A message to Israel: “For once in your life…”

“For once in your life, do something that you can relate proudly to your grandchildren.”

Why doesn’t Israel help Palestinians in Yarmouk?
Given the horrific tragedy of the Syrian refugee camp, it is time for Israel to think differently about the Palestinian people, some of which is part and parcel of this country and its future.

Full article by Oudeh Basharat in Haaretz.

In this Feb. 4, 2014, file photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, residents of the besieged Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp wait to leave the camp. Photo by AP

Israeli-style policing in Ferguson gives US minorities a taste of Palestine

Just like Ferguson: A Palestinian youth with a gas mask grabs a tear gas grenade fired by Israeli forces during clashes in the West Bank town of Bethlehem protesting Israeli attacks on Gaza, November 20, 2012. (photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

Israel’s position as a pariah state seems assured with revelations that at least four US police departments have been coached in the ‘counter-terrorism’ techniques used by the IDF in the occupied Palestinian territories.

US commentators have been drawing telling parallels between Israeli operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and their own combat-ready law enforcement officers, who they claim increasingly resemble an occupying force.

And the links with Israel have been highlighted by the paramilitary-style response of St Louis County police to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which followed the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by the local force on 9 August.

Some eyewitnesses say that the 18-year-old boy was trying to surrender to police when he was shot six times. His body was left in the street for hours, during which time a crowd gathered demanding answers from the police, who responded by deploying K-9 units and riot squads.

This sparked days of riots in Ferguson, culminating in the deployment of the Missouri National Guard to restore order to this St Louis suburb.

However, in addition to the disturbances in Ferguson itself, the boy’s death has provoked protests across the nation, with institutional racism, breaches of human rights, police brutality and the militarisation of law enforcement the primary targets.

With images of Israel’s latest carpet bombing of Gaza still fresh in the memory – an operation which has more than ever threatened grassroots US support for the Jewish state – Michael Brown’s death and the subsequent riots have come at the worst possible time for Israel’s supporters.

And this is because the IDF-style counter-terrorism tactics, and the weapons used by the police, have highlighted the links between the policing of minorities in the US and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Palestinians and US minorities now have a common interest, as Palestinians were quick to show when they tweeted tips on dealing with tear gas and with their messages of solidarity.

Even before Ferguson, Israel’s Operation Protective Edge had already sparked protests across the US, led by organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which is behind grassroots campaigns – such as this one in Colorado – to hold Jewish community leaders to account. US support for Israel is likely to come under further scrutiny as evidence emerges that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.

Indeed, support for Israel among young Americans has been waning for some time, according to polling research by Gallup and focus group studies, but the latest bombing has significantly also hit support among the Evangelical Christian community. Unsurprisingly, studies suggest that support for the Palestinian cause is much higher and growing among non-white Americans.

Grassroots support for Israel, though still strong, appears to be on a long-term declining trend. Throw in the suppression of the US black population – an fact so apparently obvious it has become the subject of satire – using Israeli techniques and the same US-made weapons as those used to control the Palestinians, and this could begin a real shift in American opinion on the Jewish state.

Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa Mosque and climb Dome of the Rock

Israel’s ever-aggressive band of radical Jewish settlers have committed a “flagrant violation against places of worship”, according to the country’s Islamic-Christian Commission, by repeatedly storming the iconic Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem over the last few days.

Indeed, the settlers’ actions, which have been orchestrated by radical rabbi Yahuda Glick, are feared to be the concluding attempts at Judaising the mosque and clearing the way for the Israeli authorities to unveil it as a synagogue.

And the latest incidents, as reported in the Middle East Monitor, have been condemned as provocative and dangerous by the general director of Muslim Endowments and Al-Aqsa Mosque affairs, Sheikh Azzam Al-Khatib.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque is located in Palestinian east Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel in 1980, and is considered the third-holiest Islamic site in the world. The mosque forms part of the Temple Mount compound, which is considered the most holy site in Judaism and a site of historic significance for Christians.

The settlers’ actions, which have included scaling the sacred Dome of the Rock, will almost certainly be seen as an expression of contempt for the Palestinians’ historic claims to the site itself, as well as to east Jerusalem, which Israel is progressively colonising. In some ways, it’s a surprise that Israel has taken this long to turn its attentions to the mosque, given that it has targeted sites of historic or cultural significance to the Palestinians over the last 15 years, the most notable being the destruction of the old city of Nablus.

This, however, is of a much higher order of significance. An illustration of the sensitivity around the Al-Aqsa Mosque can be seen in Ariel Sharon’s notorious visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 which, though agreed in advance with the Palestinian Authority, was the fuse that lit the Second Intifada. Sharon, surrounded by Israeli riot police that day, did not enter the mosque itself, but by the time the resulting Palestinian uprising had subsided nearly five years later, an estimated 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis had lost their lives.

If anyone needs confirmation of the Jewish fundamentalists’ arrogance and provocation, and the state of Israel’s disinterest in peace, then this is surely it.

Click here for the full Middle East Monitor article.

Five Broken Cameras: an everyday story of resistance to Israeli occupation

After graduating in 1986, I spent a couple of months working as a volunteer at Kibbutz Hagoshrim, located just 1km from the Lebanese border in northern Israel. While we were there, my then girlfriend and I toured the country and parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to educate ourselves about one of the world’s most enduring conflicts. Our travels took us to Metula, effectively a frontier town on the Lebanese border in the north, as well as to Haifa, Nazareth, Tiberius, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho, the Dead Sea and Eilat in the south.

What we saw convinced us that Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, and the lot of non-Jews (ie. Arab Israelis) in Israel itself, was not only a terrible injustice, but seemed conceived specifically to drive the Palestinians insane with fury. Palestinians were daily confronted with road-blocks in their own land, with property taken from them at will with the assistance of an implacable ‘Jewish’ state. While we were based in Palestinian east Jerusalem, the ongoing attrition of enforced evictions – in which Palestinian families were ordered to leave their homes in sudden, early-morning raids to make way for Israeli settlers – was a hot news topic.

Of course, Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land has developed apace since then, a process which I have followed from afar. But I find the absence of morality and the cynical, calculating nature of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and creeping land-grab so infuriating that it’s difficult to stay engaged. And that’s because of the overwhelming protection of impunity that Israel enjoys. If a white middle-class liberal, such as myself, finds it hard to keep engaged with this issue when thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime, imagine how it must feel for those who are being dispossessed, inch by inch, every day. To illustrate the point, I bought a copy of Marwan Bishara’s Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid several years ago to get to grips with the build-up to the Second Intifada, only to put it down again just 25 pages in because of the futile rage it provoked in me. So far, I’ve not returned to it.

So it was with more than a little trepidation that, thanks to a friend of mine here in Broadstairs, I finally sat down to watch 5 Broken Cameras, which shows how the West Bank village of Bil’in, threatened by the Apartheid Wall and encroaching Jewish settlements – illegal under international law – stood up and fought the Israeli machine. It is, like Bishara’s book, both powerful and one of the most anger-provoking films you could wish to watch, if you’re interested at all in any sense of natural justice.

I’ve written before about Israel’s creeping colonisation and annexation of Palestinian land. What I haven’t addressed is the tacit support of Britain’s Jewish establishment, and the rabid support of the Jewish lobby in the US, where it is almost a treasonable offence to question Israel’s right to take from the Palestinians whatever it wishes. Given the inhumanity and iconic nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the role it plays in Islamic radicalisation, how is it that so many Jews here in the West can stay silent – therefore, by default, providing tacit support Israel’s fait accompli? This is puzzling to me given the Jewish community’s vibrant and generous contributions to debate and political life. Surely, if you’re concerned with morality, then you’d also be aware of the consequences of your actions, or lack thereof: the Palestinians’ apparent lack of a right to exist. Surely, also, you’d take stock if there was any danger at all that Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.

There are, of course, plenty of Jews who detest Israel and its claim to be protecting their ‘homeland’. I know one or two personally who are vociferous in renouncing their ‘rights’ to that land. Jews for Justice for Palestinians also claim that Israel’s human rights abuses have corrupted the humanitarian principles of Judaism. I think they’re right, but I’d go further than that and say Israel has corrupted Zionism, a term for a set of philosophical ideas which, before the First World War, were unconcerned with creating a nation-state on Palestinian territory and excluding non-Jews in the process. Meanwhile, many within the Jewish establishment appear still to be fighting Israel’s PR battles of the 1980s, claiming that it is merely exercising its right to self-defence against violent fundamentalists, apparently unaware that – in terms of the land, at least – the battle is pretty much already won. The point is illustrated in today’s Jewish Chronicle, in which Tom Gross defends Arial Sharon as an innocent in the build-up to the Second Intifada. That’s despite his undeniably provocative visit to the Temple Mount in 2000. The article, like so many written in Israel’s defence, seems pitilessly churlish to me, given Sharon’s history – and, specifically, his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Religion has been at the heart of so much war, misery and suffering over the centuries. At least in ancient times, there was the excuse that news travelled slowly (compared with today) and items of faith were less open to challenge. But that’s not the case any more: for instance, there’s plenty of evidence and information to betray what the state of Israel has been up to over the last 40 years. And so the Jewish establishment, that so easily takes for granted the claim to the Holy Land, needs to be asked a question: what god worth worshipping can possibly justify this?

US threats against the Palestinians ensure an unjust ‘peace’

The Palestinian leadership is caught on the horns of a dilemma.

Since being granted ‘non-member observer state’ status by the UN General Assembly in November 2012, the Palestinian authority has been able to give the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction over its territory.

This would give the ICC the power to judge crimes on Palestinian land by all parties, whether it’s those who fire rockets into Israel, or Israel’s appropriation and settlement of Palestinian land, as well as the use of torture and indiscriminate attacks on its people.

Set against this is the threat from Israel of unspecified retaliation if the Palestinians seek justice through the ICC, a threat strongly backed up by the US.

Indeed, the US has said that any attempt to apply internationally-recognised and standards of justice by the Palestinians would destroy any chance of peace.

Given the choice of two evils the Palestinian leadership is presented with, it’s not surprising they are taking their time to decide.

However, given that Israel is using this hiatus as an opportunity to steal more Palestinian land for colonisation and development, there will surely come a time when the Palestinians have nothing else to lose. After all, their deaths might as well be the subject of ICC hearings as shrouded in silence or obscured by Israel’s PR machine.

Barack’s betrayal

The US threat represents quite possibly the greatest betrayal by Barack Obama’s administration. He came to power in 2008 promising to make the search for a just Middle Eastern peace a priority. But this was always going to be a tough task and, like most of his predecessors, his policy perspective has been hopelessly dependent on Israel’s agenda.

As Bill Van Esveld, of the Ma’an News Agency, writes in this article, Why Palestine should seek justice at the International Criminal Court:

The ICC’s statute categorises the ‘direct or indirect’ transfer of civilians by an occupying power into occupied territory – like the Israeli government’s transfer of Jewish citizens into the settlements – as a war crime.

Another war crime under the statute is the ‘forcible transfer’ of protected people in an occupied territory off their lands, such as by demolishing their homes and preventing them from returning.

Since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 2009, construction has begun on 8,575 settlement homes. Israeli demolitions during the same period left more than 4,000 Palestinians homeless. Both trends are accelerating. There were 1,708 settlement housing starts in the first half of 2013, up by 70% over the same period in 2012, and demolitions have left 933 Palestinians homeless so far this year, up from 886 in all of 2012.

Palestinian leaders have said they would seek ICC jurisdiction at the present time if – and, apparently, only if – Israel builds settlements in the so-called E1 area just east of Jerusalem, which many analysts say would effectively cut the West Bank in half.

But settlement-building is not only relevant to a future two-state solution: it takes a terrible, daily toll on people’s lives. Israel has granted settlements jurisdiction over 39% of the entire West Bank, making those areas off-limits to Palestinians who own land there or traditionally had access for farming and raising livestock. Meanwhile, as an Israeli rights group recently reported, the area used for settlement agriculture has increased by 35% since 1997, to 9,300 hectares. Some Palestinian farmers have no recourse but to lease land from settlers, who got it from Israel for free.

Of course, a just peace is exactly not what the US is seeking. Though Israel is a voracious and aggressive rogue state, the US considers it an important strategic ally, despite the poisonous effect it has on relations with nations across Asia. As a result, Israel acts with impunity – the forcible resettlement of the Bedouin as part of Israel’s latest land grab, being a case in point.

Consequently, Israel has achieved its position through an economic enterprise and military force underwritten largely by the US, and supported by corporations unconcerned with human rights issues – such as Caterpillar – and happy to profit from the misery and oppression of others.

How ironic that the ‘Land of the Free’ has facilitated the destruction of a fledgling nation, and overseen the dehumanisation of an entire people and the wholesale theft of their land.