparisons is understandable given that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the central campaign called for by Palestinian civil society for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and is modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid. However, an over-emphasis on similarities and differences confines the use of the term to narrow limits. With the expanding agreement that the term “apartheid” is useful in describing the level and layout of Israel’s crimes, it is important that our understanding of the “apartheid label” be deepened, both as a means of informing activism in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, and in order to most effectively make use of comparisons with other struggles.

The apartheid analogy

It is perhaps understandable that some advocates of Palestinian rights look at the “apartheid label,” in its comparative sense, as a politically useful tool. The struggle of the South African people for justice and equality reached a certain sacred status in the 1980s and ’90s when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. The reverence with which activists and non-activists alike look to the righteousness of the South African struggle, and the ignominy of the colonial apartheid regime, are well placed. Black South Africans fought against both Dutch and British colonization for centuries, endured countless hardships including imprisonment and death, and were labeled terrorists as the powers of the world stood by the racist apartheid regime. They remained steadfast in their struggle, raising the cost of maintaining the apartheid system until South African capital found it no longer profitable and white political elites found it impossible to maintain. The comparison is further enhanced due to the relationship between the respective Palestinian and South African liberation movements, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, as well as the unabashed alliance between Israel and the South African apartheid regime, which remained strong even at the height of the international boycott against South Africa.

A further impetus for confining the “apartheid label” to a comparison with South Africa is that the commonalities and similarities between the liberation struggles of South Africa and Palestine are quite stark. Both cases involved a process of settler-colonialism involving the forced displacement of the indigenous population from most of their ancestral lands and concentrating them in townships and reservations, dividing the colonized community into different groups with differing rights, strict mobility restrictions that suffocated the colonized, and the use of brutal military force to repress any actual or potential resistance against the racist colonial regime.

Both regimes have enjoyed the impunity that results from full US and European support. Accompanying these and countless other similarities are a host of uncanny details common to both cases: both regimes were formally established in the same year — 1948 — following decades of British rule; approximately 87 percent of the land was off limits to most of the colonized population without special permission, and so on. While we speak here in the past tense for South Africa, this still applies to present-day Palestine.

As the Israeli apartheid label has gained ground, some have adopted the approach of describing the differences between the two regimes, albeit for various purposes. In general, Israel has not legislated petty apartheid — the segregation of spaces such as bathrooms and beaches — as was the case in South Africa. However, Israeli laws form the basis of systematic racial discrimination against Palestinians. The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (approximately 20 percent of Israel’s citizens) do indeed have the right to vote and run in Israeli elections while the Black community in South Africa, for the most part, did not. The South African version of apartheid’s central tenet was to facilitate the exploitation of as many Black laborers as possible, whereas the Israeli version, although exploiting Palestinian workers, prioritizes the forced displacement of as many Palestinians as possible beyond the borders of the state with the aim of eradicating Palestinian presence within historic Palestine. South African visitors to Palestine have often commented on the fact that Israeli use of force is more brutal than that witnessed in the heyday of apartheid, thus leading several commentators to adopt the position that Israel’s practices are worse than apartheid and that the apartheid label does not go far enough.

Israel and the crime of apartheid

In terms of law, describing Israel as an apartheid state does not revolve around levels of difference and similarity with the policies and practices of the South African apartheid regime, and where Israel is an apartheid state only insofar as similarities outweigh differences. In 1973, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (General Assembly resolution 3068 entered into force on 18 July 1976 — the year of the Soweto uprising in South Africa and the Land Day uprising in Palestine). The resolution set forth that the definition of the crime of apartheid was not limited to the borders of South Africa. The fact that apartheid is defined as a crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002 — long after the apartheid regime was defeated in South Africa — attests to the universality of the crime.

While the wording of the definition of the crime of apartheid varies between legal instruments, the substance is the same: a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one “racial” group over another. Karine Mac Allister, among others, has provided a cogent legal analysis of the applicability of the crime of apartheid to the Israeli regime (see “Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel,” al-Majdal #38, Summer 2008). The main point is that like genocide and slavery, apartheid is a crime that any state can commit, and institutions, organizations and/or individuals acting on behalf of the state that commit it or support its commission are to face trial in any state that is a signatory to the Convention, or in the International Criminal Court. It is therefore a fallacy to ground the Israeli apartheid label on comparisons of the policies of the South African apartheid regime, with the resulting descriptions of Israel as being “apartheid-like” and characterizations of an apartheid analysis of Israel as an “apartheid analogy.”

Recognition by the international community of such universal crimes is often the result of a particular case, so heinous that it forces the rusty wheels of international decision-making into motion. The Transatlantic Slave Trade is an example where the mass enslavement of peoples from the African continent to work as the privately owned property of European settlers formed an important part of the framework in which the drafters of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery thought and acted. An even clearer example is the Genocide Convention (adopted in 1948, entered into force in 1951) in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust in which millions of Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were systematically murdered with the intention to end their existence. We do not describe modern day enslavement as “slavery-like,” nor do we examine the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi Rwandans through a Rwandan “genocide analogy.”

Two points made by Mac Allister in her legal analysis of Israeli apartheid deserve to be reiterated because they are often confused or misconstrued even by advocates of Palestinian human rights. First, Israel’s crimes and violations are not limited to the crime of apartheid. Rather, Israel’s regime over the Palestinian people combines apartheid, military occupation and colonization in a unique manner. It deserves notice that the relationship between these three components requires further research and investigation. Also noteworthy is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign National Committee’s “United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People” position paper, which outlines and, to some extent, details the various aspects of Israel’s commission of the crime of apartheid, and begins to trace the interaction between Israeli apartheid, colonialism and occupation from the perspective of Palestinian civil society. [1]

The second point worth reiterating is that Israel’s regime of apartheid is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, the core of Israel’s apartheid regime is guided by discriminatory legislation in the fields of nationality, citizenship and land ownership. This discriminatory legislation was primarily employed to oppress and dispossess those Palestinians (refugees and internally displaced) who were forced from their land and property during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, as well as the minority who managed to remain within the 1949 armistice line (referred to as the “green line”), who later became Israeli citizens. Israel’s apartheid regime was extended into the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the 1967 occupation of those territories for the purpose of colonization and military control over the Palestinians who came under occupation. Using again the example of South Africa, the crime of apartheid was not limited to the Bantustans — the whole regime was implicated and not one or another of its racist manifestations.

The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state has proven to be very important in several respects. First, it correctly highlights racial discrimination as a root cause of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Second, one of the main effects of Israeli apartheid is that it has separated Palestinians — conceptually, legally and physically — into different groupings (refugees, West Bank, Gaza, within the “green line” and a host of other divisions within each), resulting in the fragmentation of the Palestinian liberation movement, including the solidarity movement. The apartheid analysis enables us to provide a legal and conceptual framework under which we can understand, convey and take action in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle as a unified whole. Third, and of particular significance to the solidarity movement, this legal and conceptual framework takes on the prescriptive role underpinning the growing global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.

Colonialism and the role of comparison

I have argued that the question of whether apartheid applies cannot be determined by means of comparison with South Africa, but rather by legal analysis. This, however, does not mean that comparative study is not useful. Comparison is in fact essential to the process of learning historical lessons for those involved in struggle. A central point of comparison with South Africa is the fact that it was, and for the indigenous people of Palestine and the Americas, continues to be a struggle against colonialism.

Focusing on the colonial dimension of Israeli apartheid and the Zionist project enables us to maintain our focus on the issues that really matter, such as land acquisition, demographic engineering and methods of political and economic control exercised by one racial group over another. Comparison with other anti-colonial struggles provides the main resource for understanding this colonial dimension of Israeli oppression, and for deriving some of the lessons needed to fight it.

One of the key lessons for Palestinians from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was the pressure placed on the African National Congress leadership to compromise on its economic demands such as land restitution. Only a tiny proportion of white-controlled land in South Africa was redistributed to Blacks after 1994. As such, while the struggle of the South African people defeated the system of political apartheid, the struggle against economic apartheid continues in various forms including anti-poverty and landless peoples’ movements today. The centrality of the demand for land restitution should be highlighted as part of the demand for refugee return as Palestinians and those struggling with them work to reconstruct a political strategy and consensus on how to overcome the political challenges that have emerged since the launching of the peace process and the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement leadership into a non-sovereign authority dependent on Israel for its international legitimacy and financial solvency.

A second key lesson is in response to the paradigm currently guiding most mainstream accounts of how to achieve the elusive “peace in the Middle East,” which is the idea of partition often referred to as the “two-state solution.” In the 1970s, South Africa tried to deal with its “demographic problem” — the fact that the vast majority of its population was Black but did not have the right to vote. The apartheid regime reconstructed South Africa as a formal democracy by reinventing the British-established reservations (the Bantustans) as independent states (British rule in South Africa established reserves in 1913 and 1936 on approximately 87 percent of the land of South Africa for the purpose of segregating the Black population from the settlers). These 10 “homelands” were each assigned to an ethnicity decided by Pretoria, and indigenous South Africans who did not fit into one of the ethnicities were forced to make themselves fit in order to become nationals of one of the homelands. Through this measure, members of the indigenous population were reclassified as nationals of a homeland, and between 1976 and 1981 the regime tried to pass the homelands off as independent states: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981.

Each of these Bantustans was given a flag and a government made up of indigenous intermediaries on the Pretoria payroll, and all the trappings of a sovereign government including responsibility over municipal services and a police force to protect the apartheid regime, but without actual sovereignty. The idea was that by getting international recognition for each of these homelands as states, the apartheid regime would transform South Africa from a country with a 10 percent white minority, to one with a 100 percent white majority. Since it was a democratic regime within the confines of the dominant community, the state’s democratic nature would be beyond reproach. No one was fooled. The African National Congress launched a powerful campaign to counter any international recognition of the Bantustans as independent states, and the plot failed miserably at the international level — with the notable, but perhaps unsurprising, exception that a lone “embassy” for Bophuthatswana was opened in Tel Aviv.

Israel has employed similar strategies in Palestine. For example, Israel recognized 18 Palestinian Bedouin tribes and appointed a loyal sheikh for each in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 1950s as a means of controlling these southern Palestinians, forcing those who did not belong to one of the tribes to affiliate to one in order to get Israeli citizenship (see Hazem Jamjoum, “al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine’s Southern Bedouin,” al-Majdal #39-40, Autumn 2008/Winter 2009). In the late 1970s, the Israeli regime tried to invent Palestinian governing bodies for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the form of “village leagues” intended to evolve into similar non-sovereign governments — glorified municipalities of a sort. As with apartheid’s Homelands, the scheme failed miserably, both because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had established itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and because Palestinians largely understood the plot and opposed it with all means at their disposal. The main lesson for Israel was that the PLO would have to either be completely destroyed or would have to be transformed into Israeli apartheid’s indigenous intermediary. Israel launched a massive campaign to destroy the PLO throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. With the demise of the PLO’s main backers in the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War and its strained relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Israel capitalized on the opportunity, and worked to transform the PLO from a liberation movement to a “state-building” project that was launched by the signing of the Oslo Accords, seven months before South Africa’s first free election.

The push for the establishment and international recognition of an independent Palestinian state within the Palestinian Bantustan is no different from the South African apartheid regime’s campaign to gain international recognition of Transkei or Ciskei. This is the core of the “two-state solution” idea. The major and crucial difference is that in the current Palestinian case, it is the world’s superpower and its adjutants in Europe and the Arab world pushing as well, and armed with the active acceptance of Palestine’s indigenous intermediaries.

Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of al-Majdal, the English language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Endnotes
[1] This is the Palestinian civil society position paper for the April 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, and can be downloaded at: http://bdsmovement.net/files/English-BNC_Position_Paper-Durban_Review.pdf (accessed 29 March 2009).

Changing the Rules of War

 By GEORGE BISHARAT

The extent of Israel’s brutality against Palestinian civilians in its 22-day pounding of the Gaza Strip is gradually surfacing. Israeli soldiers are testifying to lax rules of engagement tantamount to a license to kill. One soldier commented: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him.” What is less appreciated is how Israel is also brutalizing international law, in ways that may long outlast the demolition of Gaza. Since 2001, Israeli military lawyers have pushed to re-classify military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from the law enforcement model mandated by the law of occupation to one of armed conflict. Under the former, soldiers of an occupying army must arrest, rather than kill, opponents, and generally must use the minimum force necessary to quell disturbances. While in armed conflict, a military is still constrained by the laws of war – including the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and the duty to avoid attacks causing disproportionate harm to civilian persons or objects – the standard permits far greater uses of force. Israel pressed the shift to justify its assassinations of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, which clearly violated settled international law. Israel had practiced “targeted killings” since the 1970s – always denying that it did so – but had recently stepped up their frequency, by spectacular means (such as air strikes) that rendered denial futile. President Bill Clinton charged the 2001 Mitchell Committee with investigating the causes of the second Palestinian uprising and recommending how to restore calm in the region. Israeli lawyers pleaded their case to the committee for armed conflict. The committee responded by criticizing the blanket application of the model to the uprising, but did not repudiate it altogether. Today, most observers – including Amnesty International – tacitly accept Israel’s framing of the conflict in Gaza as an armed conflict, as their criticism of Israel’s actions in terms of the duties of distinction and the principle of proportionality betrays. This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel’s lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations. Israel’s campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate and knowing. As the former head of Israel’s 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General’s office, Daniel Reisner, recently stated: “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries … International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy.” In the Gaza fighting, Israel has again tried to transform international law through violations. For example, its military lawyers authorized the bombing of a police cadet graduation ceremony, killing at least 63 young Palestinian men. Under international law, such deliberate killings of civilian police are war crimes. Yet Israel treats all employees of the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip as terrorists, and thus combatants. Secretaries, court clerks, housing officials, judges – all were, in Israeli eyes, legitimate targets for liquidation. Israeli jurists also instructed military commanders that any Palestinian who failed to evacuate a building or area after warnings of an impending bombardment was a “voluntary human shield” and thus a participant in combat, subject to lawful attack. One method of warning employed by Israeli gunners, dubbed “knocking on the roof,” was to fire first at a building’s corner, then, a few minutes later, to strike more structurally vulnerable points. To imagine that Gazan civilians – penned into the tiny Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, and surrounded by the chaos of battle – understood this signal is fanciful at best. Israel has a lengthy history of unpunished abuses of international law – among the most flagrant its decades-long colonization of the West Bank. To its credit, much of the world has refused to ratify Israel’s violations. Unfortunately, our government is an exception, having frequently provided diplomatic cover for Israel’s abuses. Our diplomats have vetoed 42 U.N. Security Council resolutions to shelter Israel from the consequences of its often illegal behavior. We must break that habit now, or see international law perverted in ways that can harm us all. Our government has already been seduced to follow, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Israel’s example of targeted killings. This policy alienates civilians, innocently killed and wounded in these crude strikes, and deepens the determination of enemies to harm us by any means possible. We do not want civilian police in the United States to be bombed, nor to have anyone “knock on our roofs.” For our own sakes and for the world’s, Israel’s impunity must end. George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.

 This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle

Source: Counterpunch