Month: June 2009

Smile on the face of the tiger

Obama at Cairo University
Obama at Cairo University

In his latest column, John Pilger de-codes the Obama’s “historic” speech in Cairo “reaching out to the Muslim world”. However seductive, its content was as morally bankrupt as any of Bush’s spiels.

At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip. His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and he was suffering from a lung infection which was treatable.

Denied basic equipment, the doctors in Gaza could do nothing. For weeks, the child’s parents had sought a permit from the Israelis to allow them to take him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he would have been saved. Like many desperately sick people who apply for these permits, the parents were told they had never applied. Even if they had arrived at the Erez Crossing with an Israeli document in their hands, the odds are that they would have been turned back for refusing the demands of officials to spy or collaborate in some way.

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Paul Findley: Obama plans showdown with Israel

Paul Findley, member of Congress, 1960-83, author of They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, presents a rather optimistic view of Obama’s Cairo speech and actions to date.

He believes Obama is a long-range planner heading for a showdown with the Israel lobby.  I don’t share his enthusiasm for Obama or for the two state solution.  After all, even if it happens, what type of two state solution can Palestinians really expect?

As a Capitol Hill insider with long, close experience with Middle Eastern affairs and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s principal lobby in Washington, I believe I can explain why Barack Obama, as president-elect, chose Rahm Emanuel as his chief-of-staff and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. I am not an Obama insider. This is my analysis, based on strong evidence that the president is a careful, long-range planner.

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Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan

Kathy Kelly
Kathy Kelly (portrait by Robert Shetterly)

The brave and tireless Kathy Kelly who founded Voices in the Wilderness to campaign against the genocidal UN-US sanctions on Iraq is presently touring the Pakistani conflict zones.Yesterday we published her moving report from the Shah Mansoor refugee camp in Swabi. Today she sent us two of her earlier dispatches which we have published below. All her future dispatches from the region will also be appearing on PULSE.

9 June 2009, Waziristan — In Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea, in 1950, are described in this way:

“The planes always come…like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses.”

The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came twenty days ago, on May 20th, 2009.  A U.S. drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4:30 AM, killing 14 women and children and 2 elders, wounding eleven.

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Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid

For those who refuse to accept the brutal reality on the ground, the Human Sciences Research Council of South https://i0.wp.com/sabbah.biz/mt/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/4_9Mirror_on_Apartheid_Wall.jpgAfrica has produced a new detailed legal report which confirms “that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).” The study was commissioned to “test the hypothesis posed by Professor John Dugard in the report he presented to the UN Human Rights Council in January 2007, in his capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the OPT:

Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT. At the same time, elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law. What are the legal consequences of a regime of prolonged occupation with features of colonialism and apartheid for the occupied people, the Occupying Power and third States?

On the specific question of colonialism the report unambiguously states that:

“Five issues, which are unlawful in themselves, taken together make it evident that Israel’s rule in the OPT has assumed such a colonial character: namely, violations of the territorial integrity of occupied territory; depriving the population of occupied territory of the capacity for selfgovernance; integrating the economy of occupied territory into that of the occupant; breaching the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources in relation to the occupied territory; and denying the population of occupied territory the right freely to express, develop and practice its culture” (pp. 15-16). Furthermore, “Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem is manifestly an act based on colonial intent” (ibid.).

Concerning the charge of apartheid, the report states:

By examining Israel’s practices in the light of Article 2 of the Apartheid Convention, this study concludes that Israel has introduced a system of apartheid in the OPT (p. 17)

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Down and Out in Shah Mansoor

Refugees await uncertain fate in IDP camps
Refugees await uncertain fate in IDP camps

The tireless and wonderful Kathy Kelly is visiting refugee camps in Pakistan with Dan Pearson. Here is her first dispatch (Mahmood Mamdani recently told me that apparently Arundhati Roy is also in Swat these days):

In Pakistan’s Swabi district, a bumpy road leads to Shah Mansoor, a small village surrounded by farmland. Just outside the village, uniform size tents are set up in hundreds of rows. The sun bores down on the Shah Mansoor camp which has become a temporary home to thousands of displaced Pakistanis from the Swat area. In the stifling heat, the camp’s residents sit idly, day after day, uncertain about their future. They spoke with heated certainty, though, about their grievances.As soon as we stepped out of the car, men and children approached us. They had all arrived from Mingora, the main city of Swat, 15 days prior. One young man, a student, told us that bombing and shelling had increased in their area, but, due to a government imposed curfew, they weren’t allowed to leave their homes. Suddenly, the Pakistani Army warned them to leave within four hours or they would be killed. With the curfew lifted long enough for them to get out of Mingora, they joined a mass exodus of people and walked for three days before reaching this camp.

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The Israel democracy fraud

Samieh Jabarin, Um al Fahm, February 2009
Samieh Jabbarin, Um al Fahm, February 2009

Caryl Churchill’s play, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, is due to be performed in Israel and directed by Samieh Jabbarin. Jabbarin is a Palestinian citizen of Israel political prisoner, and he will direct the play via telephone. Seldom one hears about the conditions of the Palestinians living in what is considered to be Israel. Jabbarin’s case illustrates the fraud implied by the term “Israeli democracy” or, even worse, “Jewish democracy”.

Jabbarin was imprisoned because he was demonstrating against the appointment of a notorious Jewish fascist as election observer in Um al Fahm, a Palestinian city in Israel. A petition on Jabbarin’s case demonstrates the Kafkaesque nature of what passes for “democracy” and “justice” in Israel:
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Regime change comes home to roost

Yossi Peled
Yossi Peled

Antiwar.com brings us news that Israeli minister Yossi Peled is seeking sanctions and regime change… against the USA!

Peled is calling for the Israeli government to seek to influence American elections and cutting trade ties with America.  This, let’s remember, is coming from a minister of the country that has received more aid from the US than all of Sub-Saharan Africa combined.  Israeli politicians are now so comfortable with their relationship with America they talk about America in the same way America talks about minor Latin American rogue states.

For those, like me, who are skeptical of whether the Obama Administration is going to offer any real change on US policy towards Israel, stories like this offer cause for optimism.

Team Obama may not do enough to pressure Israel, but with fundamentalist misanthropes filling every cabinet post in Israel, there is every chance that it is the Israelis who will bring about an Israeli-American split with their antagonism.

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Destroying houses and lives, the israeli way

Two videos highlight the plight of Palestinians whose homes have been destroyed. The first features the courageous activism of israeli Ezra Nawi, who had tried to stop military bulldozers from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. (Yes, those are IOF soldiers callously laughing in the aftermath of home demolitions). Nawi, a Jewish Israeli of Iraqi descent, is viewed as a threat because he has brought international attention to efforts to illegally remove Palestinians from the Hebron region. He will be sentenced in July and a campaign is underway to rally to his cause. The second clip is from the Guardian’s Inigo Gilmore who visits the devastated neighbourhoods in Gaza to find that families are still living among the rubble, in tents.

Support Israeli Human Rights Activist Ezra Nawi – http://www.supportezra.net

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Israel lobby descends on UC-Santa Barbara

Original Email at Issue p. 7
One slide of the photo essay Prof. Robinson sent to his students

The Anti-Defamation League and the Israel advocacy group “Stand With Us” are leading an aggressive, direct campaign to pressure UCSB administrators and faculty to investigate and discipline Professor of Sociology William I. Robinson for having introduced materials critical of Israel in a course on global affairs. The UCSB academic senate opened an official inquiry alleging “academic misconduct” and “anti-semitism”, following complaints by two students in response to an email Robinson sent out to his class during Israel’s war on Gaza. The email consisted of an article published in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle by Judith Stone, who had recently returned from the occupied territories (the editor responsible was fired the next day), a photo essay which juxtaposed Nazi atrocities against Jews in WWII and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza and the following commentary:

If Martin Luther King, Jr. Were alive on this day of January 19, 2009, there is no doubt that he would be condemning the Israeli aggression against Gaza along with u.s. military and political support for Israeli war crimes, or that he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians. I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing “with love” on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children.

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Israeli towns adopt “loyalty oaths” to bar Arab residents

Perhaps dismayed by the cabinet’s decision to reject Lieberman’s ‘loyalty oath’ proposal, Jewish communities in https://i0.wp.com/electronicintifada.net/bytopic/uploads/no-arabs-483.jpgthe central Galilee are taking matters into their own hands. Call it grassroots fascism. Jonathan Cook reports:

A community in northern Israel has changed its bylaws to demand that new residents pledge support for “Zionism, Jewish heritage and settlement of the land” in a thinly-veiled attempt to block Arab applicants from gaining admission.

Critics are calling the bylaw, adopted by Manof, home to 170 Jewish families in the Galilee, a local “loyalty oath” similar to a national scheme recently proposed by the far-right party of the government minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Other Jewish communities in the central Galilee — falling under the umbrella of a regional council known as Misgav — are preparing similar bylaws in response to a court petition filed by an Arab couple hoping to build a home in Misgav.

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