On November 10 Presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that anybody who says Obama has made a decision “doesn’t have in all honesty the slightest idea what they’re talking about. The president’s yet to make a decision” about troop levels. I read that as an effort to encourage the antiwar folks who continue to think kindly of Obama that just maybe he’ll do the right thing and withdraw.

The fact that former general and current U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry recommended against a buildup of forces given the widespread corruption in the Hamid Karzai regime in a memo last week, and that the memo was allowed to leak to the press, may also be a sop to the rational forces calling for an end to the war.

Obama says he’s angrier that Robert Gates about the leak and wants whoever is responsible fired. But the fact that Obama says he will make the decision “with a few weeks” and that NATO has announced that its regular Brussels meeting to discuss troop levels in Afghanistan has been postponed from November 23 to sometime next month suggests that the president may indeed be experiencing some internal conflict about this war he has repeatedly called a “war of necessity.”

That’s really been Obama’s defining foreign policy thesis. For a man without “foreign policy experience” (which of course from a common-sense point of view is not a bad thing) Obama felt from the get-go that he needed to balance his stand against the Iraq War, which was never really more than objection to a “strategic blunder,” with a macho, ringing defense of the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”–the war that George Bush blew by diverting troops and resources to Iraq.

So long as Afghanistan was the Good War to Iraq’s Bad War that may have been a rational political strategy. As recently as his Cairo speech in June Obama told the world that while the Iraq War had been a “war of choice” (a significant admission for the head of state of the aggressor nation in a still ongoing war) Afghanistan was a war of necessity caused by the 9-11 attacks. But since then his own intelligence services have assured him that al-Qaeda has left Afghanistan and U.S. forces aren’t fighting the 9-11 perpetrators there. The U.S. forces and diminishing numbers of demoralized NATO and other allies fight Pashtun nationalists fired up by jihadist spirit. They have gotten stronger with each passing year of the eight year war, and more effective in killing U.S. troops unclear about their mission.

Obama could back off from his defining foreign policy thesis and say, “I was wrong. Actually this war wasn’t necessary at all and I’m pulling out.” He could point out the obvious: that it is an inherited conflict, not his war; that it has lost the support of the American people; that the Afghan regime for which the U.S. fights is hopelessly corrupt and unpopular; that the Afghans want the foreigners out, with Karzai himself calling for a timetable for withdrawal; that the war is dangerously destabilizing nuclear Pakistan and causing the people there as well as Afghanistan to hate the U.S. which is just very dangerous for everyone concerned.

It would be so easy, and there would be enormous support for a clear statement of a withdrawal plan. But it’s widely predicted that Obama will bow to the demand of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for tens of thousands of more troops, raising the issue of who really runs this country and what issues are really involved in Afghanistan. Does the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean, bypassing both Russia and Iran, have anything to do with it?

All the wrestling with the arguments about the absence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the increase in U.S. forces actually strengthening the Taliban and the distastefulness of having American soldiers dying for Karzai’s bogus regime ends when the pale cast of thought turns to serious imperialist geopolitics. Forgive my language but Obama is a traditional bourgeois politician who with his State Department identifies corporate U.S. interests as “national” interests and probably can be persuaded that they’re worth fighting for. Or rather, using U.S. troops to fight and die for.

Whether he gives McChrystal the 40,000 he wants or a smaller force, it will be doomed to contribute to the current 922 military fatality figure. Soon 1000 will have died fighting illiterate tribesman deeply angered at their presence in their valleys which have resisted countless ill-considered incursions for over 2300 years. Will the standard-bearer of change and hope still be pacing his office, wrestling with the question then?

“’This is something similar to what occurred in Gaza or worse, because neither observers nor journalists had access to the war zone,’ stated a UN source who asked for anonymity. The army acknowledges that 6,200 soldiers and 22,000 guerrillas died in the last three years of the longest civil war in Asia. The UN affirms that between 80,000 and 100,000 persons died in the conflict,” wrote Elisa Reche of Prensa Marea Socialista.

“During the war,” Reche continued, “the army had 200,000 troops. Now with peace, 100,000 are being incorporated… A strange peace it is that requires more troops than in actual combat.”

More troops are needed because systematic ethnic cleansing is now the order of the day for the Tamil people. Their Homeland will be obliterated by introducing more Sinhalese settlers. The same strategy, as John Pilger pointed out, that Israel uses against Palestinians.

This is what M.K. Bhadrakumar, an ambassador for India who served in Sri Lanka and other countries, wrote about the day after Sri Lanka declared victory.

See, they have already solved the Tamil problem in the eastern provinces… The Tamils are no more the majority community in these provinces. Similarly, from tomorrow, they will commence a concerted, steady colonization program of the Northern provinces where Prabhakaran reigned supreme for two decades. They will ensure incrementally that the northern regions no more remain as Tamil provinces… Give them a decade at the most. The Tamil problem will become a relic of the bloody history of the Indian sub-continent.

Ethnic cleansing goes hand-in-hand with the policy of imprisoning and mistreating hundreds of thousands of Tamils. For more than a year before its military victory, the Sri Lanka government enticed Tamils, wishing to flee the war zone, into so-called “welfare” centers or villages. Tens of thousands became “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDP), and are thus subject to United Nations regulations concerning decent living conditions, food and water, freedom of movement and the right to leave and rejoin families. All these rights and necessities have been denied them.

“Really if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy,” President J.R. told the Daily Telegraph, (UK) on July 11, 1983.

A quarter-century later, the current president is striving to fulfill his predecessor’s genocidal intentions. Mahinda Rajapakse has claimed that no IDP is held against his/her will and all are treated well. However, the few United Nations visitors—there are no official investigators into abuses since the Human Rights Council majority blocked such a possibility—who come to observe have quite another picture.

When UN’s political chief, Lynn Pascoe, visited camps in September he said people were not free or well treated… “this kind of closed regime goes directly against the principles under which we work in assisting IDPs all around the world.”

Rajapakse told Pascoe another tale about “free movement”. He said that detention was necessary because the army was clearing the area for mines, and it was still looking for guerrillas hiding among civilians. However, as the UN resident coordinator reported, and Amnesty Internationalquoted: “Under international humanitarian law, captured combatants…may be held pending the cessation of hostilities. Once active hostilities have ceased, prisoners of war must be released ‘without delay.’”

At of July, there were 9,400 individuals with purported links to the LTTE held separately from the rest of the population. They have not been released nearly half-a-year after internment.

Amnesty International also reported that the camps are clearly militarized. The 19-member Presidential Task Force established in mid-May “to plan and coordinate resettlement, rehabilitation and development of the Northern Province” is headed Major General CA Chandrasiri, who was also appointed governor of the province. All inmates are enclosed by barbed-wire fences, guarded and brutalized by well-armed soldiers.

“Arrests have been reported from the camps and Sri Lankan human rights defenders have alleged that enforced disappearances have also occurred,” wrote Amnesty.

“Sri Lanka’s history of large-scale enforced disappearances dating back to the 1980s, and the lack of independent monitoring… raises grave concerns that enforced disappearances and other violations of human rights may be occurring… Previous research [shows] that [persons] suspected by the government of being members or supporters of LTTE are at grave risk of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearance, and torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”

“Although the government calls these facilities ‘welfare villages,’ they are effectively detention camps…” Amnesty International also reported that not only are people not free to move as they wish, women and girls are raped by soldiers, and people live in sewage, disease-infested conditions, with little food and water and medical attention. They die in droves because of these imposed conditions.

Women and children are especially mistreated, which was the subject that James Elder, spokesperson for UNICEF, complained about to Sri Lankan authorities, who then expelled him from the country. Elder described the “unimaginable suffering” of children caught in the fighting, including babies he had seen with shrapnel wounds.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had refrained from criticizing Sri Lanka’s government, leveling his critique only at LTTE for carrying out atrocities. But when he briefly visited one camp less than a week after the end of the war, he said:

“I have traveled around the world and visited similar places, but this is by far the most appalling scenes I have seen…I sympathize fully with all of the displaced persons,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told CNN after visiting Manik Farm, the most presentable of Sri Lanka’s squalid and dangerous internment camps for Tamils civilians. The UN Chief has also promised international action regarding the heavy shelling of civilian populations during the recent fighting.

Out of the 280,000 IDPs after the end of the war (there were nearly one-half million over a year’s period), only between 15,000 and 40,000 had been released by November 1. Half of them, perhaps, have been ransomed. The Sunday Times wrote about “human trafficking at the internment camps.” Relatives were made to pay camp authorities in order to secure their release.

Future

A week after the end of the war, the LTTE communicated that several of its leaders were killed, but the organization would continue struggling for an independent Tamil Eelam in peaceful ways. July 22, the LTTE announced that its chief of international relations, Selvarsa Pathmanathan—known as KP—was made the new leader, and that a new strategy for a “free Tamil Eelam” would occur. On August 8, England’s The Independent wrote that Pathmanathan was under arrest by Sri Lanka and held incommunicado.

For us solidarity activists, left-wing organizations, and governments considered to be progressive-socialist-communist-revolutionary, I believe that our task must be to press for the lives and rights of the Tamil people. Australia’s Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance said it well in its October 2009 international situation report:

Now the Tamil struggle has entered a new phase. The immediate campaign must focus on defence of basic human rights, release and resettlement of the Internally Displaced Persons currently held in SL government concentration camps, an end to murders, torture, rapes, and provision of basic housing, food and drinking water to the Tamil people under brutal occupation.

As a solidarity activist, who advocates the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to induce oppressive and terrorist governments to engage in a process aimed at peace with justice, I condemn all perpetrators of terrorism and demand they change tactics to ones that are morally in accordance with our ideology for socialism, for justice with equality.

I find that most, if not all, armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror in the long course of warfare. This has sometimes been the case with FARC and PFLP, for instance. But I support them in their righteous struggle. They are up against, as was the more brutal LTTE, much greater military and economic forces that practice state terror endemically. Remember the ANC in South Africa’s war for liberation. They committed much the same.

The main reason why I am on their side, why I have been a leftist solidarity activist and writer for nearly half-a-century is a matter of basic ethics. I define ethics in this way: Life shall not be abused or destroyed by our conscious hand—without being attacked, invaded, oppressed beyond bare. A moral person, organization, political party, government acts in daily life and in the struggle for justice with that ethic in mind. These are my thoughts on morality.

1. We act to so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.
2. In combat against oppressors and invaders, we do not kill non-combatant civilians nor forcefully recruit them, or use them as hostages.
3. We struggle to create equality for all.
4. We abolish all profit-making based upon the exploitation of labor or the oppression of any person, group of people or class. Instead, we build an economy based upon principles of justice and equality, one in which no one goes hungry, sharing equitably our resources and production.
5. We struggle to create a political system based upon participation where all have a voice in decision-making of vital matters, in local, national and international policies.
6. We struggle to eliminate alienation in each of us.

After following liberated Cuba for half-a-century, having lived and worked there for eight years, I find that during its guerrilla struggle, which fortunately only lasted two years, it acted in a moral manner. Cuba’s revolutionary armed struggle was exceptional in this way. The Vietnamese struggle against the invaders of France and the USA was so conducted as well. There are a few other examples: the original Sandinistas is, perhaps, one.

I think that the key reason why so many millions of people the world love and respect Che Guevara is because of his moral stance, of his example as a just revolutionary leader. I conclude this all-too-long essay with these oft-quoted words from Che’s Socialism and Man.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love… Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible… one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

A move to stage the commemoration in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is being led by Michael Ben-Ari, who was elected this year and is the first self-declared former member of Kahane’s party, Kach, to become a legislator since the movement was banned 15 years ago.

The US Embassy, in Tel Aviv, has sent a series of e-mails to Reuven Rivlin, the parliamentary speaker, asking that he intervene to block the event.

According to US officials, pressure is being exerted on behalf of George Mitchell, the US president Barack Obama’s envoy to the region, who is concerned that it will add to his troubles as Israeli and Palestinian leaders clash over a possible move by the Palestinians to issue a unilateral declaration of statehood.

Some Israeli legislators have warned that Mr Ben-Ari and his supporters are gaining a stronger foothold in parliament, in an indication of the country’s increasing lurch rightwards.

“Ben-Ari and the advisers he has brought with him are unabashed representatives for Kach and Kahane’s ideas,” said Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator and the deputy speaker. “What we have is in effect a terrorist cell in the parliament.”

Kahane, a US rabbi who emigrated to Israel in the early 1970s, advocated the expulsion of all Arabs from “Greater Israel”, an area that the far right believes encompasses not only Israel but also the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and parts of neighbouring Arab states.

Kahane was elected to parliament in 1984 but was barred from standing again four years later. He was assassinated by an Egyptian-American in New York in November 1990.

In 1994 Kach was declared a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States after Baruch Goldstein, a supporter, went on an armed rampage through the Ibrahimi mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron, killing 29 worshippers and injuring 150.

Despite the ban, Kach is still active in many West Bank settlements, especially in and around Hebron, where shrines to Kahane and Goldstein regularly attract large numbers of devotees.

Mr Ben-Ari, one of four members of the National Union elected to the 120-seat parliament, has included as his parliamentary advisers two former Kach activists, Baruch Marzel and Itimar Ben Gvir, who are leaders of the far-right Jewish National Front. Mr Ben-Ari has never disavowed his support for Kahane, telling the Jerusalem Post newspaper this month that Kahane “dedicated his whole life to Israel … He was a great man and a great leader.”

This month Mr Ben-Ari was the voice on an advertisement on the Israeli radio station Reshet Bet to promote a public memorial service for Kahane held by his family. It was also reported that for the first time posters had been placed in many central areas of Jerusalem publicising the event and declaring “We all know now – Meir Kahane was right”.

The United States has expressed more concern, however, at a commemoration being planned in parliament.

Michael Perlstein, the second secretary at the US Embassy, is reported to have e-mailed Mr Rivlin several times, asking whether the commemoration was likely to be approved. According to e-mails leaked to the Israeli media, he added: “This is something Senator Mitchell and his team are following with some concern.”

An embassy spokesman reiterated those concerns last week: “To stir up controversy at the same time that we are trying to get people back to the [negotiating] table, is not productive of that effort. It is only natural that Senator Mitchell would be paying attention to that – and the US government as well.”

Mr Rivlin has reassured the United States that he has refused Mr Ben-Ari permission to stage a commemoration but has also admitted that it would be difficult for him to stop a “stunt” by Kahane supporters in the chamber.

“We are talking about a provocation,” Mr Rivlin told the Haaretz newspaper. “The man [Kahane] and his outlawed movement cannot be separated. This is an attempt to bring the Kach movement into the Knesset through the back door.”

Last week, Mr Ben-Ari appealed against the speaker’s decision to the House Committee, which rules on issues of parliamentary procedure. Mr Rivlin has said he will abide by the committee’s decision.

Its chairman, Yariv Levine of the ruling Likud Party, said he was not happy with Mr Rivlin’s refusal and is reported to be working with the speaker and Mr Ben-Ari to find a solution.

Mr Ben-Ari responded angrily to the US concern: “I was elected to the Knesset by citizens of the independent state of Israel. The flagrant involvement of Mitchell has crossed a red line and it testifies to the bowed head of the Knesset speaker that is turning the Knesset into a dish rag.”

Mr Ben-Ari is probably not the only former member of Kach in parliament. Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, the third largest in parliament, is believed to have joined Kach when he first arrived in Israel in the 1970s. His membership was revealed in February by Yossi Dayan, the movement’s former secretary general.

Last week Mr Ben-Ari had to cancel a trip to the United States, his first overseas visit, after he was refused a US visa. He had intended to speak to American Jewish groups to encourage emigration to Israel.

To date, the only authorised parliamentary commemorations are for Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister assassinated by a right-wing Jew in 1995, and for Rehavam Zeevi, a former general and leader of a far-right anti-Arab party, who was assassinated by Palestinian gunmen in 2001.

They reflected the fact that many if not most peoples of the nations of the world (so-called ordinary folk) are becoming increasingly fed up with Israel’s arrogance of power, its contempt for international law and its appalling self-righteousness and, also, are beginning to see the Zionist state for what it really is – the prime obstacle to peace, because of its preference for more and more land rather than peace.

Could it be that in the quietness of his unspoken mind, President Obama is counting on this growing anti-Israel sentiment, if and when it takes hold in America, to give him the freedom to respond to Netanyahu’s two-fingered gestures by taking on the Zionist lobby’s stooges in Congress?

Put another way, is it possible that Obama can live for the time being with the humiliation Netanyahu is heaping upon him because he believes that the Zionist state will so overplay its hand that it will alienate even Americans, enough of them to make it possible for him to do whatever is necessary to oblige Israel to be serious about peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept?

On this occasion, I’m not answering the question. Only asking it.

State terrorism manifests itself in: 1) police state practices against its own people to dominate through fear by surveillance, disruption of group meetings, control of the news media, beatings, torture, false and mass arrests, false charges and rumors, show trials, killings, summary executions and capital punishments;

The terrorism of modern state power and its high technology weaponry exceeds qualitatively by many orders of magnitude the political violence relied upon by groups aspiring to undo oppression and achieve liberation.

…peoples who are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination have the right to use force to accomplish their objectives within the framework of international humanitarian law.

This document applies to the situation of the Sri Lankan governments since 1983 as well as to the LTTE, and the proportions of the use of violence are as written by the general assembly. The LTTE did, however, after time, go beyond the framework of international humanitarian law.

One voice regarding terrorism and what lies behind these atrocities appears so credible to me, and so tragic in itself, that I quote him extensively to show that all warring parties in Sri Lanka acted as terrorists. Here are some of the last words of Sri Lankan journalist Manilal Wickrematunge Lasantha, a Sinhalese, who predicted his assassination shortly before it occurred, on January 8, 2009. His newspaper, The Sunday Leader, published his own “obituary” three days later.

Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty…

Our commitment is to see Sri Lanka as a transparent, secular, liberal democracy… Secular because in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society such as ours, secularism offers the only common ground by which we might all be united…

…we have consistently espoused the view that while separatist terrorism must be eradicated, it is more important to address the root causes of terrorism, and urged government to view Sri Lanka’s ethnic strife in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism. We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens…

The LTTE are among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations ever to have infested the planet. There is no gainsaying that it must be eradicated. But to do so by violating the rights of Tamil citizens, bombing and shooting them mercilessly, is not only wrong but shames the Sinhalese, whose claim to be custodians of the dhamma [the teachings of Buddha, which lead to enlightenment] is forever called into question by this savagery, much of which is unknown to the public because of censorship…

What is more, a military occupation of the country’s north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self respect…

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.

The irony in this is that, unknown to most of the public, Mahinda [Rajapakse, the president] and I have been friends for more than a quarter century… “Sadly, for all the dreams you had for our country in your younger days, in just three years you have reduced it to rubble. In the name of patriotism you have trampled on human rights, nurtured unbridled corruption and squandered public money like no other President before you…”

When Lasantha’s dramatic editorial appeared, he had already been murdered on his way to work by four men on motorcycles. The probable conspirator behind the execution was Lasantha’s “friend’s” brother, war secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse, a naturalized citizen of the USA. In December 2008, he had censored the Sunday Leader from publishing any criticism of his actions. He had earlier threatened the careers and lives of other journalists.

A week before Lasanth’s murder, G. Rajapakse’s army captured the capital of the de facto Eelam state, Kilinochchi. LTTE guerrilla army fled but not all the civilians had evacuated before the government’s troops entered and butchered scores or hundreds. On August 25, 2009, England’s Channel 4 News broadcast footage showing Sri Lankan forces executing nine Tamils stripped naked. One of the military’s soldiers had filmed this atrocity on his mobile telephone. Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (Sinhalese and Tamils) obtained the film and presented it to Channel 4, which showed it after verifying its authenticity.

The United States government praised Sri Lanka for its military offensive. The US embassy in Colombo issued this statement: “The United States does not advocate that the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with the LTTE…”

Following this crushing defeat, the LTTE was reduced to an area of a few square kilometers. Many thousands of civilians had left their homes to reach so-called No Fire Zones, which the S.L. army began setting up on January 20th. Conditions were sub-human (and they continue to be so for over two-hundred and fifty thousand interned civilians in various camps as of this writing), and they were (are) forced to remain. Amnesty International—more often than not a reliable observer of international conflicts, one of the few NGO’s that does not take money from any government or political party—recently published a report about these camps. Sri Lanka is violating rules established by the United Nations, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, applying to displaced persons.

Here is an excerpt from a civilian inmate.

“Knowing that many civilians were not able to move, the government restarted shelling. They even hit the No Fire Zone so even that small area was not protected…When we heard the supersonic Kfirs [Israel jets] overhead we used to rush to the bunker and hide…That was our life for months just squatting in bunkers.”

Amnesty stated: “The Government of Sri Lanka exacerbated this isolation by restricting access by outsiders to the conflict area. In September 2008, Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaska issued a directive ordering all humanitarian and UN agencies to leave the Vanni and remove all equipment and vehicles.” This order also applied to journalists, opposition politicians and humanitarian organizations.

John Pilger described Sri Lanka’s isolation strategy this way:

The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite willfully by a Tamil suicide bomber.¹

From 2006-7 onward President Rajapakse was spending nearly one-quarter ($1.5 billion) of Sri Lanka’s national budget of $7.5 billion (2008 figures) on war. By January 2009, the Sri Lankan military, refortified especially by Israel, Pakistan and China, had recaptured much of the Tamil Homeland. From the end of 2008 to Sri Lanka’s military victory over LTTE, it had indiscriminately bombed Tamil civilians even in the “safe zones” where the government had told them to flee. Many thousands were killed.

After the fall of Tamil Eelam’s de facto capital, it still took the far superiorly armed and manned army four and one-half months to defeat the guerrilla army. There were few close contact battles. The LTTE fighters and civilians in the remaining Homeland area were subject to shelling from the air and by long-distance artillery. Amnesty International reported:

Eyewitness accounts of the final months of the war painted a grim picture of deprivation of food, water and medical care; fear, injury and loss of life suffered by civilians trapped by the conflict… both the LTTE and Sri Lankan government forces committed violations of international humanitarian law… The LTTE forcibly recruited children as soldiers, used civilians as human shields against the Sri Lankan army’s offensive, and attacked civilians who tried to flee. The Sri Lankan armed forces launched indiscriminate attacks with artillery on areas densely populated by civilians. Hospitals were shelled, resulting in death and injuries among patients and staff.

Sri Lanka’s military achieved victory by murdering any Tamil “in its way”, and because of the extensive military force provided to it by many capitalist and so-called socialist states. Here are the major players:

1. India has provided weaponry, radar and training to Sri Lanka’s military since 1987. It often hides what aid it gives or sells since so many of its citizens are against S.L.’s brutality against Tamils. After a period of providing little military assistance, it increased its aid at the end of 2008 when the government launched its all-out offensive. As late as April 2009, India sent three fast attack boats and a missile corvette (INS Vinash), part of $500 million in total aid. It has also turned over LTTE fugitives to S.L. India sees its traditional role as the dominant nation in South Asia being replaced by China’s fast-growing presence, which is another reason for its support to Sri Lanka’s Buddhist government despite the fact that 80% of India’s 1.2 billion people practice Hinduism with less than 1% Buddhists. On the world plan, India hip hops from one antagonist force to another. There is no clear direction.

2. The United States of America has been arming and financing Sri Lanka for most of the civil war period. The Indian Ocean is a vital waterway in which half of the world’s containerized cargo passes through. Its waters carry heavy traffic of petroleum products. The US signed a ten year Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) with Sri Lanka on 5 March 2007 which provides, along with other things, logistics supplies and refueling facilities. The US already has Voice of America installation at Tricomalee, which can be used for surveillance. From at least the 1990s, the US has provided military training, financing and weapons sales averaging $1.5 million annually. During the cease fire, in 2002, this sum went down to $259,999 for military training only. Bush was especially glad for Sri Lanka’s terrorism, and encouraged Colombo to resume the civil war, in 2006, which his government financed with $2.9 million. The Pentagon provided counter-insurgency training, maritime radar, patrols of US warships and aircraft. At the end of Bush’s second term, the US was forced to cut back on aid given that it was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. That, coupled with critical public opinion, organized by the Diaspora, of state terrorism and systematic discrimination of Tamils, prompted congress to make noises about abuses of human rights by not only LTTE but also about the use of children in “paramilitary forces of the Sri Lankan government.” Nevertheless, in 2008, $1.45 million in military financing and training was granted the government out of a total of $7.4 million in total aid. The US made noises about killing a ‘humanitarian crisis’ when the Sri Lankan army was about to finish the war but it never took affirmative action to bring the war to an end. It’s howling about human rights is only a veiled threat to the Sri Lankan government, that it should not do anything prejudicial to its interests, that is, keep China at bay.

3. Israel was officially re-awarded diplomatic relations, in May 2000, after Sri Lanka had severed them, in 1970, in protest at Israel’s continued illegal expansion into Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, Israel continued to operate inside S.L. out of a special interests office set up in the US embassy. Under the table, however, Sri Lanka’s successive regimes embraced Israel’s military advisors, a special commando unit in the police, and Mossad counter-intelligence agents—who sought to drive a wedge between Muslims and Tamils. After S.L. military defeat at Elephant Pass, it appealed to Israel for military aid. Israel sent 16 of its supersonic Kfir fighter jets, some Dvora fast naval attack craft, and electronic and imagery surveillance equipment, plus advisors and technicians. Israel personnel took part in military attacks on Tamil units, and its pilots flew attack aircraft. Tigers shot down one Kfir. Just before the end of the war, Prime Minister Wickremanayake was in Israel to make bigger deals with Israeli arms supplies.

4. U.K./EU In 2005, British arms export rose by 60%, according to John Pilger (12). In 2008, £1.4 million in arms export was approved. France sent patrol boats, and other EU countries continued but reduced military aid. The EU had never been required to offer much aid given that its major allies were so much engaged.

5. Japan has long been Sri Lanka’s greatest economic donor until China overtook that position in 2008-9. Japan has sold technology and offered generous loans, but it has also outright donated millions more every year. In 1997, for instance, it granted $52 million outright but $26 in technical cooperation. In 2001, aid was at $310 million. It also paid for the government television station, Rupavahini. While Japan’s aid, sales and loans are not directed at defense, these huge sums allow the Sri Lanka governments to use more of its budget for war. This is the case as well with several other Asian countries.

6. Iran “We don’t need your money (with all those strings)”, a Sri Lanka treasury functionary purportedly told World Bank officials last year. “The international community” (US-EU governments) had begun to cut back on aid and even to ask questions about treatment of Tamil civilians, whose cries were being heard from the Diaspora. So, Sri Lanka played one power against another: India-Pakistan/China, US-China, Israel-Iran/Libya—the West-NAM. In 2008-9, Iran provided $1.9 billion in credit to build an oil refinery, in order to process S.L.’s crude oil, and it donated $450 million for a hydropower project. Iran is US’s most important inside ally with the Quisling Iraq government. And Libya has most recently been approached for a $500 million loan by Sri Lanka. Libya is with and against Iran.

7. Pakistan came into the Sri Lanka debacle, in 2008, at the encouragement of China. At the beginning of 2009, it provided $100 million in military assistance loans; it gave Chinese-origin small arms, and offered pilot training for S.L.’s new Chinese aircraft. Pakistan is also an ally of the US in its terror war “against” terror. Its governments are part of the war against Afghanistan, which has spread throughout most of Pakistan and split the population. Here have we a country allied with Cuba and ALBA et al. in NAM at the same time a partner with the world’s greatest terrorist state.

8. China entered the picture in 2005.China is the world’s no 2 oil consumer after the United States. China has stepped up efforts to secure sea lanes and transport routes that are vital for its oil supplies. In April 2007, just one month after the US’s ACSA deal with SL, China’s Poly Technologies supplied $36.5 million arms to Sri Lanka. A $150 million contract was given to China’s Huawei, which has close links with the Chinese intelligence wing MSS, to build a country-wide infrastructure for communications. In 2008, China invested five times over what it did in 2007. Its biggest investment is a vast construction project at Hambantota on the southern coast, which it will use as a re-fuelling and docking station for its navy. “Ever since Sri Lanka agreed to the plan, in March 2007, China has given it all the aid, arms and diplomatic support it needs to defeat the Tigers, without worrying about the West,” wrote The Times (London). China acts without asking questions about the treatment and conditions of workers and minorities. In April 2007, S.L. made a deal to buy Chinese ammunition and ordnance for is military. China gave it six F7 jet fighters after a Sky Tiger raid that destroyed ten military aircraft, in 2007. One Chinese fighter was soon shot down by Tigers. China has also given or sold on credit: an anti-submarine warfare vessel, gunboats and landing craft, battle tanks, anti-aircraft guns, and air surveillance radars. In June 2009, after the conclusion of the civil war, it signed an $891 million agreement for the Norochcholai Coal Power project. Chinese companies were granted an Economic Zone for 33 years. Huichen Investments Holdings Limited is to invest $28 million in next three years in the Mirigama Zone. For the first time a specific area was given to a foreign country. China is making major inroads into Sri Lanka, causing concern in the US-India Axis.

In the last few months of the war, Sri Lanka’s military used China’s weapons to systematically bombard what was left of the Tamil Eelam homeland. British media reported that 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed just in the last five days. Yet President Rajapakse claimed that “not one Tamil civilian was killed by military shelling.”

According to the pro-imperialist The Times (London), “aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony” tell a story of the Sri Lankan’s “fierce barrage” of three weeks constant shelling in a five-kilometer area where 300,000 Tamil civilians were. The Times’ estimated that about 1,000 civilians were killed each day for three weeks until May 19. With most of the leadership dead, and tens of thousands civilians slaughtered, the LTTE surrendered.

One of The Times’ sources for these figures, and that responsibility lay with SL military, is the Catholic priest Amalraj, who was there until May 16. At the time of article, May 29, 2009, he was interned in the militarized Manik Farm camp along with 200,000 others.

Even the editor of the pro-imperialist Armed Forces of the UK magazine contended that it was not the Tigers who fired upon their own people but that is was the Sri Lankan government, which used imprecise air-burst and ground-impact mortars to annihilate anything alive.

The Times piece ended on this sad note: S.L “was cleared of any wrongdoing by the UN Human Rights Council after winning the backing of countries including China, Egypt, India and Cuba.”

1. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.

Contrary to their cajoling speeches the foreign policies of these leaders have encouraged the erection of these walls. Their political support and their citizens’ tax money had encouraged rogue Israel to violate international laws and to keep constructing its separation wall. The erection of the Baghdad concrete wall, similar to Berlin Wall, exposes the hollow rhetoric of Obama and Hillary

In 2004 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ruled the Israeli wall as a flagrant violation of international laws. Fourteen out of the fifteen judges in the ICJ voted against the Israeli wall. The sole backer of the wall was US judge Thomas Buerghenthal, who echoed the sentiments of then US president Bush and the presidential candidate John Kerry.

Occupational governments, who erect such walls, claim that walls are needed to ensure security. One should notice that these walls are built to divide countries and cities into halves, to separate members of same family in order to disintegrate their social structure, to separate people from their farmland in order to destroy their economy, and to separate people, who had shared same culture and history for thousands of years, in order to destroy a nation.

The separation walls are symbols that show how governments can separate and alienate people in order to create misunderstanding and hatred. History shows us how governments had divided same people; e.g., Germany was divided into east and west; Korea was divided into south and north; great India was divided into Pakistan, Kashmir, and India; Yugoslavia was divided into many segments such as Kosovo, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina; the Arab world was divided into 22 separate countries; and lately Iraq was divided into three separate segments: Kurdish, Shiites, and Sunnis.

The Israeli separation and imprisoning wall is a unique phenomenon and is unlike all other walls. It cuts down a whole country and extends from one end to its other end. In the West Bank the wall extends 730km and 8-9 meters high. This is five times longer and three times higher than the Berlin Wall. It has armed watchtowers with snipers every 400 meters, and a military buffer zone 30-100 meters wide in many areas. In other areas it consists of electric fences, trace paths, barbed wires, cameras and deep trenches. In yet other areas it cuts through the hearts of Palestinian towns separating families from their very neighbors.

While Berlin Wall was only in Berlin City, the Israeli wall is all over the West Bank of Palestine encircling many major cities such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarem, Qalqiliya and Nablus. Some of these cities are completely surrounded by the wall on all directions with a single military checkpoint serving as the only exit/entrance gate to the city.

The whole Gaza Strip is surrounded with the wall on all three directions, while the fourth is faced with a sea patrolled by Israeli torpedo boats. The Gaza economical siege and the last December Israeli military onslaught demonstrate the devastating effects of the wall on the people.

Israel is building its separation wall not for security reasons as its leaders keep claiming. In reality it is an isolation wall erected with the hidden agenda of creating an atmosphere of silent “voluntary” transfer of Palestinians out of their communities. Its purpose is to imprison whole Palestinian communities in a large open prison within a wall disrupting peoples’ lives and separating them from their farm land, from schools, from hospitals, from jobs and from all the social services in the neighboring cities, thus exacerbating poverty and unemployment that would, Israelis hope, drive Palestinians out of their home towns to search for better livelihoods.

The wall is a massive land grab that has annexed 47% of the West Bank, which constitutes 22% of the whole Palestine proper leaving even smaller disconnected patches of land for the proposed Palestinian state. Its construction is a great crime against mother earth herself since Israel has razed the fertile layer of the confiscated farm land, and has uprooted hundreds of thousands of fruit trees especially one-thousand-years old olive trees. Many of these trees are protected under international cultural heritage laws.

The wall has also cut off all Palestinian cities from Jerusalem, the proposed capital of Palestinian state, and has destroyed the city’s historical and cultural characters. It has thus encroached on and violated Palestinians’ religious rights since they are cut off from their Christian and Islamic religious sites in the city.

Palestinians opposed the construction of the wall since its beginning in 2002. They have organized peaceful demonstrations and rallies against the wall. Weekly peaceful demonstrations are carried in the path of the wall, the most known are carried in the villages of Bi’lin and Ni’lin, where Palestinians are joined by many international and even Israeli peace activists. These demonstrations are usually faced violently by Israeli soldiers shooting live bullets, rubber-coated bullets, tear gas and sound grenades, arrests and savage beatings.

Palestinians had also taken the issue to the streets of major American and European cities leading to the establishment of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) with western peace activists, who expressed solidarity with the Palestinians verbally and actively. Many ISM members traveled to Palestine to help Palestinian farmers harvest their crops peacefully, to protect Palestinian homes from demolition, and to join in demonstrations against Israeli separation wall.

Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against mother earth, and violations of international laws have shocked even the average western citizen. An anti-Israeli apartheid movement has begun to take shape and is gaining momentum. Boycott campaigns against Israel have been launched worldwide. Israeli goods are being boycotted in many European countries. Academic and sports boycotts are also gaining ground. Divestment campaigns are spreading within university campuses, churches, city councils, and many other organizations.

In the 20th anniversary of the dismantling of Berlin Wall Palestinians, with the help of international peace activists, have planned ten days (Nov. 9-18) of demonstrations, meetings, discussion groups, and information centers to bring people’s attention to Israeli crimes and to the inhumane Israeli separation wall. Demonstrations against the wall are planned in many countries such as Argentina, Australia, Austria, Basque Country, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Quebec, Scotland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and Venezuela.

In the occupied West Bank Palestinians led demonstrations against the wall. In a symbolic gesture and despite Israeli tear gas and rubber bullets, Palestinians with international activists in the village of Ni’lin and Qalandia refugee camp had toppled down one of the concrete slabs of the wall.

It took twenty years to topple down the Berlin Wall. But with such Palestinian resolve and international support the Israeli separation wall would, definitely, take shorter time to fall.

The Tamil people in Sri Lanka had expectations that they would achieve equal rights and power with the Sinhalese once independence was won from the British colonialists. As the independence movement was winning over colonialization there was no talk of any Tamil separatism.

Even before the defeat of the Axis powers, Britain prepared to decolonize Ceylon. In 1943, the colonial secretary of state stated that a constitution would be drafted will all parties involved. A condition would be that “The Parliament of Ceylon shall not make any law rendering persons of any community or religion liable to disabilities or restrictions to which persons of other communities are not made liable …”²

Britain established the Soulbury Commission in 1944. The leading Sinhalese politician was D.S. Senanayake—a conservative, who founded, in 1946, the rightist pro-independence and pro-capitalist United National Party (UNP). Senanayake became known as the “Father of Sri Lanka.” He convinced a leading Tamil politician, G.G. Ponnamblam—who founded the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), in 1944—to partake in independence negotiations.

Another provision of the Soulbury Commission (Constitution) was that any bill which evoked “serious opposition by any racial or religious community and which, in the opinion of the Governor-General is likely to involve oppression or serious injustice to any community must be reserved by the Governor-General.”

The vote on the third reading of the “Free Lanka” bill was supported by all the Muslim members and by most Tamil and Sinhalese groups. “Some of the other minority members who did not want to openly support the bill took care to be absent or abstain. Finally, the debate and the vote of acceptance on the eighth and ninth of September 1945 was the most significant indication of general reconciliation among the ethnic and regional groups. Far exceeding the 3/4 majority required by the Soulbury Commission, Senanayake had 51 votes in favor, and only three votes against the adoption of the constitution. The vote was ‘in many ways a vote of confidence by all communities…and the minorities were as anxious as the majority for self-government.’”

Senanayake’s speech in proposing the motion of acceptance made reference to the minorities and said … “throughout this period the Ministers had in view one objective only, the attainment of maximum freedom. Accusations of Sinhalese domination have been bandied about. We can afford to ignore them for it must be plain to every one that what we sought was not Sinhalese domination, but Ceylonese domination. We devised a scheme that gave heavy weightage to the minorities; we deliberately protected them against discriminatory legislation. We vested important powers in the Governor-General… We decided upon an Independent Public Service Commission so as to give assurance that there should be no communalism in the Public Service. I do not normally speak as a Sinhalese, and I do not think that the Leader of this Council ought to think of himself as a Sinhalese representative, but for once I should like to speak as a Sinhalese and assert with all the force at my command that the interests of one community are the interests of all. We are one of another, what ever race or creed.”

The first national election was held August 23-September 30, 1947. 1,887, 364 people voted for 95 MP (members of parliament). There were six parties and many independents. The results were:

UNP with 39.8% (42 MPs)

LSSP 10.8% (10)

BLPI 6% (5)

ACTC 4.4% (7)

CIC 3.8% (6)

CPC 3.7% (3)

Labor 1.4% (1)

Independents 29% (16)³

“We are one of another, whatever race or creed,” swore the “Father” of the new independent State. It looked good for all ethnic and religious groups, but then the deceit became evident with the new citizenship act.

On February 4, 1948, the new government introduced the Ceylon Citizenship Bill before Parliament. The outward purpose of the bill was to provide a means of obtaining citizenship, but I think its real purpose was to discriminate against the Indian Tamils by denying them citizenship. The Ceylon Citizenship Act no. 18, August 20, 1948 denied citizenship to 11% of the population.

Although the All Ceylon Tamil Congress opposed the bill, it had joined with the UNP. This provoked half of its members to form the Federal Party, led by SJV Chelvanayakam. Next year, the Indian and Pakistani Residents Act, no.3, disenfranchised nearly all Tamils, who were originally from India. Their seven MPs were kicked out of parliament and there were no Indian Tamils in the 1952 parliament elections. It wasn’t until 1988 that the Sri Lanka government granted citizenship to stateless persons, who hadn’t applied for Indian citizenship. In 2003, 168,141 descendants of Indian Tamils were allowed citizenship.

The new government allowed Sinhalese to appropriate land on the Tamil traditional homeland in the north and east. Entire villages were driven out—ethnic cleansing—which the Sinhalese settled, aiming to break a geographic continuity of the Tamil homeland.⁴ Within time, Sinhalese settlers had taken over 30% of Tamil lands and homes—a la Israel in Palestine.

In 1956, The Sinhala Only Act became law. It mandated Sinhala as “the sole official language”, which, at that time was spoken by 70% of the population.

Supporters of the law saw it as an attempt by a community that had just gained independence to distance themselves from their colonial masters, while its opponents viewed it as an attempt by the linguistic majority to oppress and assert dominance on minorities. The Act symbolizes the post independent majority Sinhalese to assert its Sri Lanka’s identity as a nation state, and for Tamils, it became a symbol of minority oppression and a justification for them to demand a separate nation state, which resulted in decades of civil war.

Tamils protested the discriminatory law by using Gandhian tactics of non-violent sit-ins. Although stated advocates of non-violence, Buddhist monks led Sinhalese mobs against Tamils.

The Gal Oya riots… were the first ethnic riots that targeted the minority Sri Lankan Tamils… The riots took place from June 11, 1956 and occurred over the next five days. Local majority Sinhalese colonists and employees of the Gal Oya settlement board commandeered government vehicles, dynamite and weapons and massacred minority Tamils… It is estimated that over 150 people lost their lives due in the violence. Although initially inactive, the Police and the Army were eventually able to re-take control of the situation and brought the riots under control.

Tamil political leader SJV Chelvanayagam began to organize a massive Satyagraha (non-violent resistance). In order to avoid even more bloodshed, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranayaka signed an agreement with Chelvanayagam promising to restore Tamil as the (or one of two) official language(s) in its minority areas. This infuriated many Sinhalese, especially monks, and they assaulted and sometimes killed Tamils in many areas. Buddhist monks even besieged the official residence of Bandaranayaka demanding that he abandoned the agreement, which he did. But, in 1958, the Sinhalese-led parliament, pressed by the violence and the pro-Moscow and Trotskyist Sinhalese parties, passed an amendment to the Sinhala Only Act (called “Sinhala Only, Tamil Also”) restoring Tamil as a co-official language in their areas of the North and East. Frustrated at the compromise, Sinhalese mobs murdered 200-300 Tamils, including some Sinhalese who gave Tamils refuge. Many Tamil women were raped and some Tamil boys were stripped, bound, and burned alive. This violent hatred evokes the lynching and burning alive of black people by whites in the southern USA.

Some Buddhists were angry that the Sinhalese Prime Minister Bandaranayaka had tried to compromise with Tamils. In 1959, a Buddhist monk assassinated him.

The language law had its intended effect. In 1955, the civil service had been largely made of Tamils, who had benefited more than Sinhalese from western style education provided by missionaries. This fact was used by populist Sinhalese politicians to come to power—or retain power—on the promise of providing more civil service jobs to Sinhalese by demanding that their language be the only one used in public service. By 1970, the civil service was almost entirely Sinhalese. Thousands of Tamil civil servants were forced to resign due to lack of fluency in Sinhala. In the1960s, government forms and services were virtually unavailable to Tamils.

Confrontation became the modus operandi; Sinhalese were the Zionists and Tamils the Palestinians!

It is important to stress, especially with progressive-revolutionary governments, such as the ALBA alliance in Latin America, and their supporters throughout the world, that the Tamils’ history in Sri Lanka is one of constant and widespread discrimination. They are also subjects to a policy of genocide as defined by the United Nations.⁵

Sri Lanka made world headlines in 1960 when a woman, Sirimavo RD Bandaranaike, was elected prime minister—the world’s first female leader. Being the widow of the martyr and founder of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was an asset. She immediately brought Sri Lanka into the Non-Alignment Movement, founded in 1961. The originators—India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Yugoslavia’s Tito and Ghana’s Nkrumah—sought support for each other’s sovereignty without aligning with either super-power bloc at that time.⁶

Nevertheless, Sri Lankan leaders of both predominantly Sinhala major parties continued to be dependent upon economic and military ties with India, the US, the UK, and Israel. Social welfare programs were carried out within a capitalist economic structure. This was a cause for radical opposition. In 1971, thousands of Sinhalese students, and Indian Tamil plantation workers, under the leadership of a new nationalistic and Marxist-oriented political party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramana (JVP), translated as Peoples Liberation Front, engaged in anti-government clashes. Fifteen thousand protestors were killed in the uprising.

Once in power, Bandaranaike’s widow did not alter the Sinhalese policy of genocide: “…an ingenious device was resorted to deprive the Tamils of the constitutional safeguards and the characteristics of the conditional polity. A coalition of three Sinhalese political parties, led by Mrs. Sirimavo R.D.Bandaranaike, called upon the people to give a mandate [in the 1970 General Elections, during her second term] for a new Constituent Assembly to scrap the 1948 dominion polity and create a new Republic of Sri Lanka. Whilst the voters in the seven Sinhalese provinces gave Mrs.Bandaranaike the mandate that she had requested, the Tamil voters in the Northern and Eastern Provinces summarily rejected her call. In the North and East, a mere 14% of the votes polled supported the call for a new constituent Assembly.”

Laws protecting rights of racial and religious minorities were abandoned and Buddhism was made the constitutional religion of Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese claimed 5000 acres in the Tamil farmland “Nochikulam” as theirs, renaming it “Nochiyagama.” Next year, 10,738 Sinhalese families settled in Trincomalee illegally.

“The sovereignty of the Tamil people (who were ethnically, geographically and linguistically separately identifiable and distinct) revived.”

With this setback, a reinvigorated ACTC joined with the Federal Party, in 1972, to form the Tamil United Front (TUF). Separatism or autonomy now became the cry for nearly all Tamils, who sought an Eelam part of Sri Lanka. Thirty Tamil militant groups emerged.

“The operative part is Thamil Eelam and it means the Tamil part of Eelam. The term Eelam is a synonym for Sri Lanka and has been in use in Tamil literature right from the Cankam Period dating as far back as 200 B.C. to circa 250 A.D.”

The second government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike enacted a discriminatory double standard law for admission grades to universities, requiring Tamil students to achieve higher grades than Sinhalese.

Throughout the 1970s, Sinhalese mobs clashed—with impunity—not only with Tamils but also Muslim Moors. In 1976, Sinhalese burned 271 houses and 44 shops, murdering a score of Muslims.

In 1976, the Tamil United Front Party changed its name to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TUFP) at the Vattukottai Conference, and adopted a demand for an independent sovereign state in traditional Tamil homeland in the north and east to be known as the “secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam.”⁷

By 1975, Tamil militancy increased with the birth of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, who considered himself a Marxist and follower of Che Guevara. The LTTE engaged in small armed clashes with the military.

The conservative UNP won a landslide victory in the July 1977 elections. But the pro-independence TULF won 6.4% of the popular vote, winning all 14 seats in the Tamil homeland area, and four more seats of the 168-member parliament. In response to Tamil’s peaceful struggle and its parliamentary victory, Sinhalese mobs, led by Buddhist monks, again destroyed many Tamil homes and shops and murdered up to 300 Tamils.

In July 1978, the UNP, led by Prime Minister Junius Richard Jayewardene, changed the constitution and renamed the country the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. An executive presidency was established, allowing the president greater powers than the prime minister, whom the president now appoints. The president is also the commander-in-chief and head of the cabinet. He can dissolve parliament and has judicial impunity.

Jayewardene became the first president and appointed Ramasinghe Premadosa (UNP) prime minister. Despite the new name, “democratic socialist republic,” the capitalist government began deregulating much of what had been government run enterprises. Private enterprise was priority.

On May 31, 1981, the TULF held a rally in Jaffna in the north. Police clashed with Tamils and two policemen were killed. For three days, Sinhalese mobs, policemen, and soldiers went on a rampage. Several Tamils were taken from their homes and killed. The TULF headquarters, a newspaper office, presses, and shops were destroyed. Worst of all was the total destruction of the Jaffna library and its 97,000 volumes of books and irreplaceable historical manuscripts, some made of palm leaves. It is now well known that the fire that destroyed this unique institution of the Tamils in their homeland was masterminded by a handful of ministers of the Sinhala Government in Colombo, who were present in Jaffna the night of the fire.

“The national newspapers did not carry information about the incident and in subsequent parliamentary debates some majority Sinhalese members reminded minority Tamil politicians that if Tamils were unhappy in Sri Lanka, they should leave for their homeland in India. This is a direct quotation from United National Party member MP WJM Lokubandara:

“If there is discrimination in this land which is not their (Tamil) homeland, then why try to stay here? Why not go back home (India) where there would be no discrimination?”

“Twenty years later, the mayor of Jaffna, Nadarajah Raviraj, still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a University student. He was later killed by unknown gunmen in the capital Colombo, in 2006.”

Civil War and LTTE

By summer 1983, the then small guerrilla army of LTTE was well settled in most northern and eastern areas. Their first major assault against the state’s military took place at Jaffna peninsula, July 24. LTTE ambushed a convoy of soldiers passing through land mines and killed 15.

This could have been in response to many random attacks upon Tamils in various areas. One example is in Trincomalee where, on 10 April 1983, a young Tamil died in police custody after having been held without charge for two weeks. At the judicial inquest into his death, on May 31, the Jaffna Magistrate returned a verdict of homicide. Three days later, the government changed the rules permitting the police to bury or cremate bodies without a post mortem or an inquest.

Amnesty International cabled President Jayawardene expressing concern that such a regulation could give rise to grave human rights violations and appealed to him to rescind it. But he did not. On the contrary, on June 3, 1983, the day that the new Emergency Regulation was brought into effect, the attacks on the Tamils in Trincomalee commenced in earnest.

R. Sampanthan, M.P. for Trincomalee, described that mobs of Sinhalese went from village to village setting fire to Tamil houses and shops. A particular modus operandi was observed. Heavily armed service personnel would enter a Tamil area and carry out a search alleging that explosions and dangerous weapons were hidden in that area. Invariably nothing would be recovered other than implements that would normally be available in any house. Sometimes Tamil youths would be arrested on “suspicion” and taken for questioning. After a month of many pogrom raids, the LTTE struck the army convoy.

That night and for weeks Sinhalese rampaged against Tamils, especially in the Colombo area where some Tamils youths were stripped naked and burned alive in petrol. Black July ended with between 2000 and 3000 dead Tamils, among them 53 prisoners, including key political leaders, who were murdered by Sinhalese prisoners at Welikadai. One political prisoner, Kuttimani, had his eyes gouged out and stomped upon under a soldier’s boots.

One hundred thousand Tamils were rendered homeless and that many and more fled to India.

Even non-violent advocates of separatism or independence, such as the TULF, were pushed out of the democratic process. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted in August 1983, classified all separatist movements as unconstitutional. That meant that all its members of parliament—16 then—lost their seats. Thousands of Tamil youth joined militant armed groups, especially the LTTE, which became the most disciplined and well organized.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the LTTE established a de facto state, called Tamil Eelam, and managed a government, which provided a judicial court system, a police force, and social assistance in health and education and for the poorest. LTTE ran a bank, a radio station (Voice of Tigers), even a television station. Guerrilla leaders helped organize small cooperative farming units based on traditional methods. The LTTE dismantled the caste system and officially stopped discrimination against women. The LTTE organized a civilian administration under its command. There was order and peace in these areas, as long as everyone obeyed and when the Sri Lanka army did not bomb.

In the 1980s, there was much discontent in other parts of Sri Lanka. Radical Sinhalese youths, such as the JVP, demanded going further towards socialism. In 1987, JVP engaged in another armed uprising. But after 1989, it entered into parliamentary politics. It participated in the 1994 parliamentary general election and joined conservative and liberal party coalitions in opposing equal rights with Tamils.

Ranasinghe Premadasa was prime minister from February 1978 to January 1, 1989, under President Jayewardene, and then he became president until his assassination on Mayday 1993. Many Sinhalese elitists thought he was too common to be their leader and too compromising with Tamils. Controversial policies under his terms included the matter of language, ethnic cleansing, and the role of India in internal affairs. The first controversy was the constitutional amendment allowing “equality” of languages in the Tamil areas: “National languages shall be Sinhala and Tamil,” although, “The official language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala. Tamil shall also be an official language. English shall be a link language.”

This compromise spoke in double tongues. Why not just make Sinhala and Tamil equally official, as India has done with a score of languages?

Alienated Tamils

Even a U.S. Library of Congress study characterized Tamils as alienated. In 1988, it published, SriLanka: a Country Study. In the chapter entitled, “Tamil Alienation,” the authors wrote:

Moderate as well as militant Sri Lankan Tamils have regarded the policies of successive Sinhalese governments in Colombo with suspicion and resentment since at least the mid-1950s, when the “Sinhala Only” language policy was adopted…

Several issues provided the focus for Sri Lankan Tamil alienation and widespread support, particularly within the younger generation, for extremist movements…Sinhalese still remained the higher-status “official language,” and inductees into the civil service were expected to acquire proficiency in it. Other areas of disagreement concerned preference given to Sinhalese applicants for university admissions and public employment, and allegations of government encouragement of Sinhalese settlement in Tamil-majority areas.

“Government-sponsored settlement of Sinhalese in the northern or eastern parts of the island, traditionally considered to be Tamil regions, has been perhaps the most immediate cause of inter-communal violence. There was, for example, an official plan in the mid-1980s to settle 30,000 Sinhalese in the dry zone of Northern Province, giving each settler land and funds to build a house and each community armed protection in the form of rifles and machine guns. Tamil spokesmen accused the government of promoting a new form of ‘colonialism’,” but the Jayewardene government asserted that no part of the island could legitimately be considered an ethnic homeland and thus closed to settlement from outside. Settlement schemes were popular with the poorer and less fortunate classes of Sinhalese.”

Che Guevara made no bones about the significance of alienation: “…the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration (is) to see man liberated from his alienation.”⁸

India’s Vacillating Role

The role of India in Sri Lanka’s civil war was a major problem. India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, first supported the LTTE. His air force even dropped 25 tons of aid in their territory in Jaffna (Operation Poomalai). A month following this, the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord was signed between Gandhi and the reluctant Prime Minister Ranasinghe Presmadasa, under pressure from his president, JR Jayewardene. The July 29, 1987 accord was expected to resolve the ongoing civil war. Colombo agreed to devolution of power to the Tamil provinces, and its military was to withdraw in exchange for the Tamil rebels’ disarmament. The LTTE had not been made party to the talks but reluctantly agreed to surrender arms to the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Within a few months, however, both sides flared into an active confrontation. Indian soldiers died in far greater numbers than Tamil rebels: 1,500 killed and 4,500 wounded.

In January 1989, Premadasa was elected President on a popular platform promising that the Indian Peace Keeping Force would leave within three months. The police action was unpopular in India as well, especially with some 50 million Tamil Nadu people. Gandhi refused to withdraw India’s troops, however, believing that the only way to end the civil war was to politically force Premadasa and to militarily force the LTTE to accept the accord. But, in December 1989, Vishwanath Pratap Singh was elected India’s Prime Minister and completed the pullout.

On May 21, 1991, in an act of revenge over India’s militarist actions, a female LTTE member blew up Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bomb attack. In 1992, India became the first government, even before Sri Lanka, to declare the LTTE a terrorist group.

President Premadasa resumed the civil war, which became stalemated. Many forces were angry with him, including a rival Sinhalese leader Lalith Athulathmudali, who sought an impeachment motion against Premadasa, in 1991. Lalith was an adamant supporter of Zionism.

When Athulathmudali, a pro-Israeli power broker, challenged Premadasa two years ago with an impeachment motion in the parliament, Premadasa openly accused Mossad, the intelligence agency of Israel, of trying to topple him. In his address to the Sri Lankan parliament, Premadasa said,

“…I had Israeli interests section removed. In such a context there is nothing to be surprised about the Mossad rising up against me. Please remember that there are among us traitors who have gone to Israeli universities and lectured there and earned dirty money…”

cited Sachi Sri Kantha, quoting the prime minister in “The Puzzles in President Premadasa’s Assassination Revisited.”

In April 1993, Athulathmudali was murdered. Eight days later, on Mayday, Premadasa was murdered. The LTTE did not claim responsibility for these assassinations but were so blamed by Sinhalese and the mass media.

“When Athulathmudali was assassinated last April, the members of his party immediately accused Premadasa for ordering the killing. The murder of Premadasa could have been a return hit planned and executed by the Mossad which had lost its major card in Sri Lankan politics.”

The second Eelam war lasted from 1989 until November 1994 when the People’s Alliance (led by SLFP) candidate, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, won the presidency. But peace negotiations broke down and the war continued from 1995 until the end of 2001 when ceasefire negotiations made progress. But not before the LTTE proved to the Sri Lanka government and military, with 230,000 well armed troops, that it was its equal. With somewhere around 5000 guerrillas—along with a small Sea Tigers boat unit, which made some pirate hits for funding, and even a few light civilian aircraft, the Sky Tigers, which sometimes made damaging raids against the Air Force—the LTTE won many military victories.

The Sri Lankan military often bombed civilian Tamils in the LTTE-controlled zones. It claimed that they were legitimate “collateral damage” given that the guerrillas allegedly forced them to remain against their will. The civilian hostage charge was widely reported as truth by the west and its mass media, as was the allegation that the LTTE forces children into armed combat.

On January 31, 1996, the LTTE stunned the nation when it bombed the Central Bank in Colombo, which managed most financial business accounts. One suicide bomber with 200 kilos of explosions drove through the main gate and exploded, wiping out many bank floors and several other buildings. Behind him came a vehicle with two cadres firing rifles and launchers. They escaped but were later captured. Material damage was tremendous but more so was the loss of 53 lives and injuries to 1,400 people, most of them not military targets.

On July 24, 1996, LTTE forces bombed a commuter train killing 70 Sinhalese civilians. By the end of the 1990s, both sides had killed tens of thousands of people. Civilians were targeted by both sides. The Tigers claimed that civilians were targeted only when associated with military installations. But some attacks, such as the train, were unjustifiable. Furthermore, the LTTE has often murdered other Tamils who also seek autonomy but were not part of the LTTE or had made public critiques. It has, for example, killed several leaders of the TULF.

On April 22, 2000 LTTE forces surprisingly overran Sri Lanka’s Elephant Pass military base on Jaffna. Over 1,000 troops were killed and huge quantities of arms and ammunition were taken.

On July 24, 2001, the LTTE again stunned the nation and the world when it attacked the only international airport and the nearby military base.

Around 3:30 am on July 24, 14 members of the LTTE Black Tiger suicide squad infiltrated Katunayake air base… After destroying electricity transformers to plunge the base in darkness they cut through the barbed wire surrounding the base to begin their assault. Using rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and assault rifles, the militants attacked the air force planes. They were not able to attack the aircraft in the hangars but did destroy eight military aircraft on the tarmac: three Nanchange K-8 trainer aircraft, one Mil Mi-17 helicopter, one Mil Mi-24 helicopter, two LAI Kfir fighter jets, and a Mig-27. Five K-8s and one MiG-27 were also damaged. A total of 26 aircraft were either damaged or destroyed in the attack.

Eight Tigers and three air force officers died in the battle at the air base. The six remaining LTTE members then crossed the runway to nearby Bandaranaike Airport. Using their weapons, they began blowing up any civilian aircraft they could find, which were all empty. One Airbus340 was destroyed by an explosive charge; an A330 was destroyed by a rocket fired from the control tower. In addition, an A320-200 and an A340-300 were damaged in the assault.”

All 14 guerrillas were killed, along with six Sri Lankan air force personnel and one soldier killed by friendly fire; 12 soldiers were injured, along with three Sri Lankan civilians and a Russian engineer… The cost of replacing the civilian aircraft was estimated at $350 million USD. The attack caused a slowdown in the economy of Sri Lanka, to about -1.4%. Tourism also plummeted, dropping 15.5% at the end of the year.

Cease Fire

During two decades of civil war, the LTTE had several times offered a ceasefire on the condition of negotiations to establish peace and ethnic equality. With this military victory, the guerrilla army offered a unilateral ceasefire. Some national voices and many international ones were also pressing for a ceasefire. Norway took concrete steps, but it was this spectacular military victory and the loss to the economy that forced the government to the bargaining table.

The formal Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) was signed on February 22, 2002. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and LTTE leader Velupillai Pirabakaran signed the agreement, alongside mediator Jan Petersen representing Norway’s foreign ministry.

Provisions provided for each side holding their ground positions. Neither side was to engage in any offensive military operation or move munitions into the area controlled by the other side.

The LTTE proposed an Interim Self-Government Authority (ISGA) to administer the Tamil homeland, pending final agreement and elections. The ceasefire was monitored by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. It was staffed by designees from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. The US, UK and other EU countries had observers. Headquarters were established in Colombo, and there were 60 monitors in six district teams and two naval ones. The SLMM monitored violations and mediated between the two parties but could not enforce sanctions. Many Sinhalese considered the Monitoring Mission, especially Norway, of being partial to the Tigers.

During the ceasefire, progress was made in agricultural development and general infrastructure in the Tamil Homeland. Many foreigners were invited to observe and participate in building Tamil Eelam. Impressive first-hand accounts have been written about the progress in many areas: administrative, economic and a social welfare network. While voices friendly to this process praised the advances made, many also questioned the lack of civilian input in the decision-making process.

The LTTE did not emphasize an international political solidarity movement. It did appeal for economic donations, which poured to it, especially from Tamils in the Diaspora. The LTTE stopped speaking of Marxism or building a socialist independent state. It emphasized winning militarily—if Sri Lanka continued preventing an autonomous Tamil homeland—and constructing a social welfare state with cooperative and private enterprises. The Tigers became so respectable they could openly purchase weaponry from some countries not directly under the thumb of US-EU-Israel or their partial antagonists: China, Iran and Pakistan. A May 29, 2009 Times Online piece quotes the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, saying that the LTTE used 11 merchant ships to deliver weapons, many of which they got from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Cyprus, Thailand and Croatia. Even the World Bank recognized the LTTE as an unofficial State, according to its representative in Sri Lanka, Peter Harrold, in 2005.

The LTTE was even building a Tamil University where Tamils in the Diaspora would have taught. I spoke with one of them, a man who had earned a doctorate degree in environmental science and taught in European universities. He frequently visited the homeland he had left three decades previously. He hoped that he would return and teach once the university would be opened.

An activist in independence forces using peaceful methods, he wished to remain anonymous. His impressions were that the Tigers were the dominating factor in civilian administration but that as long as no one objected one felt safe in the Homeland areas whenever Colombo’s armed forces were not bombing. He was critical that the LTTE armed forces had resorted to terrorist methods in their history, such as assassinating political critics. The professor, however, did not think the LTTE forced children into combat or used civilians as human shields, generally.

“Tigers were good people, intelligent and sensitive to people and nature. But contradictions did exist. They were a strange animal.”

Cease Fire Ends

On December 26, 2004, the greatest earthquake-tsunami ever recorded (9.3) hit Southeast Asia. Eleven countries were deeply affected: 230,000 were killed or missing. Sri Lanka was one of the worst disasters. About 40,000 people were killed or missing; 1.5 million were displaced from their homes. International aid poured in but did not arrive in the North and East due to Sinhalese political party opposition. The LTTE organized all the aid it could muster for hundreds of thousands in the Tamil homeland. Foreign volunteers and emergency relief organizations praised the LTTE for its effective and caring work. There are many accounts of this.

Mahinda Rajapakse was appointed prime minister April 6, 2004, and then elected President on November 19, 2005 with just 50.3% of the vote. He was the pro-war candidate of a new coalition, the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). Tamil political parties and many foreign relief groups accused Rajapakse of diverting Tsunami relief funds designated for their homeland. In this complex reality, those parties most adamant about refusing aid to suffering Tamils and who demanded an end to the ceasefire with the objective of launching an all-out war were those claiming to be either hard-core Marxist-Communist-Trotskyists or self-proclaimed non-violent Buddhists.

“United People’s Freedom Alliance [is] undoubtedly the broadest coalition of progressive forces in the country. This coalition, which came into being in 2004 upon a platform of new liberal socio economic program and a resolve to defeat separatist terrorism, has since mobilized people around a social democratic agenda.”

This coalition is not just made up of alleged “progressives” but of “social” capitalists and self-styled “democratic socialists.” At the start, the coalition parties were: Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya, Muslim National Unity Alliance, Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, Democratic United National Front, and Desha Vimukthi Janatha Party.

The Communist Party of Sri Lanka and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party signed a memorandum of understanding with the SLFP so their candidates would take part in parliamentary elections in the new coalition. They also joined the UPFA. On April 2, 2004, the alliance won 45.6% of the popular vote and took 105 out of 225 seats.

A Buddhist political party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), was founded in February 2004 and participated in the 2004 parliamentary elections, winning 6% of the vote for nine seats. In 2007, it formally joined the hodge-podge UPFA coalition government and was given a ministry post.

On April 3, 2008, JHU’s leader gave his reasons for warring against Tamils to the United States government financed Voice of America radio station.

Athurliye Rathana, a Buddhist monk who heads the Jathika Hela Urumaya party in Sri Lanka’s parliament, wants to end the suffering by putting a quick end to the war. Speaking with VOA at a seaside hotel in this former tourist haven, Rathana says he supports the government’s latest military offensive to quash the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

“Anytime a militant group is harmful to peaceful people, then government should have the right to exercise constitutional law and order,” Rathana said. “And, LTTE is unlawful and so, under our constitutional law, anyone cannot exercise militancy. But [with] the LTTE separatist movement, the government has some duty to control their military activities. I say only one thing, ‘Please do your duty.’”

For comments like that, the Sri Lankan media has branded Rathana the “war monk,”… his sentiments are common in Sri Lanka’s majority ethnic Sinhala community.

Rathana is a celebrated figure in this predominantly Buddhist nation, where monks are cherished for their spiritual guidance. The pro-war activism of Rathana and others has spurred as many as 30,000 Sinhalese young men to join the army in the past few months.

The UPFA alliance of apparently conflicting ideologies and economic policies is so strange that one can easily be confused about who is who and why their politics are such that they are. After a month’s research, having begun as a total novice to this region, I am unclear about why various political forces take the position they do not only about the Tigers but about the entire Tamil ethnic group. For many Sinhalese, an engrained racism is clearly a major motivation. But how can one explain that a Tamil group, Eelam People’s Democratic Party, also takes part in this coalition of Sinhalese racists? The EPDP is a paramilitary group fighting against the LTTE alongside the government. It even has one member in parliament. EPDP also assassinates civilians, including BBC reporter Nimalarajan Mylvaganam.

The Cease Fire Agreement was a thorn in the side of the new ruling coalition. Although the government claimed that the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission favored the Tiger guerrillas, its monitors had lodged 3006 violations committed by the LTTE and only 133 by the government, as of June 30, 2005. From May 2006 onward to its termination in January 2008, the Monitoring Mission was hampered by worsening hostilities, especially following a Sea Tiger boat attack on a navy convoy, May 11, 2006.

The European Union then placed the Tigers on its terrorist list, while appearing to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control.

Sweden, Finland and Denmark, as members of EU, also considered the Tigers to be terrorists, and the LTTE objected to their membership on the Monitoring Mission. They withdrew leaving only Norway and Iceland with 20 monitors. The reduced Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission disbanded in 2008. The path for a full war was clear.

1. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
2. See Article 29 of Soulbury Commission.
3. LSSP=Ceylon Equal Society Party comprised of Sinhalese Trotskyists; BLPI=Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India also Trotskyists; CIC=Ceylon Indian Congress, which soon changed its name to Ceylon Workers Congress, represented the Indian Tamils of the Estates Workers Trade Union; CPC, the Communist Party of Ceylon, with a pro-Moscow line; Labour was fashioned after Clement Attlee-led British Labour party. The Marxist parties later colluded with capitalist Sinhalese parties in opposing equality with Tamils. The CPC is now the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, which is part of the United People’s Freedom Alliance that includes the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led government of Mahinda Rajapaksa.
4. “The Unspeakable Truth,” British Tamil Forum, 2008, p.8.
5. See part 1, “Justice for Sri Lanka Tamils.”
6. In 1976, Colombo was the summit site. In 1979, the Havana Declaration ensured “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their struggle against “imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism.” In 2006, there were 118 member nations, representing 55% of the world’s population. Many of these nations have been at war with one another, and many have aligned with one or other of the previous super-powers.
7. My reading of Tamil history shows many discrepancies in dates and events. Different writings on the LTTE contend it was created at different times, either in 1972, 1975 or 1976.
8. Che Guevara, Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.

But the latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme by the agency appeared to reject Iran’s account of how and when it had decided to build the Qom enrichment plant and implied that it believed Iran was hiding the construction of other facilities.

The report provides new evidence that the Qom enrichment facility was constructed on one of many sites where tunneling had been prepared as early as 2002 to protect various kinds of facilities from a possible U.S. air attack.

The apparent Iranian decision to begin preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran in 2002 came after President George W. Bush had declared in his Sep. 20, 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress that any nation that “continues to harbor or support terrorism” would be regarded as a “hostile regime” and then named Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea in January 2002.

The new evidence contradicts the U.S. charge that Iran had been working on constructing a covert enrichment plant for several years – well before March 2007, when Iran announced that it would no longer inform the agency of new facilities as soon as the decision had been made to construct them.

The Iranian account documented in the report puts the decision to build the Qom enrichment facility in mid-2007.

The report quotes from an Oct. 28 Iranian letter to the IAEA stating, “As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers for various organizations and activities…[elipses in original].”

No date is cited for that decision, but the IAEA report refers to satellite imagery of the site indicating construction began at least as early as 2002. The agency said it had “informed Iran that it had acquired commercially available satellite imagery of the site indicating that there had been construction at the site between 2002 and 2004, and that construction activities were resumed in 2006 and had continued to date.”

The IAEA apparently intended to convey the idea that this was construction on a second enrichment plant. In a story published Nov. 13 – three days before the report was circulated to IAEA Governing Council members – Associated Press reporter George Jahn reported unnamed diplomats as saying Iran had started building the plant in 2002, that the construction had paused for two years in 2004 because of Iran’s suspension of enrichment and had resumed in 2006, when enrichment had been resumed openly.

Independent analysis of satellite imagery has shown, however, that those earlier images were of construction on the general purpose “contingency centres” rather than an enrichment facility. Paul Brannan, a satellite imagery analyst for the Institute for Science and International Security who has analysed imagery of the same site from 2004 and 2005, concluded in a Sep. 29 report that it was probably a tunnel facility for a purpose other than an enrichment facility.

Brannan noted that the Qom site was only one of “many throughout the country” with similar characteristics. Contrary to the IAEA’s account, he observed that construction had continued between June 2004 and March 2005, although it was at a slow pace.

Brannan’s analysis is consistent with the account in the Iranian letter of Oct. 28 of a decision to construct a whole system of “contingency centres” for various purposes in the event of a U.S. air attack.

The Iranian letter quoted by the IAEA said Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency had requested one of the already constructed centres for a “contingency enrichment plant”, which would assure continuation of enrichment should the Natanz Enrichment Plant be attacked. The Qom tunnel facility was made available for that purpose in the second half of 2007 and construction on the enrichment facility then began, according to the letter.

Contradicting the Jahn story, however, the IAEA report says “a number of Member States” have “alleged that design work on the facility had started in 2006″. If design work was only started in 2006, the construction work seen in the earlier years obviously could not have been on an enrichment facility.

A senior official of the Barack Obama administration charged in the Sep. 25 briefing on the Qom site that actual construction of the facility had begun before March 2007. The language of the new report indicates for the first time that the United States has taken a much more nuanced approach to the history of the Qom site in its communications with the IAEA.

The IAEA report seems to imply that it does not believe the Iranian account that construction began on the enrichment facility only in 2007. It said the agency has “indicated that Iran’s declaration of the new facility reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.”

Iran has told the IAEA it has no other nuclear facilities “currently under construction or in operation that had not been declared to the Agency”, according to the report. But it has not yet responded to a Nov. 6 letter from the agency asking whether it is planning to build any other nuclear sites.

The report, which is the last to be published under outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, appears to reflect his waning influence over the agency’s political position on Iran in relation to the director of the Safeguards Department, Olli Heinonen.

After IAEA inspectors had visited the Qom site and discussed the background of its construction, ElBaradei had commented Nov. 5 that they had found “nothing to be worried about” and that the facility was indeed a backup to the Natanz plant as Iran had maintained. “It’s a hole in a mountain,” ElBaradei said.

The spin in the report itself takes the opposite approach from ElBaradei’s suggestion that the Qom facility is not a threatening development.

It also appears to reflect a common Western view that treating the Qom site as evidence of a covert nuclear weapons-related programme is useful to increase the pressure on Iran to reach agreement with the West to give up the bulk of its low enrichment uranium (LEU) supplies until they could be replenished through more enrichment nearly a year later.

After senior officials of the Obama administration had briefed reporters Sep. 25 on the allegation that Iran had been working on the site secretly for several years, U.S. officials said the discovery of the site would give the United States “leverage” in the talks with Iran that were to start in Geneva Oct. 1.

Western governments proposed at the Oct. 1 meeting that Iran agree to ship up to 80 percent of its LEU to Russia in return for eventual shipments of 20 percent enriched uranium to fuel a small medical reactor in Tehran. That would have allowed the Obama administration to declare a diplomatic victory in regard to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and tamp down Israeli pressures to allow it to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At negotiations in Vienna last month under IAEA auspices, outgoing IAEA Director General ElBaradei presented a draft agreement based on that Western proposal. Iran has effectively rejected that deal, however, and made a counterproposal that would allow it to husband its LEU supplies.

Pres. Obama warned Iran on Sunday, “We are now running out of time,” in regard to negotiations on the ElBaradei draft. The United States and other negotiating partners have ignored Iran’s counterproposal.

Prosecutors had demanded that the juvenile, a 17-year-old from Nazareth in northern Israel, be convicted of endangering a vehicle on the road, a charge that carries a punishment of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, as a way to deter other members of Israel’s Arab minority from committing similar offences.

But Judge Yuval Shadmi said discrimination in the Israeli legal system’s treatment of Jewish and Arab minors, particularly in cases of what he called “ideologically motivated” offences, was “common knowledge”.

In the verdict, he wrote: “I will say that the state is not authorised to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological’ felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological’ felons.”

He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.

Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3 million-strong Arab minority, said the ruling was the first time a judge in a criminal court had acknowledged that the state pursued a policy of systematic discrimination in demanding harsher punishments for Arab citizens.

“We have known this for a long time, but it has been something very hard for us to prove to the court’s satisfaction,” she said. “Now we have a legal precedent that we can use to appeal against convictions in similar cases.”

The youth was arrested during a protest on a road near Nazareth a few days after Israel launched its operation in Gaza last December.

Dozens of demonstrations took place in Israel during the four-week attack, leading to the arrests of 830 protesters in what human rights groups described as often brutal Israeli police action.

The overwhelming majority of those arrested, say the rights groups, were Arab citizens, despite the participation of Israeli Jews. Adalah reported that 250 protesters were subsequently indicted, almost all of them Arabs and half of them minors.

Judge Richard Goldstone, in his United Nations fact-finding report into the Gaza assault published in September, wrote that he had been “struck” by the fact that despite many counter-demonstrations by right-wing Jews that had turned violent the police appeared to have made “no arrests” in those cases.

He also noted that, according to the information he had seen, most Arab protesters had been refused bail and held in detention for lengthy periods, even in cases where they faced relatively minor charges.

Of the court system, Mr Goldstone concluded that “the element of discrimination between … and differential treatment of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel by the judicial authorities, as reflected in the reports received, is a substantial cause for concern”.

The ruling by the Nazareth juvenile court appeared to confirm those findings.

Mr Shadmi wrote in his verdict that, in recent years, the Israeli authorities had been “working on two fundamentally different enforcement levels in relation to crimes perpetrated by [Israeli] minors”.

He pointed out that in cases of violence by Jewish youths against the security services, legal proceedings were usually frozen or cancelled before the indictment stage. He said he had not heard of a single instance of a Jewish minor being sent to prison for such offences, even though most Arab minors were convicted and jailed.

The judge admitted that he had nearly been swayed by prosecution demands for a lengthy jail term for the youth, who cannot be named because of his age. But ultimately, he said, he had been persuaded by the defence’s argument that similar cases of “ideological violence” involving Jewish youths — such as settler attacks on soldiers — rarely, if ever, merited jail terms.

“If the state feels that ideological offences justify relatively forgiving enforcement for minors, then this should be the policy towards all minors regardless of nationality or religion.”

Earlier this year the justice ministry recommended that 40 Jewish settlers convicted of resisting the disengagement from Gaza be pardoned on the grounds that their acts “were prompted by an unusual historical event and that the perpetrators are not felons”. According to Israeli media reports, many of the settlers arrested over the dissengagement will never be brought to trial.

Mr Shadmi ordered the Nazareth youth to refrain from committing any offence against the police for two years against a bond of $1,300. In a procedure mainly reserved for juvenile offences, he sentenced the youth to 200 hours of community service without convicting him.

The verdict was greeted with surprise by the youth’s family. The father told the Israeli media: “Thank God we had a judge like him, who is not motivated by racism. This may lead the state of Israel to understand that it’s time to stop treating the Arab population like enemies.”

The prosecution announced that it would appeal against the decision.

Gideon Fishman, a sociology professor at Haifa University who has made a study of criminal sentencing policies in Israel, said he was not aware of research into discriminatory policies by prosecutors towards juvenile offenders. However, he said he was sure that there was systematic bias.

“The judge is right to raise his voice against a policy that is more lenient towards Jewish offenders. This is a policy being pursued by state prosecutors intentionally and not by accident, and it undermines trust in the system.”

Judge Shadmi referred only to discrimination in sentencing in Israeli criminal courts.

Palestinians from the occupied territories are tried in Israeli military courts under different legal rules and procedures that have been severely criticised by human rights groups.

Sri Lanka’s first aborigines with continuous lineage are the Tamil people. It is not precisely known when they came to the island, but perhaps as many as 5000 years ago. Archaeologists date the first humans in Sri Lanka to some 34,000 years. Scientists call them Balangoda people, the name of the location where artifacts were found. These hunting-gathering cave dwellers have no current lineage.

Tamils were also known as proto-Elamites or Ela. These people in Sri Lanka call themselves Eelam Tamils, meaning “earthly people”. Tamils speak a Dravidian language, which has no ties to other language families. It was, perhaps, associated with Scythians and Urals. The Dravidian language and Tamils originated, perhaps, from Sumer and Ur: the “cradle of the first civilization”, now Iran. The Sumer and Tamils formed the first language of proto-grams on clay tablets. Tamil inscriptions and literature are at least 2500 years old. Today, 100 to 200 million people speak Tamil.¹

The Christian Bible refers to Elam as “maritime nations in various lands, each with a separate language”. (Genesis 10) In the myth of Noah’s Ark, Elam was thought to be a descendant of one of Noah’s three sons on the ark. (Genesis 5-9) Tamils were the first to use the wheel for transportation. They traveled to India and the island Sri Lanka, which had been connected to India. The first known manuscripts in India were written in Tamil. Other Tamil inscriptions have been found in Egypt and Thailand.

About 2500 years ago, the first Sinhalese came to Sri Lanka from India. This was hundreds of years after Tamils were settled in the kingdom in the north at Jaffna (Yazhpanam). Sinhalese is, perhaps, a term originating from King Vijayan, who was expelled from the kingdom of Sinhapura in India and arrived in Sri Lanka 543 BC. He and his people engaged in combat with the Tamil aborigines. They established the Kandi and Kottai kingdoms in the central and southern areas.

The Sinhalese are among many ethnic groups who speak an Indo-Aryan language, Pali, believed to have developed in Sindh, Gujarat and Bengal areas about 3000 years ago. They early became practitioners of Buddhism, an off-shot of Hinduism, which is the religion that most Tamils adopted. Buddhism was created by the prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in the 6th century BC. Most Sinhalese adopted Buddhism but some were converted to Christianity, which was first introduced by traders from Syria, in the 1st or 2nd century after Christ.

The Sinhalese and Tamils have distinct ethnic backgrounds, languages and religions. The vast majority of both peoples has always lived in separate regions of Sri Lanka and they have often been at war. The Sinhalese adopted the chauvinistic attitude that their language and religion were the only true ones and they must reign throughout Sri Lanka. All other religions were alien. This notion seems to have originated, or been fortified, by the historical poem Mahavamsa (“Great Chronicle”) written in Pali by the Buddhist monk Mahatera Mahanama. It covers nearly one thousand years of Sinhalese kingdom history in Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese maintain that Sri Lanka must be a Buddhist nation because, they claim, it has been so throughout history—although they count the beginning of national history with Mahanama’s account of the first Sinhalese kingdom of Vijaya, in 543 BC. The fact that Tamil Eelams had kingdoms in Sri Lanka for many hundreds of years is ignored.

When the first Europeans, Portuguese traders, landed in Sri Lanka, in 1505, they encountered three native kingdoms: two Sinhalese kingdoms at Kottai and Kandi, and the Tamils in Jaffna peninsula. Although the Portuguese were traders, they brought fire power and eventually seized power militarily from the Kottai kingdom. Despite their superior weaponry, it took them decades to defeat the kingdoms at Jaffna and Kandi, yet resistance remained throughout Portuguese occupation. The Portuguese named the island Ceilão, which the English later transliterated as Ceylon.

In 1658, Dutch invaders arrived. The Dutch United East India Company sided with the Kandi resistance to defeat the Portuguese. But when the natives realized the Dutch sought total control, the Kandians organized guerilla warfare. In 1766, the Dutch took sovereignty over the entire coastline but not the entire island where some Tamils and Sinhalese remained independent.

In 1795, the British landed and kicked out the Dutch within a year. They realized there were two separate nations of natives. In June 1796, the British Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Cleghorn wrote to his government:

“Two different nations, from a very ancient period, have divided between them the possession of the Island: the Sinhalese inhabiting the interior in its southern and western parts from the river Wallouwe to Chilaw, and the Malabars (Tamils) who possess the northern and eastern districts. These two nations differ entirely in their religion, language and manners.”

It took the Brits a generation to defeat resisting natives. In 1811, they defeated Bandara Vanniyan and his guerrilla resisters in the Tamil Vanni territory. In 1815, the British finally captured the last of the Kandyan kingdom.

The European invaders were only interested in the riches they could steal. They converted the peasant based agricultural economy into an export one. The island was rich in cinnamon and other spices, coconuts and graphite. English colonialists converted much of the land into tea, coffee and rubber plantations.

Religion was used by the colonialists to dominate and pacify the natives. The Portuguese spread Catholicism in an organized manner. Some Tamils and some Sinhalese converted or were forced to convert. Both the Dutch and English continued the process with their Protestant missionaries, yet most natives held onto their beliefs in either Buddhism or Hinduism. Islamism was also introduced by Arab traders.

“Sri Lanka as British-ruled Ceylon was subjected to a classic divide-and-rule,” wrote John Pilger.

The English had to have their tea so they created tea plantations in the mountainous regions, especially in the center of the country where Sinhalese lived. But Sinhalese would not work them so the Brits “brought Tamils from India as virtual slave labor while building an educated Tamil middle-class to run the colony,” continued Pilger.² Only a few indigenous Tamils, however, ran anything, but some educated ones took the opportunity to sit on top of the bottom castes.

A hierarchy of “races”, classes and castes was perpetrated among native ethnic groups and new arrivals. In the mid-1800s, English and German scholars adopted an ideology of superiority first based on language and then on race. The English viewed Sinhalese as cousins in the large Aryan family. Brits (and Germans) were the “superior” white Aryans; the Sinhalese lesser Indo-Aryans, and Tamils were the colonized proletariat, the “black inferior race.” This fit in nicely with the Sinhalese elite notion of superiority, based on their precious book of mythology, Mahavamsa. In the 1870s, a German scholar, Max Muller, writing about language origins, especially Indo-Aryan, first coined the term “Aryan race”—something he later regretted.³

Europeans took it for granted that Greek and Latin were superior languages, and they saw affinities with Sanskrit, from which Sinhalese is derived. Given this identity, it was easier for the colonialists to drive a wedge deeper between the indigenous peoples, and all the more so by allowing Sinhalese to own land without having to work the British tea and rubber plantations in the center of the country. The Brits left the aboriginal Tamils stay in their homeland in the north and east, but brought between 800,000 and 1.5 million Tamils from India to work the fields; nearly one-fourth died in route. It is estimated that 70,000 Tamil Nadu died on route in the 1840s. Their story parallels that of Africans forced into slavery and brought to the Americas.

Ironically, it was protestant missionaries who contributed greatly to the development of political awareness among Tamils in the north and east, and led to a revival of the Hindu faith as a reaction against Christian domination. We find many examples of this in modern history, such as the increasing interest among Arabs in practicing strict Islamic customs, including separate gender rules, as a reaction to the invasions and occupations of Western imperialism in the Middle-East. Something similar is occurring in Palestine in response to the apartheid enforced by Zionist Jews.

Led by revivalist Arumuga Navalar in the mid-1800s, Tamils in the north and east built their own schools, temples, associations and presses. Literacy was used to spread Hinduism and its principles. Tamils published their own literature and newspapers to counter the ideology-religion of the missionaries. Tamils thought confidently of themselves as a community, thus lending to the legitimacy of their later assertion of the necessity to be treated equally with the Sinhalese or be granted—or take—their own autonomy as Eelam Tamils.

For some of the time that Britain ruled the island different colonial governors recognized equality of the native peoples, yet played one against the other. In 1833, the British mandated the administrative unification of the country while incorporating the different native administrative structures that existed earlier. The new legislative council was composed of three Europeans and one representative from the Sinhalese, the Ceylon Tamils and the Burghers—a Euro-Asian minority, Creole descendants of European colonialists who spoke a mixture of Indo-Portuguese. They had been converted to Protestantism.

Tamil laborers brought from India had no say nor did the few Arab Muslims. Racist Sinhalese massacred many in 1915. In 1930, another hard-working minority, Malayali plantation workers, were attacked by Sinhalese and most fled back to Kerala.

In 1921, the colonialists altered the legislative council so that Sinhalese acquired 13 seats to three for the Tamils. From here on out, Tamils developed a communal consciousness as a minority. In 1931, the Brits changed the rules again by incorporating the notion of universal franchise—one man one vote including for castes. Most Sinhalese opposed this progressive measure, seeking to maintain classes and castes while agreeing to part of the rule allowing them, as the majority, to have a decisive say over the minority Tamils. The issue of representative power-sharing, and not the structure of government, was used by nationalists of both communities to create an escalating inter-ethnic rivalry, which has been the dominant trend since.

Britain’s vacillating ruling strategy throughout their 150 year domination led to sporadic episodes of violence between Sinhalese and Tamils, often expressed as religious conflicts between Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims. More often than not, it was Buddhists who first attacked other ethnic peoples who held other faiths. The Brits often held police on the sidelines.

In the 1930s, and especially during World War II, Sinhalese and Tamils spoke out for independence. Various left-wing parties and coalitions arose, and some conservative groupings as well. Many natives hoped for a German victory over the hated English colonialists.

Tamils struggled to have their language placed on equal terms with Sinhalese, and replace English as the official language. Some Sinhalese leaders agreed but many did not. In 1939, a Tamil leader, G.G. Ponnambalam, spoke against the common Sinhalese notion, taken from the Mahavamsa, that their language should be the only official language and Buddhism the only official religion. Angry at the speech, Sinhalese mobs bashed and killed many Tamils. This time the British stopped the riots, but the roots to the upcoming 26-year long civil war had been laid.

Once WW II ended, the British Empire realized it had to give in to so many native peoples struggling for sovereignty. India won dominion status in 1947, a slight reform until full independence in 1950. The civil disobedience movement led by Mahatma Gandhi had succeeded yet he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist on January 30, 1948. Gandhi sought unity among all Indians, but most Muslims wanted their own State after colonialism. Many Muslims were killed in riots; many lost their homes. Gandhi believed it morally correct for India to compensate them with finances. Many Hindu nationalists opposed this, and it led to his murder.

Great numbers of Hindus in India discriminated against non-Hindus just as Buddhist Sinhalese discriminate against Hindus and Muslims. The percentage of Tamils in Sri Lanka has been reduced from 30% to 12.6%. Tens of thousands have been murdered before and during the recent war, and as many as one million have fled the country, part of a massive Diaspora, like the Jews.⁴

1. This condensed history is gleaned from many sources: author Maravanpulavu K. Sachithananthan; Latin American Friendship Association, Tamilnadu, India; Wikipedia: many articles about Tamil Eelam, Sri Lanka and their histories, religions and languages; Tamilnation.org and many other sections in this comprehensive Tamil self-determination website. I am uncertain about the exactitude of origins, who came first, specific dates, or how to determine linguistic lineages. The record is unclear. But what is clear is that Sinhalese have judged and treated Tamils as inferior beings.
2. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
3. See chapter 13. “Understanding the Aryan Theory,” by Marisa Angell, a Usamerican Jew. The chapter is part of Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka, edited by Mithran Tiruchelvam and Dattathreya C.S., published by International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1998.
4. Current population statistics of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka—so named since 1978—show a population of 21 million people. 74% (15 million) Sinhalese; 12.6% (2.5 million) Tamil; 7.4% (1.5 million) Moors; 5.2% (1 million) Indian Tamil. 93% of Sinhalese are Buddhists, and the remainder Christian. 60% Tamils are Hindus, 28% are Muslim and 12% Christian.

The watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are believed to be stepping up their campaigns after the recent publication in a US newspaper of an Israeli professor’s call to boycott Israel.

Both groups have been alerting the universities’ external donors, mostly US Jews, to what they describe as “subversive” professors as a way to bring pressure to bear on university administrations to sanction faculty staff who are critical of Israeli policies.

“I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”

Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a “rogues’ gallery” of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an “academic fifth column”.

“The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.”

Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organisation founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement.

Campus Watch has been widely accused of intimidating US scholars who have expressed views critical of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. The organisation’s goal, according to critics, is to pressure US universities to avoid hiring left-wing lecturers or awarding them tenure.

The advertisement placed by IsraCampus, and seen by Haifa University students as they returned from their summer break, warned that a number of their professors “openly support terrorist attacks against Jews, initiate an international boycott of Israel, exploit their status in the classroom for anti-Israeli incitement and anti-Zionist brainwashing, collaborate with known anti-Semites … who publicly call for Israel’s destruction”.

Publication of the advert was supported by the head of Haifa’s student union, Felix Koritney: “Students who study here need to know who their lecturers are, and if there are lecturers who oppose the state of Israel it is important to publish their names.”

In a statement, Haifa University officials also defended the advertisement – after receiving a complaint from a student who called the advertisement incitement – justifying it on the grounds of “freedom of speech”.

IsraCampus is associated with Steven Plaut, an economics professor at Haifa University, who was reported to have paid for the advertisement. On the group’s site and on his personal blog, Mr Plaut has lambasted many Israeli left-wing academics.

IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have targeted professors for criticising the occupation, joining protests against Israel’s separation wall, signing petitions or attending conferences critical of Israel, defending the UN report of Judge Richard Goldstone on last winter’s attack on Gaza, or calling for a boycott of Israel.

Both groups have focused their efforts on the staff at Ben Gurion and Haifa universities, two regional campuses that have attracted more outspoken dissidents.

Ilan Pappe, a former history professor at Haifa University and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, admitted he abandoned his academic career in Israel and relocated to the UK after a campaign of vilification.

But, according to Mr Newman, Ben Gurion University had become the groups’ “public enemy No 1” after publication by Neve Gordon, a colleague of Mr Newman, of an article in the Los Angeles Times calling for a boycott of Israel.

Despite having tenure, observers say, Mr Gordon has come under increasing pressure from the university to resign his position as chair of the university’s politics department over his published views.

Rivka Carmi, president of Ben Gurion University, issued a statement shortly after Mr Gordon’s article was printed, condemning his opinions as “morally repugnant” and warning that he was “welcome to search for a personal and professional home elsewhere”.

Dana Barnett, founder of Israel Academia Monitor, has launched a petition demanding that Mr Gordon be sacked from his position as chair, that his courses be treated as elective rather than compulsory for his students, and that he be denied travel and research funding.

Mr Newman said decisions about hiring and retaining staff at Ben Gurion were still being taken on academic grounds but that the monitoring groups were seeking to change that by calling for donor boycotts of universities seen to be harbouring anti-Zionist professors.

Yaakov Dayan, the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, sent a letter to Ben Gurion University after publication of Mr Gordon’s article, warning that private benefactors “were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your institution”.

Although the universities are chiefly backed by government money, external donations account for about five per cent of their funding. With universities struggling with large debts, donations can be seen as leverage over the universities.

Mr Newman said the monitoring groups hoped to redirect donations to right-wing academic institutions and think tanks, such as the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, whose founding president is the US neoconservative scholar Martin Kramer, and Ariel College, located in a West Bank settlement near Nablus.

On his website, Mr Plaut credited IsraCampus with forcing Tel Aviv University last week to investigate claims by one of its professors, Nira Hativa, that some right-wing students were afraid to speak out in class because of fears that they would be penalised by their lecturers.

Under questioning from the Haaretz newspaper, Ms Hativa admitted that her allegations were based only on “intuition and personal impressions”.

Both IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have been incensed by the support offered to Mr Gordon’s call for a boycott of Israel by a small number of Israeli academics.

One such professor, Anat Matar, who teaches philosophy at Tel Aviv University, said the atmosphere both within the universities and more widely in Israeli society was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly “intolerant” of dissent. “We’ve become a little more fascistic as a society,” she said.

Mr Plaut has been at the centre of a libel battle with Mr Gordon since 2002 after he called him a “Judenrat wannabe” – a reference to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis.

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.
– President Fidel Castro.¹

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.
– Che Guevara²

I think that the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua let down the entire Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as well as “proletarian internationalism” and the “exploited”, by extending unconditional support to Sri Lanka’s racist government.

Cuba did so—along with the Bolivian and Nicaraguan governments and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America)—on May 27, 2009 when signing a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution praising the government of Sri Lanka for “the promotion and protection of human rights”, while only condemning for terrorism the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought the government in a civil war since 1983 until their defeat on May 19, 2009.

During the last year of war, the Sri Lankan government illegally and brutally interned nearly half-a-million Tamil civilians; 280,000 of these civilians were entrapped in several “welfare centers” upon the LTTE’s surrender. Half-a-year later, only a few thousand have been released. Their conditions are the opposite of “promotion and protection of human rights”. Hundreds have died and are dying for lack of food, water, basic health care.

Since advocating for and signing the unbalanced HRC resolution, I have found no text or evidence that these progressive-revolutionary-socialist governments of ALBA have criticized Sri Lanka for routinely practicing brutality and neglecting basic life necessities of these illegally interned people. The conduct of Sinhalese-led governments towards Tamils ever since Sri Lanka’s independence from Great Britain, in 1947-8, has always been one of mistreatment and inequality, even genocide.

While ALBA leader Venezuela is not a member of that council, President Hugo Chavez followed suit by applauding Sri Lanka’s victory.³ I hope that these revolutionary leaders will undo that damage by coming to the aid of the interned and all 2.5 million Tamil survivors of this horrible carnage and condemning Sri Lanka for its beastly and racist conduct. Tamils national rights must also be recognized, especially by governments representing other indigenous and once enslaved peoples.

In this first of a five-part series, I begin to lay the case that Sri Lanka’s governments practice genocide. I will also speculate about why the four ALBA countries involved in this matter could have decided to ignore this reality, why they disallowed an investigation into the assertion, and why they support such a cruel, chauvinistic regime. In the forthcoming parts, I will sketch the history of the Sinhalese and Tamils; outline the right and necessity for Tamil nationhood; delineate their struggles for equal rights; and show the geo-political power game being played out between the west and its’ sometimes antagonistic counterpart regimes in China and Iran; and conclude with the present state of affairs for Tamils.

Human Rights Council Resolution S-11/1: Assistance to Sri Lanka in the promotion and protection of human rights

Upon the end of the war, 17 countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council called for an extraordinary session about the Sri Lankan situation. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, spoke for an “independent and credible international investigation” into the reports of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law on both sides of the civil war.

“For its part, the Government reportedly used heavy artillery on the densely populated conflict zone, despite assurances that it would take precautions to protect civilians”… and the “reported shelling of a hospital clinic on several occasions”…”

“These people are in desperate need of food, water, medical help and other forms of basic assistance… there have already been outbreaks of contagious diseases.”

“The images of terrified and emaciated women, men and children fleeing the battle zone… must spur us into action.”

Pillay’s professional, compassionate and balanced proposal was not tabled or even discussed. Instead 17 members—mostly EU countries and Canada, but also Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile—proposed only that an investigation into these charges of human rights abuse be pursued by the Sri Lankan government itself, that is: the government investigating its brutality, hardly anything radical or effective. This, and the call for “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid from the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross, was the only significant difference from another resolution proposed by the majority, mostly Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries. Chile was the only NAM member to vote against the majority, which wanted no investigation at all. And the “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid was reduced to: “provide access as may be appropriate”, thereby giving Sri Lanka’s government the power to use food/water/medicine as a weapon against their enemy: the Tamil people and not the now defeated LTTE.

Sri Lanka was present at the HRC sessions as an observer. It had been a member from 2006 to 2008 when it lost reelection as one of the six Asian State members. Poignantly overlooked by most NAM members assembled a year later, it had been severely criticized by Tamils around the world and by internationally respected Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

“The systematic abuses by Sri Lanka government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Torture and extrajudicial killings are widespread [as is] kidnappings of its own people,” said Tutu in May 2008 when opposing its seat on the Human Rights Council.

A year later, the HRC majority unfastidiously praised Sri Lanka for continuing “to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law”. The key promoter of the majority resolution was, to my dismay, Cuba—the homeland of my heart and where I had lived and worked for the government for eight years.

The Cuban ambassador to the Council, Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios—who also spoke on behalf of the NAM—praised Sri Lanka’s governments over the years, and “congratulates” it on “putting an end” to the armed conflict. A key sentence is: “Sri Lanka’s sovereign right to fight terrorism and separatism within its undisputed borders must be respected.” The words “separatism” and “undisputed borders” will be dealt with at length later. But no one familiar with the history of Sinhalese and Tamils for decades since independence and centuries before could have chosen to speak of “undisputed borders”. Tamils had a homeland, two kingdoms, for centuries before the Sinhalese came to the island and for centuries afterwards.

Cuba also acted as a special advocate for Sri Lanka as an “interlocutor”, in addition to Egypt, India and Pakistan. The resolution about Sri Lanka was actually its own draft, which Cuba tabled.⁴

Just before the vote, the Bolivian HRC ambassador, Ms. Angélica Navarro Llames, made it clear she was perturbed by the manner in which many of the 17 countries had presented their resolution and for insisting upon a special meeting just a week before the scheduled one. She objected to “neocolonialist attitudes”. The Bolivian then spoke of LTTE terrorism used against the people and the government and people, and defended its right to fight for its sovereignty.

Resolution S-11/1 adopted by the majority (29 members for, 12 against, 6 abstentions). Here are pertinent excerpts:

Reaffirming the respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, and its sovereign rights to protect its citizens and combat terrorism,

Condemning all attacks that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) launched on the civilian population and its practice of using civilians as human shields…

Welcoming the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country…

Emphasizing that after the conclusion of hostilities, the priority in terms of human rights remains the provision of the necessary assistance to ensure relief and rehabilitation of persons affected by the conflict, including internally displaced persons, as well as the reconstruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure,

Encouraged by the provision of basic humanitarian assistance, in particular, safe drinking water, sanitation, food, and medical and health care services to the IDPs [Internally Displaced Persons] by the Government of Sri Lanka with the assistance of the United Nations agencies…

1. Commends the measures taken by the Government of Sri Lanka to address the urgent needs of the Internally Displaced Persons;

2. Welcomes the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights and encourages it to continue to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law;…

5. Acknowledges the commitment of the Government of Sri Lanka to provide access as may be appropriate to international humanitarian agencies in order to ensure humanitarian assistance to the population affected by the conflict, in particular IDPs…

In Favour: Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia;

Against: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Abstaining: Argentina, Gabon, Japan, Mauritius, Republic of Korea, Ukraine.”⁴

I will show in upcoming articles how points 1, 2, and 5 cited here have never been the reality; Sri Lanka has not respected Tamils lives or their rights nor provided them their “urgent needs.”

Terrorism and Genocide

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was first dubbed a terrorist organization by India, in 1992. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1998 that Sri Lanka’s government so characterized them, and it did so only after the US did, in 1997. On May 30, 2006, the EU placed LTTE on its terrorist list and banned the organization. It made it a terrorist crime to economically or military aid LTTE, and it froze all LTTE bank and financial assets in Europe. The EU appeared to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control. At the time of LTTE’s defeat, 32 countries had defined them as terrorists.

Never having been in Sri Lanka or South Asia, it is difficult for me to know whether LTTE was a decidedly terrorist organization or not—that is, one which seeks to terrorize civilians. After reading many accounts of atrocities, such as killing hundreds of civilian Sinhalese in their homes, on buses and trains, I conclude that this once Marxist revolutionary organization resorted to terrorism.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that any liberation movement the world’s greatest state terrorist, the United States of America does not agree with is “terrorist” and therefore illegitimate. Other terrorists, such as the government of the separatist state of Kosovo, are no longer considered terrorist although its drug-smuggling paramilitary organization had been so described, even by the US. Superpowers support or oppose autonomy-independence when it suits their interests. This is also the case with Ireland, the Basques in Spain, and the Palestinians.

Furthermore, the US systematically practices terrorism in its permanent war—invading or “intervening” militarily in 66 countries, a total of 159 times since World War Two.

We must lament the unacceptable methods the LTTE used against many people, and do so without ignoring the history of why and how it was born. Nor must we reject out-of-hand the basic rights and needs of the Tamil people. Their plight must not be abandoned, especially by governments and organizations grounded in anti-imperialism and equality amongst peoples.

Sri Lanka’s history since independence is one of conducting genocide against the Tamils. Genocide is defined by the UN, and Sri Lanka ratified its promise to adhere to it on October 12, 1950.The Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted December 9, 1948 and entered into force, January 12, 1951, states:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
   (a) Killing members of the group;
   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.⁵

Destroying “in whole or in part” an ethnic group is certainly what Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese governments, as well as Buddhist monks, have been doing to the Tamils for six decades. Evidence will be forthcoming. There is so much evidence that even a former US deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan Administration filed a 12-count indictment against S.L. defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and army commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka for “perpetrating genocide against Tamil civilians.”

The suit was filed by Bruce Fein, in February 2009, in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

The case can be filed in the US because G. Rajapakse is a naturalized citizen and Fonseka holds a resident green card. They are charged with responsibility for: “3,750 alleged extrajudicial killings, with 10,000 suffering bodily injury and more than 1.3 million displacements,” which, according to Fein, “far exceed displacements in Kosovo which led to genocide counts before the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

Fein noted that G. Rajapakse said in a BBC interview that, “if you are not fighting the Tamil Tigers you are a terrorist and we’ll kill you.” The attorney represents Tamils Against Genocide. He believes that G. Rajapakse will be “the best witness of the genocide.”

Why ALBA voted as it did: Some points of contention:

I ask the three ALBA governments, which voted for the above resolution, to take Sri Lanka’s government to account on the serious charge of genocide against the Tamil people. At the very least, ALBA should be able to see that hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are brutally treated, and that routine discrimination and abuse have been the Tamil’s plight at the hands of Sinhalese. This is a dichotomy to ALBA’s ideology of equal rights for all: in language, in religion, in the economy, in all aspects of life. In fact, the very new constitution of Bolivia recognizes itself as a pluri-nation in which all the languages and religions of all the peoples are recognized equally. The same is the case in Venezuela with its new constitution.

How can it be, then, that these peoples’ governments have fallen in the arms of such an oppressive, racist government? Possible reasons are:

1. Separatism! It is ironic and ideologically insupportable that anti-imperialist progressive and revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia—mainly dark-skinned peoples, and many of them, especially in Bolivia, are Original Peoples long abused by many whites and creoles—side with the Sinhalese chauvinist elite in Sri Lanka. Perhaps they have not studied the sordid history of Sri Lanka. But more certainly is it that they do not support separatism or dual nationhood within one land mass. Cuba especially has, from its revolutionary start, argued for unity. What Cuba and the others fail to realize or acknowledge is that the Tamil people had tried for decades to achieve equal rights with the Sinhalese, many of whom assert adherence to Marxism, yet to no avail. Most Sinhalese do not wish to unify equally with the other ethnic group. Once peaceful means are exhausted, armed struggle is the only means to achieve liberation, as was the case with Cuba and other Latin American guerrilla movements.

In the case of Sri Lanka and separatism, ALBA governments could be prompted to side with it because of, in part, the role of China! The threat of separatism, which has been the desire of many Tibetan Buddhists, is an impelling factor for China’s position of one nation in its own region, and may be how it views the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Here, China sides, ironically, with Buddhists against Hindus-Christians-Muslims.

Bolivia and Venezuela, too, are pressed by separatist demands but they come not from an ethnic group but from a rich class of Whites-Creoles, which has no historic ethnic Homeland.

2. Geo-politics! Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated governments have been supported militarily and economically by many States, some of which are sometimes antagonistic to one another. Some leftist governments and leftist organizations often operate on the notion that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. If that is the way some socialist-communist-revolutionaries view China and Iran, both totalitarian regimes, in regards to US-Europe-Canada-Australia-Japan imperialism when it comes to Sri Lanka they are mistaken. Surely there are economic and geo-political interests on the part of China and Iran in investing and trading with countries in development, including Sri Lanka but also Cuba and all in Latin America. Fortunately most Latin Americans and the majority of their governments have ceased jumping when a US president or general barks, and they are combining in regional alliances and seeking foreign investments and aid from non-traditional partners.

Since China and Iran began extending their interests into Sri Lanka and sided with its brutal treatment of Tamils, many leftists and progressive governments could think in the black-white geo-political manner. The US-EU states, for their own propaganda image, question Sri Lanka for possible abuses of human rights against Tamils. Ah, no one with experience or knowledge about the duplicity of the empire and its allies could side with them so one must back the other side.

But China is no longer socialist, rather its economy is mainly based on government-sponsored private enterprise with exploitation of labor in the extreme: no union protection, long work hours, low wages, child labor, no say on the job or national and international policies. The working class no longer even has access to full education and health care without paying on a capitalist basis. In fact, workers in most capitalist countries in Europe have better access to health care than workers do in China. Millionaire capitalists now sit on leadership bodies of the so-called Communist Party, and make important decisions over the heads of workers and the population. China is interested mainly in accumulating capital in the grand old raw capitalist style, and it owns more of the US economy (8%) than any other government or economic entity. China’s economy is intricately interdependent upon the US’s capitalism and its imperialist wars.

Iran is run by fundamentalist religious fanaticism. Its economy is basically a capitalist one. Its working class, just as the working class in China, is not a decision-maker. Iran is also a warring partner with US imperialism in its illegal war against Iraq, whose troops are a key factor in the violence against millions of Iraqis. Iran supports their co-religious Muslims in the Quisling government under US domination.

Is it possible that the developing countries, which back Sri Lanka against the Tamil population, do so out of economic reasons? China and Iran provide needed investments and technology and thus one must not criticize. Is that possible, and if so is it ethical, is it consistent with our humanitarian principles and socialist ideology? Cannot one be a trading partner without cowing politically?

Another issue is secularism. The ALBA countries and all truly socialist oriented governments are not and cannot be theocracies! How can secular nation states and organizations consider the Sri Lanka state “democratic socialist” when it declares a religion, and only one, as THE national and official religion? Secularism is the only common ground by which all can be united.

Conclusion

I concur with progressive Tamils in the Tamil Nadu state of India, who have for decades supported Cuba and the new ALBA formation. The Latin American Friendship Association there has held many solidarity activities for these countries, and published scores of books by Latin American authors, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Upon learning of the HRC resolution, they were appalled. The author of the excerpted letter below is Amarantha Visalakshi. For 25 years, she has translated books about Latin America into Tamil and written some herself.

We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements in various fields… and are in the midst of our preparation for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and evaluation of the consolidation of Latin American countries in ALBA…

We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act [the HRC resolution] by those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future—Socialism of the 21st century.

Why do these countries wish for wiping out the Tamils from the Sri Lankan soil where they rightfully belong? What are the sources of information for these Latin American countries to decide against the Tamils and in favour of the racist Sri Lankan government in the UN Human Rights Council?… more than any other time we feel the absence of Che Guevara, the true internationalist, who laid down his life for the oppressed people of the world.

I also concur with Australia’s largest left-wing organization, the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance, which publishes greenleft.org.au.

We need “to undertake work to help convince the revolutionary governments of Latin America, including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to cease support for the Sri Lankan government, and to recognize the national rights of the Tamil people. There is a long-run danger if revolutionary governments, for whatever reason, fail to support genuine movements for national self-determination in Third World countries, and endorse repressive regimes on the basis of a bogus ‘anti-imperialism…’”

1. Fidel told writer-photographer Lee Lockwood: Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, Macmillan, N.Y. 1967.
2. Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.
3. “Hugo Chavez praises President Rajapaksa’s leadership in defeating LTTE”, Sri Lanka Daily News, September 4, 2009. In this piece, published by a pro-government newspaper, there is not one quotation by Hugo Chavez, who spoke with Rajapakse when they were in Libya. The piece paraphrases what the anonymous writer asserts Chavez having said; an example: Chavez apparently said that the defeat of LTTE terrorism “is a glowing example to other countries beset with the same problem,” words of the writer. Chavez allegedly praised Rajapakse for his leadership.
4. 1, 2, 3.
5. Source. Although the US signed the 1948 convention, it did not accede to it until November 1988. As of 2008, 140 nation states have acceded.

This means that no war has broken out, no suicide bomb has exploded, no Qassam rocket has been launched at Sderot. Ahmadinejad has not test-fired a new missile that can reach Tel Aviv. Just another murder.

Not that Israel is the world’s murder capital. We shall have to work much harder to reach the heights of New York or Moscow, not to mention Johannesburg. Statistics even show our murder rate is declining.

But lately Israel has been shocked by a series of exceptionally brutal murders. A husband took revenge on his wife by killing his little daughter and burying her in a forest. A man who lived with the wife of his son killed her daughter, his own granddaughter, put her little body in a suitcase and threw it into Tel Aviv’s Yarkon river. A son who quarreled with his wife killed her and her mother, cut up both bodies and dispersed the parts in garbage bins. A young man who had a quarrel with his mother killed her, and then went off to kill his brother, too. A man in his 70s killed his wife in her sleep with a hammer.

In recent weeks, there were two cases that trumped even these atrocities.

Damian Karlik, an immigrant from Russia who worked as head waiter in a Russian restaurant, was dismissed for theft and decided to take revenge on the owners, Russian immigrants like him. He went to their apartment and stabbed to death six people, one after another – the owner and his wife, their son and his wife and their two small grandchildren.

An immigrant from the US called Jack Teitel, an inhabitant of one of the most extreme West Bank settlements, has now confessed to the killing some years ago of two random Palestinians. He returned briefly to America, and, after coming back, put bombs into police cars. Why? Because the police were protecting gays and lesbians. He is also suspected of killing two traffic policemen for the same reason. He also claimed responsibility for the mass killing of gays in a Tel Aviv club (though that may be empty bragging). He planted a bomb in the home of some Messianic Jews (Jews who regard Jesus as the Messiah) and grievously injured a 15-year-old. He tried to kill the leftist professor Ze’ev Sternhell with another bomb which wounded him.

What is so special about these two cases is that they involved new immigrants who were allowed into Israel in spite of already being under investigation for crimes in their homelands.

The Law of Return accords every Jew the right to immigrate (“make Aliyah”) to Israel, where he or she automatically receives Israeli citizenship on arrival. But even according to this law, the Minister of the Interior can reject people suspected of serious crimes.

This makes the case of Karlik especially interesting. He was suspected in Russia of armed robbery, but the organization in charge of issuing Israeli immigration permits in Russia asserts that they did not know about it.

This organization, Nativ (“path”), was active in the Soviet Union as one of the Israeli secret services, like the Mossad and Shin Bet. Its particular job was to infiltrate Jewish communities and induce Jews to come to Israel.

Apart from this, Nativ was also engaged, of course, in espionage. It is no secret that for decades immigrants arriving from the Soviet Union were interrogated exhaustively by the Shin Bet about military, economic and other installations in their former homeland. The precious information thus gathered ensured Israel a high standing in the Western intelligence community.

After the collapse of the Communist regime, Nativ was to be disbanded, but like every threatened organization it fought for its life. It was decided to leave it intact and put it in charge of immigration to Israel from all the former Soviet republics. They now have to make sure that immigrants are kosher Jews according to religious law.

The religious credentials of the immigrants interest Nativ much more than any criminal record they may have. It seems Nativ has no contacts with the Russian police, who probably suspect it of other activities.

Thus it happens that a person like Karlik, a man under investigation for robbery with violence, was found suitable for immigration. His ethnic pedigree was impeccable. After his arrival in Israel, the Russian authorities officially applied for his extradition for robbery, but the request was denied. The escaped robber was issued a license for a gun and allowed to work as a guard.

Teitel’s case is similar. True, in the US there is no Nativ, but the logic of those in charge of emigration to Israel is the same: to bring immigrants without asking unnecessary questions. According to religious law, a Jew remains a Jew even if he sins.

These affairs shine a spotlight on one of the guiding principles of the Zionist establishment: to bring Jews to Israel, whatever the price. Statistics must show that this year – or any other year – a record number of Jews have “made Aliyah”. In many communities, the bottom of the barrel is scraped in order to bring more Jews. Emissaries find “lost tribes” of Jews in Peru and Ethiopia, India and China.

In this situation, there is an understandable temptation to overlook the criminal past of would-be immigrants. So what if somebody, a kosher Jew, has robbed a bank or mistreated children? In Israel he will perhaps mend his ways. Or if somebody was put on trial abroad for illegal arms deals, money laundering and/or selling blood-stained diamonds – he is welcome, and if he brings his millions with him, the leaders of the state will be happy to be photographed in his company.

That is true, of course, only for an immigrant who is a Jew according to the Halakha (religious law). If he is a Goy, the story is quite different. That is the province of the leader of the Shas party, Eli Yishai.

In the present Israeli government there are several candidates for the title of Racist in Chief. An objective jury would be hard put to choose between them.

The favorite is the Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a certified racist whose entire career in Israel is built on hatred towards Arabs and foreigners. It was he who appointed as Minister of Justice the kippa-wearing lawyer Ya’akov Ne’eman, who is now busily engaged in securing the all-important position of Legal Advisor to the Government (practically the Attorney General) for a judge educated in a Yeshiva (Orthodox school), who lives in one of the more extreme settlements and who has become notorious for several rightist judgments. Binyamin Netanyahu himself, of course, is also an excellent candidate.

But the King of Racists is the Minister of the Interior. He is more dangerous than his colleagues because he has absolute power over the civil status of every person in Israel, immigration and emigration, the Register of Residents and the expulsion of foreigners. In this position he is now doing to foreigners what others have done to Jews in many countries. He is untiring in his efforts to guard the real Israel – not the “Jewish and democratic state” as it is officially defined, but rather the “Jewish and demographic state”. For this purpose he has recently created a special para-police force for the detection and deportation of illegal foreigners.

It is difficult to decide whether Yishai is an extreme fanatic or a complete cynic, or some strange combination. As matter of fact, when Shas was still a moderate party, in those distant days when its guru, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, ruled that it is permissible to give back the occupied territories, and its former leader, Aryeh Deri, was the darling of the left, Yishai, too, declared, “Yes to Oslo, Yes to the evacuation of Jews from Hebron, Yes to Arafat!” But since then much dirty water has flowed down our polluted rivers, Shas has turned into a radical right-wing party and Yishai is now the most extreme rightist in the government.

His unshakable devotion to the purity of the race arouses admiration. Hardly a day passes without some shocking news about his activities. He fights like a tiger for the expulsion of 1500 children of foreign workers who were born in Israel, who speak Hebrew and attend Israeli schools, who have no other homeland. Yishai is ready to lay down his life for their deportation.

The Interior Ministry prevents the entry of American and European citizens who bear Arab names. Officials of the UN and the EU in charge of projects for the Palestinians are normally unable to enter from Jordan (or anywhere else outside Israel), and if they somehow do obtain permission – they are then forbidden to cross the Green Line into Israel. Foreign women married to Israelis are expelled without mercy. There is no end to the examples.

In the eyes of Yishai, every son of a Thai is an enemy of the Jewish state, every daughter of a Colombian worker is a threat to the purity of the Jewish people. He has declared that the foreign workers are an “infection”, and warned that Tel Aviv is “becoming Africa”. He has disclosed that the foreigners carry frightening diseases, such as AIDS, tuberculosis and such. (And in this respect they resemble gays and lesbians, who, according to Yishai, are “sick people”.

Such a person would not remain a minister in the cabinet of the US or most European countries. In the homeland of the Nuremberg laws he would not even come close to a government position.

Recently, during the operation “Cast Lead”, Yishai demanded that we “bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza” – which does not hinder him from denouncing Judge Richard Goldstone as an abominable anti-Semite. He himself, by the way, never risked his skin as a combat soldier – this national hero served as an NCO for religious services in a transport unit.

800 years ago, Rabbi Moshe Ben-Nahman, called Nahmanides, coined the phrase “Scoundrel with the permission of the Torah” – meaning a person who does despicable things which are not expressly forbidden in the Bible. I am not sure if even this appellation would fit Yishai, since the Bible forbids more than once the mistreatment of strangers – “Ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless and the widow” (Jer. 7:6), “He… loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment” (Deut. 10:18) and many other commandments to this effect.

But more important than Yishai himself is the phenomenon that he represents: the invocation of the demographic demon, which terrifies the country.

62 years after its foundation, the State of Israel is still living in fear of the “demographic danger”. It is afraid of its Arab citizens, and therefore discriminates against them in every sphere. It is afraid of the 400 thousand Russians who have come to this country with their Jewish relatives in accordance with the Law of Return, but whose mothers were not Jewish. Here is a built-in contradiction: while the Nativ operators are interested in maximizing the number of immigrants, Yishai and his people deny these very same immigrants the right to marry Jews or to be buried in Jewish graveyards. They serve in the army, but if they fall in action they cannot be buried next to their comrades.

Practically all Hebrew Israelis want a state with a Hebrew majority, where the Hebrew language, culture and tradition are cultivated. But many of us do not want a man-hunting, woman-hunting and child-hunting state, closed to asylum-seekers, where foreign workers who outstay their welcome must live in permanent fear, like our ancestors in the ghettoes.

In order to exorcise the demographic demon, my friends and I have applied to the courts and requested that the registration “Nation: Jewish” in the Ministry’s Register of Residents be replaced with “Nation: Israeli”. Our application was rejected by Judge Noam Solberg – the very same person the Minister of Justice is moving mountains to get appointed as Attorney General.

A buddy of mine we called R, spent a year in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam begrudgingly helping the US launch jet planes to strafe the people and countryside of Vietnam. He joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War as soon as he got his discharge papers. He and I spent many an hour talking politics, books, and women over the years. One conversation occurred when we were somewhere in California’s Central Valley on Veterans’ Day. As we sat in the shade of some trees in Salinas and sipped surreptitiously on a quart of Rainier Ale, R began talking about friends of his from his Navy days. After all, noted R bitterly, this is our day. He continued by noting how much better vets were treated after they were dead. Shit, he said, you even get a decent burial. And a freakin’ American flag to go with it. When you’re in their goddam uniform, you ain’t no better than a maltreated dog who they’re trying to kill. If you get out alive, they just want you to go away. Especially if you have an ailment that can be attributed to their war. R eventually married and helped raise two children. When he was around fifty he was diagnosed with a disease related to the war that was exacerbated by his reckless lifestyle in the years immediately following his discharge. He met an untimely death a few years ago while waiting for a transplant. He did get a decent burial. And a freakin’ flag.
There are many more men and women who were in the military with their own stories. Some have better endings than others. No one makes it through unscathed. Some just hide their scars better. That’s what a friend who did veterans counseling before he died told me. Washington’s latest wars have produced a new crop of these men and women. Although the wars may be different, the wounds are equally painful.

Often left unsaid when the media writes about returning veterans and their trouble adjusting to civilian life is how a veteran’s loved ones are affected. If one wishes to maintain the vocabulary of modern war, then the appropriate label for the lovers, partners, parents and children of the returning soldier would be collateral damage. Think of a cluster bomb. If the returning veteran is a casualty of the explosions that occur on original impact, then the veterans’ families and loved ones would be those who are the casualties that occur from the bomblets that detonate later. Of course, this scenario of injury and death is also replicated among those whom the imperial army has attacked many more times over.

Author and antiwar organizer Beverly Gologorsky wrote a book a couple years ago titled Things We Do To Make It Home. This book was recently released in paperback by Seven Stories Press. It is a beautifully wrought story of a group of Vietnam veterans, their lovers, families and friends set in the 1990s. Twenty years after their return from the jungles of Nam the world they live in is still littered with the veterans’ experience in combat. Like so many of their real-life comrades, the men in the story have left much damage in their wake. Simultaneously, there is a love that binds them all together. That same love reaches across the lines between suburb and city while it tears relationships into remnants barely held together by threads of memory. There is no blame here, despite the desire to find somewhere to place the despair and anger resulting from the demons that define the lives these men have lived. The women who have loved them despite their better sense, the hopelessness the men hide with drugs and alcohol and the children who wonder where there father really is even when he’s sitting in the same room are portrayed with an emotional and spiritual depth the reader won’t find in newspaper reports about veteran suicides and PTSD statistics. There isn’t a lot of hope in this novel, despite the optimism voiced by some of its characters. These are men who know they were screwed and can’t seem to figure out how to get past the war they were sent to fight. Nonetheless, they go on living life as best as they can while often unaware of the pain they cause–a pain directly related to the guilt they feel because of the injury they caused to those their commanders called the enemy while fighting Washington’s war.

I had another friend named Loren. Like so many others, he was drafted into the Army against his will. When he got his orders to go to Vietnam, he took a truck from the motor pool where he worked and ran it through several gates and a couple of parked cars in the Officer’s Club parking lot at the Colorado Army base he was stationed. He did six months in the stockade and was thrown out of the Army. He celebrated by going to a rock festival and ended up in Berkeley. His father didn’t speak to him for years, but it was worth it to Loren just to have avoided the war. After reading Things We Do To Make It Home, one wishes once again that more soldiers would follow Loren’s example and just refuse to fight.

As with much of Obama’s rhetoric, it is difficult to discern whether the President’s Cairo speech was sincere or a cynical maneuver intended to provide cover under which the status quo would be maintained. In any case, expectations were raised even higher when Obama followed up the Cairo speech by appointing the venerable George Mitchell as his chief negotiator and demanding that Israel immediately freeze all settlement building as a condition precedent to a resurrected “peace process” leading to the creation of a contiguous and viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As remarkable as Obama’s Cairo speech was, no less remarkable was the speed of Obama’s retreat from its lofty rhetoric when confronted with political realities.

Under the leadership of newly re-cycled right wing hardliner Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel predictably responded to Obama’s demand by raising its middle finger to Israel’s only remaining benefactor, by authorizing the construction of 455 new Jewish-only housing units in and around Jerusalem and announcing that some 3000 units under construction would be completed regardless of any hypothetical moratorium.

Even the cynical Netanyahu must have been amazed at the ease with which the Obama government backed down from his settlement freeze demand in a series of remarkable genuflections notable mostly for the unctuousness with which they were delivered. To gain a full picture of the scope of Obama’s capitulation to the Israel Lobby, we must consider the timeliness of Judge Richard Goldstone’s report on war crimes committed during Israel’s most recent massacre in Gaza, during Operation Lead Cast in January 2009.

Goldstone’s 575-page report meticulously documenting Israel’s various crimes was released on September 15, 2009, just as the Netanyahu government was concocting new ways to placate its settler-based constituency by expressing its contempt for Obama’s peace initiative. Thus, by virtue of its timing, the public release of the Goldstone report provided a perfect opportunity for Obama to play hardball with Bibi.

Obama could have threatened to simply allow (or even support) Judge Goldstone’s recommendation – that the report be referred to the United Nations Security Council and possibly to the International Criminal Court should Israel refuse to undertake a genuine investigation of its findings – to be implemented unless Israel agreed to a freeze of all settlement activity, including Jerusalem. Given the importance to Israel of preserving its reputation as a civilized member of the “international community” (meaning, the West), such a strategy might well have succeeded, and would have allowed the Obama administration to avoid the more serious political implications of resorting to the most obvious exercise of America’s leverage – cutting off loan guarantees that are used to subsidize Israel’s illegal settlement building, a threat that would surely provoke a full-blown rebellion from AIPAC-infested U.S. Congress.

Instead, Obama immediately dispatched UN Ambassador Susan Rice to vacuously express Obama’s “serious concerns” over the “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable” work of the Goldstone commission, without of course identifying any specific flaws in the report’s findings, logic or conclusions. Worse yet, by means of some behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, Obama forced the hapless Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to in effect adopt the Likud-endorsed, grotesquely Orwellian formulation that to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes would deal a “fatal blow” to the peace process.

“Israel will not be able to take further steps and take risks for peace if it is denied the right of self-defense”, said Netanyahu on October 1, affirming that the right to commit crimes against humanity with absolute impunity is an essential weapon in Israel’s peace arsenal. Threatened by the Netanyahu-Obama axis with who-knows-what dire consequences if he failed to fall into line, Abbas was forced to agree, and withdrew the Palestinian Authority’s demand that the Goldstone report be sent to the UN General Assembly for possible action.

This was the first of the self-inflicted wounds visited upon Obama’s feckless peace initiative, which, like its equally feckless predecessors, depends on identifying and propping up a Palestinian “partner for peace” to participate in chimerical negotiations: On the day following Abbas’ announcement, the “Arab street” erupted in protests, marches and statements of condemnation, not only from his Hamas rivals, but from human rights groups, intellectuals and media pundits all over the world (except of course the United States). Abbas quickly reversed course and re-affirmed the PA’s commitment to having the Goldstone report referred to the UN Security Council. It was too little, too late, to salvage Abbas’ credibility.

The second and fatal blow – to Abbas’ viability with his own people and thus to Obama’s Cairo agenda – was landed when in late October, Obama’s loathsome Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, told reporters that Netanyahu’s patently meaningless offer to “restrain some” (as opposed to “freeze all”) settlement activities in the West Bank amounted to an “unprecedented restriction” on Israel’s colonization project. (Clinton’s assertion was true in the trivial sense that notwithstanding numerous commitments to freeze settlement activities, most recently at George W. Bush’s 2007 Annapolis conference and before that in the 2003 Road Map agreement, in practice Israel has never significantly “restrained” its settlement activities at any time; however, insofar as it in effect congratulated Netanyahu for Israel’s bad faith in rejecting the most basic request issued by her own boss, Clinton’s statement was thoroughly false in a deeper sense.)

The Clinton episode was the last straw for Mr. Abbas, who promptly announced that he would withdraw his candidacy for the coming presidential election in the Palestinian Authority. It is not readily apparent who will replace Abbas, assuming he is serious about his decision to cede the leadership role to someone more willing to play the patsy role in the absurd charade known as the American-sponsored “peace process.” What is clear, however, is that Obama’s inability to back up his Cairo rhetoric with even the semblance of spine in dealing with Israel’s intransigent leadership has consigned the latest Middle East peace initiative to failure, exactly like the similar initiatives of every American President since Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s gamesmanship vis-à-vis Mahmoud Abbas nicely illustrates the paradox of Israel’s relationship to Palestinian leadership generally:

Israel complains (in the words of Ehud Barak) that it cannot negotiate because it has no Palestinian “partner for peace.” But to the extent that any hand-picked Palestinian leader is acceptable as a “partner” – to that extent the Palestinian leader invariably lacks credibility with his own people, and for that reason cannot legitimately represent the popular Palestinian position in any negotiation. Thus, the hand-picked Palestinian leader cannot negotiate because he has no real power, and Israel is once again able to complain about having no partner for peace.

This cycle suits Israel fine, because postponement of the “peace process” means preservation of the status quo, and preserving the status quo serves (apparent) Israeli interests for one reason: the status quo allows, or more accurately consists in, the constant, never-ending, incremental construction of yet more Jewish-only settlements on stolen land, and the consequent incremental dispossession of Palestinian populations and their increasing isolation in ever-shrinking disconnected ghettos.

(Just as the space of the occupation is less a container within which events unfold than the medium for the events themselves (see Eyal Weizman, The Hollow Land), so the temporality of the occupation should be understood as part of its implementation: The occupation’s end (via agreement on final status) is constantly, interminably, forever deferred, and in the meantime, everything that occurs (the building of settlements and “outposts”, military “incursions” and “operations”, agreements, understandings, cease fires, checkpoints, barriers, suspensions of law and rights in the name of security, etc.) is characterized as temporary, conditional, of “interim status”, allowing the nearly imperceptible creation of “facts on the ground” that incrementally but permanently alter reality, rendering any possible agreement or negotiated solution moot.)

Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institute, an advisor to George Mitchell, recently remarked that with Abbas exiting the scene, “we are entering a new era.” In this new era, the challenge for the next Palestinian leader will be to resist the “peace process” altogether, based on a clear understanding that the United States cannot, now or ever, play a constructive role in bringing about a just outcome to the conflict.

As Sara Roy has demonstrated, the function of the “peace process” is to permanently remove the conflict from the framework of international law, as expressed in the well-established international consensus regarding its resolution based on UN Resolution 242, a consensus consistently blocked over the past 30 years by Israel and the United States. This removal is accomplished by creating and sustaining the illusion of a genuine “negotiation” of land for peace, but the concept of negotiation assumes the existence of two more or less equal parties, each of whom runs the risk of palpable loss should negotiations fail.

This assumption does not apply in this case, because all the power is on one side, and the relationship between the parties is that of domination: The Palestinians have nothing to give that Israel can’t take by force, and Israel has nothing to lose should negotiations fail. The only real restraint on Israel’s actions in the occupied territories is its public image in the United States Congress, which provides the money, the weapons and the legal cover for Israel’s ongoing colonization project. There are limits to gullibility, even inside the Beltway, and the day when Israel is no longer able to portray itself as the victim rather than the aggressor will be the day Israel will agree to negotiate in good faith. That is why the Goldstone report is so very dangerous from the Israeli government’s perspective.

At this point, the only possible outcome of the peace process – certain to be resurrected in some form by the Obama administration – is to force the Palestinian leadership accept national existence within a network of isolated, walled-in enclaves and call it a “state”, while lacking that most basic characteristic of any genuine state, namely, sovereignty (over borders, defense, airspace, resources, etc.). The longer the Palestinians resist that outcome, the greater the pressure on Israel to conform to its public image in the United States as a liberal democracy – by offering equal political rights, including the right to vote, to the 4 million Arabs under its rule.

As the sun sets on the two-state solution, that pressure is already well on its way to becoming intolerable – in Israel, with the growing domination of the political scene by extreme right-wing ethnic nationalists like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in the United States with the rise of AIPAC alternatives such as the J-Street organization, and in the rest of the world with the inability of functionaries like Barack Obama to bury the Goldstone report and with it, the truth.

As it happened, Obama cancelled his scheduled contribution to the proceedings in order to address the memorial service for the 13 who were killed in the shooting on the U.S. Army base at Fort Hood in Texas. (At the risk of giving offense where none is intended, I have to say that I think the conference agenda could easily have been re-arranged to provide the President with an alternative podium slot if he had wanted it. He did, in fact, put in an appearance at a reception for Jewish leaders attending the conference, but he didn’t talk about foreign policy. Instead he delivered a 20-minute homily on Jewish values of charity and the importance of health care reform).

Obama’s place as the main speaker was taken by his chief of staff (and Zionism’s number one minder in the White House) Rahm Emanuel. Reviewing his address to conference as a whole, I saw no reason to disagree with what Paul Craig Roberts wrote. Emanuel “surrendered for his boss”.

It would seem that a very similar thought was in the mind of Uriel Heilman who wrote an analysis piece for the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency). Under the headline “Obama shifts to Israel’s corner, but tries not to show it,” Heilman noted that “when the chief of staff took to the podium… he sounded almost exactly like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a day earlier”.

It’s true that Emanuel did say that “Israel must halt settlement construction on the West Bank” (not the occupied West Bank, just the West Bank); but in the context of his whole speech, that was mere lip-service to a presidential call that had been rejected by Netanyahu and served only to confirm that it’s Zionism’s stooges in Congress who call the policy shots on Israel/Palestine, not the White House.

According to Emanuel, Israel seeks a lasting peace. The truth telling of that day was left to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He said, in Paris, “Israel’s desire for peace seems to have completely vanished.” (That, of course, is not completely true. Israel does want peace, but not on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept).

Emanuel went on: “Make no mistake, the path toward peace is not one that Israel should be asked to walk alone” (my emphasis added). That, it seemed to me, was the chief of staff’s coded way of saying, “The Arabs are to blame for the fact the President’s efforts to kick-start a peace process are going nowhere”.

At the time of writing there are signs that the growing despair of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians will trigger a third intifada at a not too distant point in a foreseeable future.

In terms of realpolitik, there’s a case or saying that could be a good thing to the extent that Israel’s brutal suppression of it would probably inspire more global sympathy and support for the Palestinian claim for an acceptable amount of justice. But there’s a much stronger case for saying that it could be catastrophic for the Palestinians. A third intifada could give Zionism’s in-Israel mad men the pretext they will one day invent if they are not presented with it on a plate to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The price of President Obama’s refusal to tell truth to Jewish power might well be blood and destruction on a scale not yet seen in Israel/Palestine and far beyond.

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.

– “For What it’s Worth,” Buffalo Springfield, 1967

The birth of “The Summer of Love” occurred on June 1, 1967, with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

On June 5, 1967, the Six-Day War began and led to Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank.

On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a spy ship was attacked by Israel while navigating in international waters. Although they were flying the American flag, 34 men were killed and 172 were wounded out of a crew of 294. After eighteen hours of enduring a failure to support the troops by the Johnson Administration, they were finally rescued.

On Nov. 8, 2009, Haaretz reported on a “classified, unreleased” portion of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s ‘Plan’ that offers elements of Netanyahu’s call for “economic peace” and adds justice and common sense.

Concerns are growing in Israel’s government over the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within the 1967 borders, a move which could potentially be recognized by the United Nations Security Council.

The reports indicated that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has reached a secret understanding with the Obama administration over U.S. recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

This would expose that any Israeli presence across the Green Line, including east Jerusalem, is what it is under the rule of law: an illegal incursion.

The plan specifies that at the end of a designated period for bolstering national institutions the PA, in conjunction with the Arab League, would file a “claim of sovereignty” to the UN Security Council and General Assembly over the borders of June 4, 1967 during the Six-Day War, in which Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza.

During the summer of ‘67, the Republican representative from Iowa, H.R. Gross stood up in The House and said:

Is this Government now, directly or indirectly, subsidizing Israel in the payment of full compensation for the lives that were destroyed, the suffering of the wounded, and the damage from this wanton attack? It can well be asked whether these Americans were the victims of bombs, machine gun bullets and torpedoes manufactured in the United States and dished out as military assistance under foreign aid.¹

By November 1967, lawmakers were willing to spend six million USA tax dollars to build schools in Israel but during the debate, Representative Gross introduced an amendment that “not one dollar of U.S. credit or aid of any kind [should] go to Israel until there is a firm settlement with regard to the attack and full reparations have been made [and Israel] provides full and complete reparations for the killing and wounding of more than 100 United States citizens in the wanton, unprovoked attack…I wonder how you would feel if you were the father of one of the boys who was killed in that connection-or perhaps you do not have any feelings with respect to these young men who were killed, wounded and maimed, or their families.”²

Gross’s amendment failed, justice remains delayed and American tax payers continue to support the Jewish State which has reaped a more violent and insecure planet for innocent civilians.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America’s entire foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain.³

Congressman Paul Findley said:

It is time to speak openly and honestly about Israel. But, in American politics, that is still forbidden. Pity that we cannot seem to shed our fear of Israel. We are afraid to speak out on Capitol Hill, for fear of losing the next election. They are more like trained poodles jumping through hoops than leaders!

Why this fear? How did we get here? Forty years ago to this day, June 8, 1967 the change occurred, the floodgates opened and money poured into Israel as never before. When President Johnson heard about the U.S.S. Liberty being attacked by Israel he ordered the rescue fighter planes to return to the deck. The rescue mission was aborted and the survivors have said they heard LBJ’s voice tell Admiral Giess, ‘Get those planes back on deck. I don’t care if the ship sinks, I will not embarrass Israel.’

LBJ also threatened to court martial anyone who reported what had happened. Johnson accepted Israel’s false claim of “mistaken identity” and he knew it was a lie. That is when the change began and Israel learned they could get away with murdering U.S.A. soldiers.

In June 2005, the whistle blower of Israel’s WMD program, Mordechai Vanunu told me:

When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them. Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.

In the 1970s, Israel built many fortresses and spent lots of money on equipment, but nothing on the people I saw, who were oppressed and under occupation. I got really mad and upset every time I thought about how much money they wasted, but I kept my mouth shut and kept it all to myself. After a year, I finished my training and was assigned to train more soldiers. For me it was all futility and waste; I saw these children become soldiers and thought, What a complete waste. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, I was home on leave. I returned the next day to my station near Ramallah. Soldiers with less than a month of training got called to go with me to the Jordan Valley. There weren’t enough trained troops, and we were lucky we didn’t see any fighting and got to return to base after three days. After a few months, we all went to Syria and the Golan Heights. When Kissinger coordinated the cease-fire, the Israeli army destroyed the area before leaving there…

Fast forward to 2009: Vanunu awaits another High Court date seeking the right to leave the Jewish State while Prime Minister Fayyad, is winning international support seeking a Security Council resolution to replace Resolutions 242 and 338.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, in the aftermath of the Six Day War. The preamble refers to the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security.”

242 requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East and required the withdrawal of Israel armed forces from the territories occupied in the then ‘recent’ conflict.

On October 22, 1973, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 338 called for a ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War in accordance with a joint proposal by the United States and the Soviet Union for a bilateral cease fire to take effect within 12 hours.

It also called upon the parties concerned to immediately implement Security Council Resolution 242 and insisted that negotiations between the parties concerned would be aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.

Fayyad’s 2009 Plan is garnering positive responses from the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Sweden. Haaretz reported that, “Fayyad added that he presented the proposal to the U.S. administration and did not receive any signal of opposition in response.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a mediator between Israel and Syria during Ehud Olmert’s term as prime minister, has resume the role as an intermediary between the two countries. He said his government can be an “honest broker” in such talks but Netanyahu responded with reluctance over Turkish mediation due to the ongoing tension between Ankara and Jerusalem, which Patrick Seale reported on Oct 16, 2009:

Turkey’s sudden cancellation this week of a major air force exercise with Israel was a salutary wake-up call. Evidently, Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan found it necessary to cancel the drill because of the widespread hostility to Israel among Turkey’s population. He has had to take Turkish public opinion into account. Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu spelled out the reasons in diplomatic terms: ‘We hope that the situation in Gaza will improve…and that will create a new atmosphere in Turkish-Israeli relations…’

To offend the Turks is no small matter. Israel cannot afford to ignore the warning or sweep it under the carpet. Turkey has for many years been Israel’s main regional strategic partner — indeed its only one since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Losing Turkey could turn out to be the worst setback Israel has suffered for a very long time.

Turkey’s army is the largest in the region; so is its industrial base. Its GDP, at over $1,000bn (in 2008) dwarfs that of the oil producers, whether Arab or Iranian, and is four times larger than Israel’s own. In recent years, Turkey has greatly improved its relations with Iran and with neighboring Arab states — Syria in particular — and is emerging as the wise ‘big brother’ of the greater Middle East. It has offered to mediate local conflicts and is attempting to spread stability and security all around it.

With the Fayyad Plan gaining steam and a ‘big brother’ like Turkey, peace in the Holy Land no longer seems to be just a pipe dream.

1. James Scott, The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship (Simon & Schuster, June 2009): 271-272.
2. Scott: 272-273.
3. ”U.S. Military Aid and the Israel/Palestine Conflict,” If Americans Knew.

Lawlessness must have painful consequences for the lawless, not their victims.

– Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood is one of the most consistent and passionate writers on the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine. His book, Radio Free Palestine, and his frequent articles, focus readers on the plight of the Palestinian people, on the occupiers who are responsible, and on the governments who support Israel’s slow-motion genocide and theft of an Indigenous people’s homeland, culture and history. I spoke with him recently.

Angie Tibbs: Has your active support for the Palestinian people always been a part of who you are or was there a defining moment which caused you to speak out?

Stuart Littlewood: I’m new to this game. The Palestinians’ struggle for justice isn’t taught in school here and our politicians are afraid to discuss it, so the British people are kept in ignorance.

I knew next to nothing until I had to research the subject for a newspaper column. The more I delved into it the angrier I became. The sheer evil! A short time later, in 2005, somebody who had read my column invited me to visit the West Bank and shoot pictures for a book.

First impressions of Palestine under occupation

AT: What towns and villages did you visit in occupied Palestine and what were your impressions?

SL: Much of the time was spent with Palestinian priests in their parishes. These are the Church’s front-line troops. They are abused and sometimes shot at by the Israelis, yet they remain focused and good-humoured.

The first trip took us to Jericho, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, including the Old City, as well as smaller towns in the West Bank. We also visited Jenin, which was considered dangerous so we didn’t stay long. The town was a rubble-strewn mess after the onslaught and war crimes 3 years earlier (Israel denied accusations of massacre). The devastation was massive and brought back childhood memories of London after the Nazi blitz, which my family lived through.

All over the West Bank what struck me most was the resilience of ordinary people under brutal occupation and having to cope with endless restrictions. For them life was a cruel obstacle course, just like the Nazi occupation of Europe… There is no legal protection against the thuggish military. Every Palestinian we met urged us to tell their story when we got home because they felt sure the British people didn’t know the truth… otherwise how could we stand idly by?

These are kind, hospitable and sophisticated people who have done nothing to deserve the misery inflicted on them by the Israeli regime and its supporters in the West.

I was also shocked by the way the Israelis have systematically trashed the Holy Land and many of its antiquities. Once-beautiful landscapes, many with biblical connections, are now crowned with hideous hill-top settlements or military installations. Town and country planning principles are unheard-of. Israel’s vandalism, visible everywhere, has ruined a gentle Arab civilization and its heritage, and that’s something else they’ll never be forgiven for.

AT: Your initial trip to the West Bank was shortly after the death of President Yasser Arafat. Were people talking about him? Remembering him?

SL: No, but his image was everywhere… in village squares, on buildings, inside shops and offices. I noticed in the assembly hall of a Catholic school an enormous portrait of the Pope, and on the adjacent wall an equally large portrait of Arafat. As a symbol of resistance he’s as big as they come.

On the second trip, I visited Arafat’s mausoleum in Ramallah. The family I was staying with were delighted I wanted to do go there and they accompanied me. It was only half-built, so I asked the soldiers who stood guard: “Is he really buried here?” “Yes,” they said, visibly swelling with pride, “he’s under that slab.” For all his faults, it seems the old rascal is greatly missed.

The book project

AT: Your visits to Palestine resulted in your book, Radio Free Palestine. Tell us about that. First of all, what is the significance of the title?

SL: We were going to call it “This Land is Our Land”, but that title is already used by others. Eventually we settled on Radio Free Palestine because that’s what Palestinians need: a broadcasting service that can be heard all over the world. Proceeds from the sale of the book go to humanitarian projects in the West Bank, by the way.

The original idea was a poems-and-pictures book with me shooting the photos. But it soon became clear that to do the situation justice we needed to report in greater detail how the Israelis had effectively turned the Occupied Territories into a prison and were creating ‘facts on the ground’ to make their occupation permanent. The least we could do was tell the truth and provide readers with enough information to challenge the propaganda lies.

So I made a second visit at Easter 2006, just after Hamas’s surprise election victory. The place was in turmoil, tension was running high and plans to meet Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah had to be scrapped. Contacts also advised that it was much too risky to visit the Gaza Strip.

All the same, I gathered a lot of material, and it was a great privilege when Jeff Halper agreed to write the Foreword. I had visited his organization ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) in Jerusalem and learned a great deal from his team. Jeff is a truly courageous man and a beacon of hope.

Christians and Muslims under Hamas “all Palestinians first”

AT: You had to leave Gaza out of your book, but nevertheless you provided readers with an in-depth look at 2007 Gaza in your widely published article “Gaza and Weep,” in which you described how Gaza’s people were struggling to survive under the appalling conditions created by Israeli sanctions. What stands out most vividly in your mind today, some two years on, not only about Gaza, itself, but about Palestinian Prime Minister, Mr Ismail Haniyeh, and his party, Hamas?

SL: On the third trip, a small group of us went into Gaza and met with Mr Haniyeh, but, as you say, that was after the book came out. The Gaza Strip had been under sanctions and siege for about 18 months, so there was already a chronic shortage of food, fuel and essentials. The sick were dying from lack of medicines and hospital equipment spares. Power cuts were a daily fact of life — another Israeli weapon of collective punishment. 3,500 licensed fishermen couldn’t put to sea without being shelled by marauding Israeli gun-boats.

Mr Haniyeh and his colleagues were courteous and attentive. He gave us a generous slice of his time considering the problems he faced and the continual emergencies. I was pleased to see a strong sense of unity, with Muslims and Christians standing together against a common enemy. They are all “Palestinians first”.

I think it would be a mistake to underestimate Hamas. These are men who have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Most were raised in refugee camps, and have done time in Israeli jails or been exiled for putting up resistance. But they made sure they got themselves a good education at the Islamic University. Some went to universities in Britain and the US. They are as well-equipped as we are to govern, and they have been tested almost beyond human endurance.

When I got home the Health Ministry in Gaza sent me a list of hospital spares they desperately needed. I forwarded it to our own Health Ministry and to my MP. It was ignored, and the disgust I felt – and still feel – towards our political class is beyond words.

In the meantime I was receiving heart-breaking messages from Gazan doctors telling about the difficulties at work and at home, where their shivering children struggled to study by candle-light. What could I say to them? Here we are, two years later, and we are still letting those decent and desperate people down. How despicable is that? I cringe with shame.

AT: What were your contacts telling you about the conditions in Gaza?

SL: One message in particular still haunts me. Fr Manuel Mussallam, the elderly priest in Gaza, emailed to say: “If you wish to really understand what is taking place in the Gaza Strip, please open your Bible and read the Lamentations of Jeremiah. This is what we are living. People are crying, hungry, thirsty, desperate. They need food. Even if there is food for sale, people have no money to buy it. They have no income, no opportunities to bring food from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside Gaza. No work, no livelihood, no future… They have no hope and many very poor people are aimlessly wandering around trying to beg for something from others who also have nothing. It is heartbreaking to see.”

He ended: “I beg you, we do not need pity, we need only justice. If you don’t give justice, there will be no peace. Peace is the farthest thing away from the mind of anyone, Christian or Moslem, in Gaza at this time.”

The Hamas “terror”

AT: Israel has branded Hamas a “terrorist organization” and convinced a few of its friends to do likewise. Is this a valid designation, and what role, if any, has it played vis-à-vis lasting peace?

SL: I suppose it depends where you stand on the fascist spectrum. The Nazis called the French Resistance terrorists; we called them heroes. When a vicious occupier has his jackboot on your throat you have no choice but to fight with any weapon or any method that’s available. Pinning labels like “terrorist” and “militant” on people who are defending their homes and families is ridiculous. Always the little guy with the little gun is the terrorist, never the big guy with big guns, bunker-busting bombs and nukes. This warped mentality is the greatest obstacle to peace.

I call Palestinian fighters guerrillas or freedom fighters. The Palestinians would love to hit back with F-16 jets, tanks, helicopter gunships, armed drones and naval gunboats. That would be nice and conventional and acceptable, yes? But all they have are AK47s, RPGs and rockets made in the garden shed, and they ride into battle in a pick-up truck.

The US administration defines terrorism as “an activity that (i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and (ii) appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking”. And they use the definition to hurt people they don’t like. The laugh is that it fits the US itself, and its special friend Israel, like a glove.

The big guys are going to have to talk with Hamas eventually and when they do, they’ll discover that Hamas are not at all the way they are painted. Britain should lead the way since we caused this mess in the first place, 92 years ago.

The evil Wall

AT: What was your reaction to seeing the illegal Wall and the hundreds of check points that are scattered throughout occupied Palestine? What effect is this curtailment of free movement having on the area and its people?

SL: I love Banksy’s graffiti art on this monstrosity. The fact that the Wall is still standing – and still being built – five years after the International Court of Justice ordered it to be pulled down tells us all we need to know about our contemptible Western leaders.

Most tourists are waved through crossings in the Wall without leaving their bus seats. The last time I stayed in Bethlehem, I caught the ordinary service bus back from Jerusalem and walked with Palestinian workers (those who were lucky enough to have permits) through the sinister maze of steel and concrete barriers and holding pens…it was a thoroughly de-humanising experience. They often have to queue for hours to get to work and queue again to get home – all part of Israel’s humiliation policy.

The Wall is also an insult to Christianity the way it seals off and imprisons towns like Bethlehem and important holy places like the Church of the Nativity. It shreds and divides communities and prevents access to Jerusalem. It disrupts the life of the Church as well as the livelihoods of ordinary people.

Its other purpose, and the real reason it bites deep into Palestinian territory, is to steal large areas of prime agricultural land and the water resources beneath. If it was purely for security, as the Israelis claim, they should have built it on the internationally–recognised 1967 border.

We have just seen the world’s high-ranking hypocrites celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall but saying nothing about Israel’s apartheid wall.

Lack of respect for non-Jewish faiths

AT: Let’s talk about the religious dimension in all of this. How important is it?

SL: The three faiths are all in one place, and Jerusalem is vitally important to all of them. What’s lacking is proper respect. How many people in the West realise that Israel doesn’t allow Muslims and Arab Christians living outside Jerusalem to visit the Holy Places in the Old City?

When Palestine was under British mandate, Christians accounted for 20 per cent of the population. Now, after sixty-one years of hostilities, dispossession and economic strangulation the numbers have been whittled down to 1 or 2 per cent. At this rate there will soon be no Christians left in the land where Christianity was born. The Israelis are waging a religious war that’s designed to disrupt and paralyse Christianity in the Holy Land. It’s part of their attempt to Judaise everything.

Western Christendom doesn’t seem bothered and keeps quiet. Few churchmen, I believe, have any real clue what’s going on there. Shame on them.

AT: Are Western church leaders playing a sufficient role in protecting the Holy Land, its religious history, and its people?

SL: The Catholic Church, which has a significant presence in the Holy Land and runs a number of schools, appears to be fighting the battle alone. Anglican Church ministers I have spoken to are largely disinterested. Yes, their faith is focused on the Holy Land, they teach the Holy Land texts and they deliver sermons on the Holy Land, but what do they really care about it? One morning they’ll wake up and discover that the Holy Land – the central plank to their existence – has been stolen from under their noses.

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem – the Catholic Church in the Holy Land – does its best, but I don’t think it gets the support it deserves from the Vatican. As for the rest, they could unite and surely do much more. While Israel was planning its blitzkrieg against Gaza’s Muslims and Christians – after blockading and starving them with the British government’s connivance – the Archbishop of Canterbury went swanning off with the Chief Rabbi on a visit to Auschwitz, preaching their joint solidarity against extreme hostility and genocide! The Archbishop talked about the collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Holocaust possible. But where was his concern for the shattered Christian remnants in Gaza? Or for the murdered, maimed and homeless Muslims who, many claim, are being subjected to a ’slow genocide’? Let’s remember that the Israelis’ killing spree left nearly 60,000 homeless and 400,000 without running water, and they still won’t allow cement and other reconstruction materials to be brought in.

Did the Pope visit Gaza to show solidarity with his frightened and impoverished flock there?

Pious wofflers in their palaces make me sick, when genuine men of God – those in the front line, the priests, the nuns and the imams – risk their lives as they work round the clock to bring comfort to the victims of political greed and aggression.

Inhuman bid to starve a population and wreck their fragile economy

AT: You visited occupied Palestine in 2006 after the landslide victory by Hamas, and again in 2007. Did you get a sense of optimism from the population? Hope for a better future? Or had “the West” and Israel already begun their campaign to ensure that the Palestinian democratic election results would never become a reality?

SL: We were there just after the election in 2006, and the situation was turning nasty. Fatah’s defeat at the polls seemed broadly welcomed, but hopes of a brighter future were scuppered by the West’s childish rejection of the people’s democratic choice, Hamas.

The US and Israel were plotting to bring down Hamas by “starving” the Palestinian Authority and hence all the people it employed and served. It began by axing US-EU aid while Israel stepped up its military attacks on Gaza, killing and maiming, and destroying infrastructure including the only power station – which was built with UK taxpayers’ money, I understand. Israel also kidnapped eight Hamas cabinet ministers and a quarter of the elected members of the legislative council. On top of that, Fatah collaborators joined the plotting against Hamas and organised strikes and protests.

What spurred me to finish the book as quickly as possible was an email from a girl who worked for the Palestinian National Authority in Ramallah. Daily life was getting worse and she hadn’t been paid for over two months because the West had cut the flow of money and Israel was stealing the Palestinians’ own tax revenues. “Some of my colleagues can’t come to work anymore because simply they don’t have money for the transportation. On Thursday we made a protest in front of the entrance of our ministry demanding the international community to end this isolation and asking for our salaries. The mothers are bringing their babies and kids to work everyday because they can’t pay for the kinder yards or the baby sitters….”

Eventually her emails stopped. Presumably she could no longer get to work and access the internet. Her distress was the final straw.

Hamas misjudged the lengths to which pro-Zionist Western leaders would go to undermine democratic processes that didn’t suit their purpose or Israel’s interests. These same leaders endlessly praise Israel for being “the only democracy in the Middle East”… Everyone must be made to understand that’s because they deliberately snuffed out Palestine’s democracy as soon as it was born.

AT: How has this ongoing siege affected the lives of the women of occupied Palestine and how are they coping?

SL: The wrecking of the Palestinian economy has made it impossible for the men to work or do business effectively, and this puts a great strain on their women. They are amazingly resourceful, like the women of London during the German blitz. As a child I remember the courage of my mother and our neighbours as they overcame the hardships of being bombed every night. But Palestinian women face the added danger of enemy troops, tanks and armoured bulldozers.

In Palestinian society women hold many important positions. Even Hamas has a woman minister. Nuns too play a big part among the Christian communities. Not only are they very brave and enterprising, they are great fun to meet.

Visit Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities and you’ll see many stunningly beautiful but very determined young women – Christian and Muslim – working hard for a first-class education and running the gauntlet of Israeli checkpoints and other unpleasant obstacles. On every trip I manage to spend some time at Bethlehem Uni and am always impressed by the sharp minds and outgoing nature of the women students. I salute them.

Palestinians’ voice abroad silenced

AT: Does Palestine have an official voice in the UK, and, if so, how effective is it?

SL: You’d think Palestinians were tormented enough without the added misfortune of being represented in London by the most invisible and silent embassy it is possible to imagine. Little is done to set the news agenda or ensure that the Palestinian case is clearly heard.

In contrast the Israelis are businesslike and proactive. They pump out endless disinformation which is lapped up by the media unchallenged. Their version of events and their definition of the situation is accepted. So it’s a propaganda massacre. Many of us are convinced that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah has instructed embassies and delegations abroad to not embarrass Israel, and denies them the necessary resources to do an effective job. It’s like a fixed football match. Palestinian ’strikers’ mustn’t even shoot at an open goal.

Washington-London-Tel Aviv “axis of evil”

AT: What role, if any, does Britain play in Palestine today?

SL: None that I can see. The country that betrayed the Holy Land and its people does nothing. Our navy used to guarantee the freedom of the seas, but now it won’t even protect mercy ships from attack by Israeli pirates. The MV Dignity, for example, was deliberately rammed and nearly sunk in international waters with 16 civilians aboard, including British citizens. Nor will Britain intervene when Gazan fishermen, lawfully trying to feed a hungry population, are fired on.

AT: And the UN?

SL: Please don’t talk to me about the UN, Angie… To quote Major Rufus Cobb in that classic Jesse James film: “If we are ever going to have law and order the first thing we gotta do is take ‘em all out and shoot ‘em down like dogs!”

AT: The UN and most world leaders continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s crimes against humanity and its occupation of Palestine. What can be done to end what many feel is the slow motion genocide of the Palestinian people?

SL: This is how my good friend Dr David Halpin, a tireless campaigner for justice, describes the situation, and I couldn’t put it any better myself…. ”There is an axis of evil with Tel Aviv at one pole and Washington at the other. In the centre is London where barbarity and treachery is clothed in plummy speech and fine spectacle. Power shuttles backwards and forwards along this axis as busily as the jets carrying the psychopaths to these command centres which bring hell to earth.”

I call it the Axis of Greed, but either will do.

Israel is an aggressive military power bristling with nuclear and state-of-the-art weaponry, funded and equipped by the US and run by what British MP Sir Gerald Kaufman – himself a Jew – calls “a gang of amoral thugs”. That is simply terrifying. Those thugs are already threatening another bloodbath in Gaza, as if their atrocities eleven months ago weren’t despicable enough. If the international community doesn’t get a grip and force Israel to observe acceptable standards of behaviour and conform to international law, we can say goodbye to hopes of building a civilized world.

Lawlessness must have painful consequences for the lawless, not their victims.

As for the Palestinians, their internal squabbles play straight into the enemy’s hands. Other nations would find it easier to intervene positively if Hamas were to carry out a convincing ‘re-branding’ exercise and issue a new Charter that’s more appropriate in tone to the 21st century and their diplomatic ambitions. They now have democratic credentials and a certain amount of sympathy and goodwill among Western citizens. I hope they’ll build on it, not throw it away.

Citizens of the World must take on the Israel lobby

AT: What would be a good starting point for us, the citizens of the world, in our efforts to help the Palestinian people in a real and productive manner?

SL: At citizen level we must continue to expose Israel’s propaganda lies and evil intent. The other side uses every dirty trick under the sun and has produced an instruction manual to teach its embassy staff and its army of cyber-activists how to brainwash Western citizens and their politicians. It’ll be a long haul but the truth will eventually break through.

Citizens also need to tackle Zionist infiltration and rid us of its stranglehold on our political and government institutions. Israel has the British government eating out of its hand. Here’s an example. The other day the minister for foreign affairs, in reply to a question in the House of Commons, said: “Israel is a close ally of the UK and we have regular productive exchanges at all levels, going far beyond relations between governments. Our political relations allow us to address openly issues both of common concern and where we disagree. Most recently, on 27 October, I met the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. We will continue to foster this relationship and use it to further the interests of both countries and the wider region.” No prizes for guessing the British minister’s ethnicity.

Israel’s agents of influence are so embedded at the heart of government that signing up to the Zionist cause is regarded as a necessary stepping stone to high office. At election time activists need to identify and expose parliamentary candidates who are involved with the Israel lobby.
We are supposed to be governed in accordance with the Seven Principles of Public Life. Principle no.2 is about “integrity” – holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties. The Israel lobby has been powerful enough to ensure this is ignored. Activists need to find ways to re-impose it.

In a sane world…

AT: What happens next, and where do you fit into the scheme of things?

SL: In a sane world the UN would have guaranteed to keep Gaza’s sea border open and provide a naval escort for ships wishing to trade. And it would have declared Jerusalem an international city as stipulated in the partition plan. I hope the UN might still find the backbone to do these things.

The way America is now trying to re-write international law to legitimise Israel’s continuing land-grab and settlement expansion, and the way the US House of Representatives voted 344 to 36 to reject the UN-Goldstone report exposing Israel’s war crimes – in which America is deeply implicated – shows more clearly than ever how US politics is corrupted by the power and influence of the Israel lobby.

As for me, I’m not really an activist. I’m more a commentator. I am, however, involved with a campaign group that is part of a rapidly growing global network. There are many, many others and we are linking up. The Zionists know they have a fight on their hands in the battle for hearts and minds.

AT: Finally, what is your most fervent wish?

SL: That you and I and anybody else can visit friends in Palestine without being molested by Israel’s bad-mannered security officials. We should be able to fly or sail direct, without setting foot in Israel. Citizens of the world must make this crystal clear to the UN…. if we want to wander through Old Jerusalem’s souk, holiday on Gaza’s beach, go fishing with Gaza’s fishermen or talk football with Mr Haniyeh over coffee, it should be none of Israel’s damn business.

AT: Thank you, Stuart.

What seems as an American peace initiative putting pressure on Israel to halt its expansion into the West Bank is in fact an agenda that is promoted by Zionists within the US Administration who realise like the late Sharon, that the only chance for the Jewish state to survive the next decade, is to shrink into a little Jewish shtetle (ghetto). The Two state solution is indeed the last effort to keep Zionism alive.

Netanyahu is far from being stupid. He understands it all. He knows that his Zionist Revisionist father’s dream of ‘greater Eretz Yisrael’ is unattainable.

Haaretz reported that the Israeli PM admitted in Washington that he was committed to ‘two states living side by side’. However, he stressed that the “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes from which they were expelled, would not be on the table.” Seemingly, an Israeli hawkish PM is voluntarily confronting the Israeli original sin namely the expulsion of the vast majority of the Palestinians people. However, the fact that he insists that it won’t be ‘on the table’ can only mean that it is on the table already. “They”, continues Netanyahu, “must abandon the fantasy of flooding Israel with refugees, give up irredentist claims to the Negev and Galilee, and declare unequivocally that the conflict is finally over”.

Clearly, Netanyahu expresses here a wish that is shared by most if not all Israelis. They all dream to open their eyes in the morning just to find out that all Goyim, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims just left the region.

I am here to advise Netanyahu and every Israeli who is willing to listen that this is not going to happen. As much as being flooded by ‘refugee’ Palestinians is a deep Israeli nightmare, it is far from being a Palestinian fantasy. It is actually a reality waiting to happen. Israel has lost its opportunity to reconcile with its neighbours. It failed to settle its conflict with the indigenous people of the land. The fate of Israel will be determined by ‘facts on the ground’ namely demography. In terms of reconciliation, Israel has past the no return Zone. Its fate is doomed. One Palestine from the river to the sea is not any more a matter of ‘if’ but rather a question of ‘when’.

Unlike most Israelis who dismiss the Palestinian cause, Netanyahu admitted today that Palestinians were indeed expelled. For the first time Palestinians’ “irredentist claims” are being addressed by an Israeli PM. And yet, Netanyahu should stop deluding himself and his people. It is not just the Negev and Galilee. It is actually every piece of land between the river and the sea: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Be’er Sheva and every village, orchard, field, river and tree in between. The only question that is left open is how long will it take for the Shekel to drop? How long will it take before Israelis grasp that they dwell on stolen land? How long will it take before the Israelis realise that the battle is lost? How long will it take for the Israelis to internalise the obvious fact that they have once again managed to get on the wrong side of their Neighbours?

Obama’s strategy is now described as focussed on securing the main cities in Afghanistan, while abandoning most of the country to the Taliban. This can only be a holding measure while attempts are made to lure moderate elements in the Taliban away from their comrades to join the Karzai clique. In talks with former Taliban foreign minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil brokered by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, US negotiators supposedly offered governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast, a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net – if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan and eight US bases.

But the latest is he will bow to McChrystal’s demand for up to 40,000 more troops, US drone attacks continue apace in AfPak with his blessing, and the US is urging Pakistan on in its civil war against its frontier provinces of Baluchistan and Waziristan, pouring in massive military aid.

And missile and other plans in Eastern Europe are proceeding apace, with or without Obama’s blessing. US officials have gone out of their way to assuage the Poles and Czechs with assurances that the bases were not really cancelled. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Ellen Tauscher recently said the command centre for the new version of anti-missile defence could be stationed in the Czech Republic.

Now Poland is asking not only for missiles, but US troops, apparently “alarmed” by military exercises conducted by the Russian army in Belarus. “We would like to see US troops stationed in Poland to serve as a shield against Russian aggression,” Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski was quoted by Interfax. “If you can still afford it, we need some strategic reassurance,” he added sarcastically. When asked to comment, a Russian Foreign Ministry official told Kommersant, “It is better to ask the World Health Organisation for an assessment of Mr Sikorski’s words.” Estonia, which has sent a hefty 10 per cent of its armed forces to Afghanistan, is also asking for US troops.

NATO assurances to Georgia and Ukraine about joining up are still a dime a dozen. Georgia’s army is being armed by the US, Israeli and Ukraine, according to Alexander Shlyakhturov, head of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, encouraging Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in his plans to reincorporate South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

All this can only mean that talk of real cooperation with Russia is an illusion, as is vague talk of accommodation with Iran. Obama may mean well, but the inertia of US empire is hard to stop.

Russian politicians are not blind. Nor are the Chinese. Both Russia and China refuse to accede to US fiat on Iran, and are cooperating on many fronts these days looking for ways to ease the world towards a “multipolar world.”

This is the backdrop to the 9th meeting of the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral meeting which took place in Bangalore in late October, attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Indian External Affairs Minister SM Krishna and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. Said Lavrov after the meeting: “RIC is a group of countries that are integrally needed to mobilise regional efforts. But they are not enough. All of Afghanistan ’s neighbours are needed. The US, the main supplier of troops is needed. Iran is needed. The Central Asian countries are needed.” He politely refrained from saying that it is only because of the US invasion that the US has any role at all in the region.

As Lavrov rightly points out, it is the regional countries China, Russia, India and Iran that are the ones left to pick up the pieces in AfPak after the US finally packs its many bags. Russia has the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Russia and China have the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Even Iran has initiated its own trilateral format with Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, as MK Bhadrakumar writes in Asia Times, so far Lavrov’s efforts to fashion the three mini-superpowers into a united front on regional issues have been fruitless. Bad karma between the two most populous countries in the world lingers on; namely, the India-China frictions over borders and the Dalai Lama.

It is not only its Chinese neighbour that India can’t get along with. Deriving from its perennial distrust of anything to do with Pakistan, Delhi refuses to acknowledge the fact that the Taliban are an Afghan political reality and are part (let alone “all”) of any solution. Having drifted into the US orbit (curiously, along with its rival Pakistan), India risks being left behind, as the US-inspired war in Afghanistan continues to go nowhere, Pakistan descends into anarchy, China surges ahead, and the Russians and Chinese intensify their cooperation.

Of course, this and RIC’s inability to address Afghanistan suits the US just fine. Regional powers working together independently of the US to solve their problems would leave the US and its many SEATOs and NATOs out of the picture. Japan would like to fashion an East Asian community no longer subservient to Washington, but, according to President of the Japan Foundation Kazuo Ogoura, “It is intolerable [for Washington] to see Asians considering their relations among each other in a form that excludes the US.”

Obama is visiting Beijing and Tokyo this week. Oblivious to Asian disinterest in marching to US orders, Mark Brzezinski (son of Zbigniew) advised him in the New York Times to include in his “China List” establishing a formal mechanism among the leaders of the US, China and Pakistan – China is after all Pakistan’s oldest friend as counterweight to India. This pointedly leaves out Russia and India and ties China to US plans for the region. Good luck, Mr Obama.

Surprisingly, Moscow hasn’t given up entirely on Obama. Lavrov told Russian journalists in Bangalore, “Obama has announced a different philosophy – that of collective action, which calls for joint analysis, decision-making and implementation rather than for all others to follow Washington ’s decisions. So far inertia lingers at the implementers’ level in the US, who still follow the well-trodden track. This is a process which will take time before the president’s will is translated into the language of practical actions by his subordinates.”

However distasteful US actions are, the Russian leadership cannot risk closing the door completely on US efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, considering it was on the losing end against the Afghan resistance 20 years ago and is less than enamoured by an avowedly Islamic state there. But it is unlikely that China will join India and Pakistan as a US client state, and if India buries the hatchet with China and reconsiders its position on the Taliban, the situation for the US – and Afghanistan – could yet change dramatically. There is small reason for any of the RICs to be haunted by Bush’s curse – the US-inspired wars and subversion in their backyard.