Yearly Archives: 2010

The Palestinians of Israel are poised to take center stage

In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: “Arab animals”, “shut up, whore”.

There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka’s daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the Kurd family’s extension on the grounds that it was built without permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly scene, the settlers’ chilling arrogance underpinned by the certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.

But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.

Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the government is pressing ahead with land expropriations, demolitions and settlement building, making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever more improbable. More than a third of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant violation of international law.

Israel’s latest settlement plans were not “helpful”, Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday. But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.

About 87,000 Bedouin live in 45 “unrecognised” villages, without rights or basic public services, because the Israeli authorities refuse to recognise their claim to the land. All have demolition orders hanging over them, while hundreds of Jewish settlements have been established throughout the area.

The Israeli writer Amos Oz calls the Negev a “ticking time bomb”. The village of Araqeeb has been destroyed six times in recent months and each time it has been reconstructed by its inhabitants. The government wants to clear the land and move the Bedouin into designated townships. But even there, demolitions are carried out on a routine basis.

Cultures of Resistance: A look at global militarization

Cultures of Resistance: A Look at Global Militarization from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo.

From the front lines of the Palestinian popular struggle

Palestinian popular resistance to the Israeli occupation, settlements and the wall are a regular occurrence in the West Bank. Despite this, the overwhelmingly non-violent protests, often put down harshly by occupation forces, rarely make the mainstream news. This is a video of a lecture by journalist, blogger and filmmaker, Joseph Dana, at the Palestine Center in Washington yesterday.

Afghan air war peaks with 1,000 strikes in October

Noah Shachtman reports:

The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate rarely seen since the war’s earliest days. In October alone, NATO planes fired their weapons on 1,000 separate missions, U.S. Air Force statistics provided to Danger Room show. Since Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war effort in late June, coalition aircraft have flown 2,600 attack sorties. That’s 50% more than they did during the same period in 2009. Not surprisingly, civilian casualties are on the rise, as well.

NATO officials say the increase in air attacks is simply a natural outgrowth of a more aggressive campaign to push militants out of their strongholds in southern Afghanistan. “Simply put, our air strikes have increased because our operations have increased. We’ve made a concentrated effort in the south to clear out the insurgency and therefore have increased our number of troops on the ground and aircraft to support them in this effort,” Lt. Nicole Schwegman, a NATO spokesperson, tells Danger Room.

On the other hand, some outside observers believe the strikes are part of an attempt to soften up the insurgency before negotiations with them begin in earnest. But one thing is clear: it’s a strategy Petraeus has used before. Once he took over the Iraq war effort, air strikes jumped nearly sevenfold.

U.S. to store another $400m worth of emergency military equipment in Israel

Haaretz reports:

The U.S. government is to move an additional $400 million worth of military equipment to emergency storage in Israel over the next two years.

The equipment, which includes so-called smart bombs, will stand at Israel’s disposal in an emergency.

The U.S. Congress approved the hike last month, which will bring the value of American military equipment stockpiled in Israel to $1.2 billion by 2012. The story was first reported this week by Defense News magazine’s reporter in Israel, Barbara Opall-Rome.

The U.S. stores equipment in Israel by virtue of a special clause in U.S. foreign aid law governing war reserves stockpiles for allies. According to the clause, the equipment can be utilized by American forces throughout the world, and also, in an emergency, by the military in the country where the equipment is stored.

The clause was originally intended to allow South Korea use of American equipment in case of a surprise attack by North Korea.

The type of equipment stockpiled in Israel is determined through dialogue between the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. Army’s European Command. The issue was raised in discussions last week during the visit by the IDF’s logistics and technology chief, Maj. Gen. Dan Biton, at the Pentagon in Washington.

The agreement between the two armed forces also includes conditions under which the IDF may use the equipment. It is believed that a great deal of the equipment will include precision weapons launched from the air.

IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said this week that in Israel’s future wars, much more precise weaponry will be needed to strike urban targets from the air without injuring civilians.

During Operation Cast Lead, 81 percent of the missiles and bombs launched from the air on and by IDF artillery were of the precision type.

Use of the the American equipment is allowed with permission of the American administration; Israel used such U.S. weaponry during the Second Lebanon War.

America’s power has already been eclipsed in Asia

As many a conservative American commentator remains obsessed with the question as to how the United States can retain its position as the world’s preeminent power, Pankaj Mishra indicates why that question is already moot: it is a position America has already lost.

He points out:

India has many more likely and rewarding partners in booming Asia than in the recession-hit west. Politically damaged Thailand as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan have recovered from the downturn. Last year India signed a major free-trade deal with Asean. Not surprisingly a columnist in the Star, Malaysia’s leading newspaper in English, deemed the Indian prime minister’s visit to Kuala Lumpur last week more important than the jaunt of Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, to the region at the same time.

A tangle of bilateral trade agreements underpins Asia’s new economic unity. China and Asean countries already constitute the biggest free-trade zone in the world. Asian fears of China’s rise, which the United States keenly monitors, look minor beside the fact that China is now the largest export market for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, in addition to being India’s biggest trading partner.

All this sounds a planet away from those Tea-Partying Americans who think that the US can bomb its way out of any political and economic difficulties abroad. It now falls to Obama to advance their education; and he’ll most likely fail in this thankless task.

Separation without separating

Amjad Atallah and Mickey Bergman step outside the confines of a two-state solution whose parameters are supposedly already well understood, and present a new approach that could conceivably meet both Palestinian and Jewish nationalist aspirations. In their outline for a plan, the two states would be defined more in terms of the political rights based on resident status than through an attempt to physically separate the two populations. As with any novel approach to resolving the conflict, its value hinges on a precursor that has yet to happen: a collective acknowledgment that the peace process aimed at a two-state solution has failed.

Introducing a permanent residency status into the toolbox of an agreement can lead to two national states, with two national polities, and clearly defined borders, while not forcing relocation or denial of political rights from those who want to remain in or return to their homes. In essence, separation without separating. Here is how it might work:

1. Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, there will be two national states with clearly defined, internationally recognized borders along the internationally accepted 1967 border.

2. Each person living in this territory will be able to hold one of two citizenships: Israeli or Palestinian, regardless of which nation state is their place of residence.

3. It is possible for a citizen of one state to reside in the other, under a clear mutually agreed upon formula between the two states, with a permanent residency status, as exists with a number of states around the world.

4. Those permanent residents will be allowed to own property, pay taxes, abide by local laws and even vote in municipal elections. Their national political aspirations, however, will be exercised by voting in the elections of their national government.

This concept can allow Israeli-Palestinians to choose their nationality, while maintaining their property, residency and rights. It will allow Jewish settlers, who choose to remain in their homes to do so, while retaining their Israeli citizenship. It will allow Palestinian refugees the right of return, gaining Palestinian citizenship and residing in a location of their choice.

Obama officials moving away from 2011 Afghan date

McClatchy reports:

The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy.

The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials and instead intends to work out a more vague definition of transition when it meets with its NATO allies.

What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn’t submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, two of those officials told McClatchy.

Desperate Afghan wives choose self-immolation

The New York Times reports:

“Why did you burn yourself?” asks the doctor. “If I threw myself from a building, I’d break an arm or a leg, but I wanted to die,” Halima answers. “That’s why I set myself on fire. I thought I would die instantly.”

As an answer it is more how than why, but it is enough for Dr. Arif Jalali, the senior surgeon at The Burn and Plastic Surgery Center of Herat Regional Hospital, in western Afghanistan. Afghan women who arrive here have either set fire to themselves, or their families did it to them. Halima did it to herself.

But why, at just 20 years of age? Halima’s circumstances, like those of many of burn victims here, have to be painstakingly pieced together by the doctors and nurses.

It is hard at any time to see another human being’s suffering, but the burns center is pain of a different order. There is every noise a human being can make to express pain — cries, whimpers, groans, pleadings — as bandages are removed, burns cleaned and then wrapped again to protect them from infection. The women inside grip the hands of anyone nearby, digging their fingernails into the nurses’ arms, into my hand if I offer it.

British deny George Bush’s claims that torture helped foil terror plots

The Guardian reports:

British officials said today there was no evidence to support claims by George Bush, the former US president, that information extracted by “waterboarding” saved British lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. In his memoirs, Bush said the practice – condemned by Downing Street as torture – was used in CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

He said Mohammed, below, was one of three al-Qaida suspects subjected to waterboarding. “Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States,” he wrote.

It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction.

British counter-terrorism officials distanced themselves from Bush’s claims. They said Mohammed provided “extremely valuable” information which was passed on to security and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly related to al-Qaida’s structure and was not known to have been extracted through torture. Eliza Manningham-Buller,head of MI5 at the time, said earlier this year that the government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, but that the Americans concealed Mohammed’s waterboarding from Britain. Officials said today the US still had not officially told the British government about the conditions in which Mohammed was held.

The fight has broken out inside the Jewish family

Philip Weiss writes:

The news from the Jewish Federations’ General Assembly in New Orleans is important. I announce landmarks every 100 yards, but this is a big one. The significance of the event is that several young Jews calling themselves proud Jews took Palestinian solidarity into the Jewish family and made trouble with an explosive disruption of rightwinger Netanyahu’s speech. These Jews were brave and surely inspired by the countless brave Palestinians who have taken far greater risks in the occupied territories. But they said, this is our place to voice our anger, an official Jewish space. We are part of the Jewish community. Deal. And the official community responded with rage and violence.

These young people are liberators. The Jewish family will never be the same; the fight has begun inside the family and begun openly at last. Now Netanyahu, whose coalition included fascistic elements, has finally been called out to his face inside the Israel lobby, by angry young Jews, as their parents’ generation swallowed his ethnic cleansing and landgrabbing.

Last year at J Street, the Palestinian solidarity types were quiet. Rabbi Eric Yoffie attacked noble Richard Goldstone in a keynote speech and some people booed but they swallowed it. The panels were all Zionist. Jonathan Chait attacked this website twice during a panel with Matt Yglesias, and I said nothing about it. Passive. I thought, what is my place here, am I a real Jew?

Bibi, Tom Friedman, and U.S. Jews divesting from Israel

Bradley Burston writes:

Ahead of a New Orleans address to the General Assembly [GA] of the Jewish Federations of North America, sources quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as having said that there is fundamental support for Israel within the United States.

“We may have lost Thomas Friedman, but I don’t think we lost America,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying.

I was getting ready to leave for the airport, when my wife caught me unawares. This was the first inkling I would have of something I was to learn again and again:

Where it comes to any issue of the Mideast conflict, and where it comes to questions relating to the complex relations between the U.S. Jewish community and Israel, you can either answer in three hours, or in one sentence. This was hers:

“You know what it is – American Jews are divesting from Israel.”

This is what I was to see in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Marin County, Portland and Seattle. It’s not that they’re getting involved in significant numbers in the divestment movement. It’s that American Jews are divesting emotionally. They are quietly – but in terms of impact, dramatically – withdrawing altogether.

Not just Jews. Americans. And the younger they are, that is, the more crucial they are to Israel’s future, the more likely they are to divest.

First sign of the new U.S. political reality — Netanyahu’s swagger

At JTA, Ron Kampeas writes:

The sharpest signal of what last week’s elections meant for Jews came not from Washington but from New Orleans, Nova Scotia and Australia.

In New Orleans, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech Monday calling for moving beyond sanctions to mounting a “credible military threat” against Iran as a means of avoiding war.

“Containment will not work,” Netanyahu said in his address to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America.

The prime minister’s remarks echoed the precise terminology used by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in Nova Scotia two days earlier, when he told the Halifax International Security Forum that “containment is off the table.” The likely new majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), referred to a “credible military threat” in the days before the election.

It was a clear sign that Netanyahu feels empowered by the Republican sweep last week of the House of Representatives to trump the Obama administration’s emphasis on peacemaking with the Palestinians with his own priority: confronting Iran.

Police step in to protect young Jewish protesters from Jewish mob violence — in New Orleans

For more details on the protest during Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly in New Orleans yesterday, see the post below.

One of the protesters has now provided her own first hand account of what happened. Although sheriffs were in attendance to provide security for the event, in the end the police needed to protect the protesters from the mob!

Rae Abileah writes:

I stood up and unfurled a pink banner that read, “The settlements betray Jewish values” and in Hebrew: “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” a verse from Deuteronomy. The crowd had grown increasingly hostile with each disruption, and I was instantly attacked from all sides. A man in the row in front of me pulled the El Al seat cover off his chair and tried to gag me with it. Another man came up from the side and grabbed me by the throat. I fell into a pile of chairs until two female sheriffs buoyed me up and hustled me out of the room. The police later confided that they were trying to protect me from the angry mob and get me out of there in one piece.

Tribal loyalty versus the integrity of the individual

(Young Jews disrupt Netanyahu at Jewish General Assembly from stefanie fox on Vimeo.)

Human beings are animals, but the aspects of our nature that can most fittingly be called animalistic, most often express themselves collectively. They require the abandonment of a sense of self, a loss of the awareness of individual autonomy and personal integrity as individual will submerges in collective will.

When individuals from Jewish Voice of Peace disrupted Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans yesterday, waves of anger swept through the audience.

Jeff Shapira from San Antonio grabbed one of the protesters by the throat, but when later asked whether he had ever put a woman in a choke hold before, he responded: “Not really. No. I really did not know what was going to happen, I wanted to keep her in check. I was trying to help.”

As can be seen in the video above, a rabbi in the audience performed his own ritualistic denunciation of the protests by tearing and biting one of the protest banners as though he was slaughtering a sacrificial animal.

The collective judgement was, no doubt, that these are all appropriate ways of dealing with “self-hating” Jews — the only type of Jew who can be expected to criticize Israel.

Meanwhile, Alfred Grosser, a Jewish intellectual and Holocaust survivor who is the keynote speaker at a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht in Frankfurt tonight, has similarly been attacked because he describes himself as pro-Palestinian.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s deputy chief of mission in Germany, Emmanuel Nahshon, said that Frankfurt’s decision to invite Mr. Grosser to speak at the memorial “casts an unfortunate and unnecessary shadow on the event.” He also said that Mr. Grosser’s criticism of Israel was “illegitimate and immoral,” and suggested that his “extreme opinions are tainted by self-hatred.”

The campaign to demean and delegitimize individual Jews by describing them as being afflicted by self-hatred is transparently coercive. There is perhaps a sense that the tribe cannot allow itself to rip itself apart by rejecting any of its members, but those who display what is cast as a form of tribal disloyalty must be neutered and silenced — both as a form of punishment and as a way of signalling to waverers the risks involved in stepping out of line. Rather than the threat of exile, there is the threat of being branded a lesser Jew, a self-hating Jew.

But the phrase itself — self-hating — seems to indicate more. This “self” is a particular form of Jewish identity which recognizes no such thing as a fully autonomous individual identity. A tribal consciousness, which rejects true autonomy, cannot accommodate expressions of personal conscience through dissent. The putative self which is supposedly being hated, exists inside the individual only in as much as the individual mirrors the collective

While social mechanisms such as these stretch all the way back to the origins of primate behavior, in the age of complex, diverse modern societies, they point in a darker direction: this is where fascism finds its base.

—

The New Orleans protesters later described who they are and why they took their action:

They also released a declaration at Young Jewish and Proud:

A vision of collective identity, purpose and values written by and for young Jews committed to justice in Israel and Palestine. It is an invitation and call to action for both our peers and our elders, launched as a counter-protest at the 2010 Jewish Federation General Assembly in New Orleans. [Read their full declaration.]

Britain’s Abu Ghraib

The Guardian reports:

Evidence of the alleged systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as “the UK’s Abu Ghraib” emerged yesterday during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was told there was evidence that detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team, or JFIT.

It also received allegations that JFIT’s prisoners were beaten, forced to kneel in stressful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and that some were subjected to electric shocks. Some of the prisoners say that they were subject to sexual humiliation by women soldiers, while others allege that they were held for days in cells as small as one metre square.

Michael Fordham QC, for the former inmates, said the question needed to be asked: “Is this Britain’s Abu Ghraib?”

The evidence of abuse is emerging weeks after defence officials admitted that British soldiers and airmen are suspected of being responsible for the murder and manslaughter of a number of Iraqi civilians, in addition to the high-profile case of Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist tortured to death by troops in September 2003. One man is alleged to have been kicked to death aboard an RAF helicopter, while two others died after being held for questioning.