“’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.

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.

What is the one thing most needed right now if we are to win this race? October 24th showed us: a visible, growing, mass movement in the streets.

There are some who believed, and still do, that the key to the needed clean energy revolution was the election of Barack Obama. Although it is important to have a President who understands that climate change is happening and that action is needed to address it, it has become very clear over the last nine months of his time in office that this is not enough.

We can see that when we look at what has been happening in Congress and in the international negotiations leading up to the December 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. In both cases, the results so far have been very problematic.

In Congress, despite Democratic Party control of the White House and the House and Senate, a very weak piece of climate legislation was passed by the House in late June that doesn’t come close to being what is needed, and it is very possible, if not likely, that when a bill eventually reaches the floor of the U.S. Senate it will be even worse. The target for greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions reductions over the next 10 years, an absolutely critical period of time if we are to have any hope of avoiding world-wide catastrophe, is way too weak, and it is questionable if even this weak target would be met. It contains a huge percentage of problematic “offsets” that will likely allow U.S. corporate polluters to avoid or minimize actual reductions of emissions from their dirty coal plants or oil refineries for 15-20 years or more. Only 15% of the permits to emit ghg’s are auctioned, half of them being given directly to the fossil fuel industry, despite Obama’s call for a 100% auction of permits while campaigning for President. It strips the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate coal plants and other stationary sources of ghg’s. Its cap-and-trade framework allows Wall Street speculators to get into the huge new “carbon market” being created. It is nuclear power-friendly, and it projects giving the U.S. coal industry tens of billions of dollars for carbon capture and sequestration, an unsafe boondoggle that only dangerously postpones the critically-needed, dramatic shift to renewables, conservation and energy efficiency.

As far as the international negotiations, this is what Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, had to say about the most recent meetings in Bangkok, Thailand in early October: “Just two months before Copenhagen, the Bangkok climate negotiations did little to move the ball forward. Bold steps are clearly needed from the world’s leaders to break the deadlock in the negotiations, and time is running short. One key to a meaningful deal in Copenhagen is science-based emissions reduction commitments by industrialized countries… but the slow pace of climate and energy legislation in the Senate has left the United States unwilling to even get on the playing field. And the U.S. reluctance to accept legally binding emissions reduction commitments, together with a meaningful compliance regime, is threatening the entire negotiating process… The other key issue in these negotiations is greatly increasing funding for developing countries to deploy clean technologies, reduce deforestation, and adapt to the impacts of global warming. Here in Bangkok, the United States, European Union, Japan, and other industrialized countries once again failed to put forward a credible finance package. Most of the key developing countries have expressed willingness to take significant action to limit their emissions if such assistance is forthcoming, but they are not getting a serious response from the other side. If industrialized countries don’t start putting their climate finance cards on the table soon, there’s not going to be a card game in Copenhagen.”

Since 2002 I’ve been speaking, taking action and organizing in support of a clean energy revolution. During those seven years I’ve also been active with the peace movement in opposition to the Iraq war. I’ve been struck during that time by one major difference between these two movements when it comes to tactics.

The peace movement, up until the election of Obama, was repeatedly organizing mass demonstrations of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, in Washington, D.C. and many other places. In 2008, for example, 30,000 or so people demonstrated against the war in St. Paul, Minnesota on the day before the opening of the Republican Convention.

The vast majority of climate and environmental groups, on the other hand, have little experience with mass actions in the streets. This is especially true for the groups based in Washington, D.C. Instead, their work is all about lobbying members of Congress, trying to convince them of the correctness of their positions, developing position papers, getting their members around the country to send emails and make calls to Congressional offices, etc.

I do some of this myself. It’s not that these are bad things, when done in combination with a range of other tactics and activities. But when done in a way which deemphasizes grassroots organizing and “street heat,” it’s of very limited value. Indeed, it’s a waste of resources, because it’s just not going to get the job done.

Fortunately, there’s a new climate movement emerging that gets it when it comes to this issue of tactics. The 350.org network is a major component of it, as is the mushrooming anti-coal movement. In 2007 there were only eight anti-coal demonstrations and 33 people arrested in acts of civil disobedience, according to Source Watch, compared to 49 actions and 266 people arrested so far in 2009. There are the continuing, dramatic actions of Greenpeace and the actions organized by groups like Mountain Justice, Rising Tide, the Rainforest Action Network and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. There are the plans for another big international day of action on December 12th right in the middle of the Copenhagen conference, and some of the groups which mainly do lobbying are part of the coalitions calling for those actions.

Last Saturday, as I marched in the pouring rain with many hundreds of others down 16th St. to the White House, young people leading the march at one point began a chant I’ve heard at many other actions on other issues; “Ain’t no power like the power of the people, and the power of the people don’t stop!” Yes, and we can’t stop until we’ve forced, or changed, the governments of the world so that they act as is necessary if we’re to have a fighting chance for a future we can look forward to.

Headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the U.N. report found that evidence indicates both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip, dubbed “Operation Cast Lead”, which began on December 27, 2008.

The report recommended that allegations of war crimes by both parties be investigated.

The current text of the proposed Congressional resolution, H. Res. 867, contains numerous factual inaccuracies, beginning with the assertion that the U.N. inquiry had “pre-judged” its findings and was “one-sidedly” mandated to “investigate all violations of international human rights law and International Humanitarian Law by … Israel, against the Palestinian people … particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression”.

The actual mandate adopted on April 3 was “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

The quoted text is not from the April 3 mandate, but from U.N. General Assembly resolution S-9/1 on January 12, 2009, which resulted in the later appointment of the mission by the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Also, omitted in the draft resolution’s reproduction of the text are the words “occupying Power” before “Israel”. Under international law, the occupying power is in fact obligated to investigate allegations of war crimes and violations of human rights.

The draft U.S. resolution states that the Goldstone report “makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks, which numbered in the thousands and spanned a period of eight years, by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in Israel, that necessitated Israel’s defensive measures”.

But this criticism itself ignores the fact that even if Israel’s military operations were justifiable as “defensive measures”, Israel would still be legally obligated to conduct its operations in accordance with international law, and to conduct investigations into alleged war crimes conducted by its own forces.

The draft resolution also makes no mention of the relentless siege of Gaza by Israel, or the fact that Hamas had been strictly observing a cease-fire agreed to in June, only firing rockets after Israel had first violated that truce with repeated attacks against Gazans, a continuation of the crippling siege, and an airstrike and invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces on November 4 that ultimately resulted in the complete breakdown of the truce.

It also makes no mention of the fact that the Goldstone report contains a section dedicated to examining the impact of rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian militants on southern Israel, or that mission’s efforts to do so were impeded by Israel’s refusal to cooperate.

The draft resolution states that the U.N. mission “included a member who, before joining the mission, had already declared Israel guilty of committing atrocities in Operation Cast Lead by signing a public letter on January 11, 2009, published in the Sunday Times, that called Israel’s actions ‘war crimes’”.

That letter to the Sunday Times also stated, “We condemn the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel and suicide bombings which are also contrary to international humanitarian law and are war crimes.”

But criticism of the Goldstone report on the similar basis that one of its members had beforehand declared Hamas guilty of war crimes is lacking in the draft resolution.

It calls the Goldstone report’s findings “that the Israeli military had deliberately attacked civilians during Operation Cast Lead” “unsubstantiated”. In fact, the 575 page report provides extensive documentation for its findings.

The draft resolution states that “the authors of the report, in the body of the report itself, admit that ‘we did not deal with the issues … regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and second-guessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers ‘ in the fog of war.’”

This is an outright fabrication. Those words do not in fact appear in the body of the actual report.

Those words actually come from an alleged e-mail from Richard Goldstone in which he explained why the U.N. report did not rely on a Colonel Kemp for its inquiry. The full text of the statement from that e-mail, replacing the part omitted in the draft resolution, reads “we did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas…” (emphasis added).

The draft resolution states that Richard Goldstone had been quoted in the October 16 edition of the Jewish daily Forward as saying, “If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven”.

But omitted is the further context of that remark in the same article, which added, “He recalled his work as chief prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunal in Yugoslavia in 1994. When he began working, Goldstone was presented with a report commissioned by the U.N. Security Council based on what he said was a fact-finding mission similar to his own in Gaza.

“’We couldn’t use that report as evidence at all,’ Goldstone said. ‘But it was a useful roadmap for our investigators, for me as chief prosecutor, to decide where we should investigate. And that’s the purpose of this sort of report.”

The draft resolution asserts that the Goldstone report “in effect, denied the State of Israel the right to self-defense”, but offers no supporting evidence for this.

The Goldstone report found that “While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self-defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

The draft resolution states that “the report usually considered public statements made by Israeli officials not to be credible, while frequently giving uncritical credence to statements taken from what it called the ‘Gaza authorities’, i.e. the Gaza leadership of Hamas”, but offers no examples from the report.

The report does, in fact, question the credibility of Israeli officials. It notes in one instance that “it considers the credibility of Israel’s position damaged by the series of inconsistencies, contradictions and factual inaccuracies in the statements justifying the attack.”

In another example illustrating Israel’s lack of credibility, it “acknowledges that significant efforts [were] made by Israel to issue warnings”, but that “The credibility of instructions to move to city centres for safety was also diminished by the fact that the city centres themselves had been the subject of intense attacks”.

The Goldstone report also observed, “By refusing to cooperate with the Mission, the Government of Israel prevented it from meeting Israeli Government officials, but also from travelling to Israel to meet Israeli victims and to the West Bank to meet Palestinian Authority representatives and Palestinian victims.”

The U.N. report also noted that “In establishing its findings, the Mission sought to rely primarily and whenever possible on information it gathered first-hand. Information produced by others, including reports, affidavits and media reports, was used primarily as corroboration.”

The draft resolution asserts that “notwithstanding a great body of evidence that Hamas and other violent Islamist groups committed war crimes by using civilians and civilian institutions, such as mosques, schools, and hospitals, as shields, the report repeatedly downplayed or cast doubt upon that claim”.

The “great body of evidence” is an apparent reference to remarks from Israeli officials found to be demonstrably lacking in credibility, which were commonly simply repeated by U.S. officials and the mainstream media.

The U.N. mission did examine “whether and to what extent the Palestinian armed groups violated their obligation to exercise care and take all feasible precaution to protect the civilian population in Gaza” and found that “Palestinian armed groups were present in urban areas during the military operations and launched rockets from urban areas”.

But it “found no evidence, however, to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or that they forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.”

While there is no evidence that Hamas deliberately used civilians as human shields, the Goldstone report “investigated four incidents in which the Israeli armed forces coerced Palestinian civilian men at gunpoint to take part in house searches during the military operations” and concluded “that this practice amounts to the Use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and is therefore prohibited by international humanitarian law.”

The draft resolution, besides calling upon the White House and State Department to reject the Goldstone report and its recommendations, also “reaffirms its support for the democratic, Jewish State of Israel, for Israel’s security and right to self-defense, and, specifically for Israel’s right to defend its citizens from violent militant groups and their state sponsors.”

It makes no similar mention of the right of Palestinians to security and self-defense from Israel and its U.S. sponsor.

Human rights groups, including the Israeli organization B’Tselem, have called upon the international community to implement its recommendation that suspected violations of international law be investigated.

To do this, it expanded rapidly in the past decade, and now has a Partnership for Peace with ex-Soviet hopefuls. It also has a Mediterranean Dialogue with Western-oriented Muslim states and Israel (of them, Morocco and Israel are further blessed as “major non-NATO allies”) and the GCC+2 — the Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt and Jordan. GCC+2 has been optimistically dubbed the “NATO of the Middle East” in Western media, but then once-upon-a-time so was the ill-fated Baghdad Pact, originally called the Middle East Treaty Organisation (METO). The real “NATO of the Middle East” is of course US+1.

Whatever the US/NATO schemes and their pretexts, the results in recent years have been less than impressive. The communist hordes were soon replaced by the Russian and/or Muslim ones, and, despite the Mediterranean Dialogue and the GCC+2, the Muslim ones are multiplying daily. Even NATOphiles realise something is amiss. The newly appointed secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was so eager to transform the organisation he gave up his job as prime minister of Denmark, making him the highest ranking politician to take over NATO. “I want to modernise, transform and reform so that NATO adapts to the security environment of the 21st century.”

Rasmussen points to the bloated bureaucracy, with its more than 300 committees — all requiring decisions by consensus, and 13,000 personnel scattered across Western Europe at NATO’s many military bases. With France rejoining the integrated military structure in April, it had to send 900 military staff to the various NATO commands. “In a rapidly changing security environment, we have to make sure that NATO is able to make rapid moves,” asserts Fogh Rasmussen wistfully.

But his biggest move so far to reform the dinosaur was to appoint an “outsider”, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, to lead a group of 12 experts to work out a new strategic concept. Albright is hardly an outsider, being a key actor in the NATO bombing of Serbia which led to the creation of the first NATO satellite — Kosovo, touted as a great success by NATOphiles, but as a violation of international law and relations by just about everyone else. It remains a basket-case, shunned by the likes of China, India and Russia. So don’t hold your breath that Albright will spearhead a radical reinvention of NATO.

NATOphiles ignore the obvious question about the organisation: why didn’t it just disband when its mission to crush Communism was successful and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved? They also don’t seem to feel it necessary to explain why a northern Atlantic organisation should expand into Eurasia and fight wars in Central Asia; why the UN is not the more appropriate forum for world security issues. The UN, famous for its own bureaucracy, has undergone considerable reform in the last decade and is certainly no more dysfunctional than NATO. It also has the advantage of bringing North, South, East and West together, guaranteeing a modicum of world consensus for any military action.

There is no hint within the NATO fortress that such questions will worry Albright’s experts, or that they will reach consensus towards anything other than making NATO an even greater threat to the diplomatic resolution of world problems.

Others are not twiddling their thumbs, however. The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on. Russia has been picking up the pieces in its foreign affairs since the regional alliance of Soviet days broke up and its place in the world as a counterweight to American diktat was lost. The Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) was formed in 2002, bringing together Russia, Central Asian states Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, as well as Armenia and Belarus, and has been picking up steam in the past year, despite the difficulty of dealing with unpredictable member-dictators.

It is truly a regional pact with a legitimate reason for existing, unlike NATO. It was recognised by both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the UN as such in 2007, and there has been talk of it becoming the genesis of a defence arm for the SCO. NATO’s battering in Afghanistan has reduced it to asking for Russia’s — really the CSTO’s — participation in the Afghanistan operation, most obviously as the “northern corridor” transport route from Europe to Northern Afghanistan via CSTO member-states.

The CSTO is now working openly on a UN cooperation declaration similar to the one passed in September 2008 with NATO — behind UN members’ backs — to work together against terrorism, drug and arms trafficking, and as part of peacekeeping missions under UN command. In addition to the UN, the CSTO has relations with the EU and the OSCE.

There is even talk of squaring the circle between the CSTO and NATO. Says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, “Compared to the previous situation, when NATO did not want even to hear about the OSCE, now many officials and experts say that the CSTO can be a very useful partner.” CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordiuzha is less naive: “We proposed to NATO to cooperate in several spheres, including those regarding fighting illegal drug trafficking, but NATO has its own position.” Ironically, NATO’s Partnership for Peace includes all CSTO countries, so NATO has been cooperating with the CSTO by default all along, whether it likes it or not.

In addition to this startling outcome of NATO’s failure in Afghanistan, there are several interesting developments percolating that will soon provide a window into just which direction NATO will go in its latest mutation. Ukraine and Georgia are committed to join NATO, both with leaders swept into power by carefully orchestrated Western-backed campaigns but who are now widely reviled. Does NATO still have the will and the way to snatch them up?

Another development is the recent mutual recognition of Turkey and Armenia, long-time foes. This reconciliation finessed their outstanding differences — Armenia’s occupation of almost 20 per cent of Turkey’s natural ally Azerbaijan, and Turkey’s refusal to accept greater responsibility for the tragedy of ethnic Armenians who died fleeing civil war in 1915-17.

The EU took the credit for bringing the two sides together and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to the signing ceremony, but it is far from clear which “side” will benefit most. Will NATO-member Turkey help usher CSTO-member Armenia into the Western fold? Or will Russia-friendly Armenia draw Turkey the other way? Will the EU’s spurning of Muslim Turkey and its desire to snag tiny Christian Armenia widen the growing rift between an increasingly independent and pro-Muslim Turkey and the West? Will Azerbaijan join NATO in a huff? Will Turkey dust off its Ottoman past and reinvent itself as a major regional power? The situation is far too complex to make any firm predictions.

Russia’s staunch defence of Iran in the face of Western threats and its increasing assertiveness in the face of NATO expansion are widely admired in the Muslim world, Turkey being no exception. Last year Moscow embraced Ankara ’s proposal for a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform as a mechanism for political dialogue, stability and crisis management in a region covering Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. Russia noted Turkey’s refusal to assist the US in invading Iraq or to allow a US warship into the Black Sea following Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia last year. Early this year, a Turkish mission visited Abkhazia.

During a state visit to Moscow by Turkish President Abdullah Gul in February, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev made a straightforward proposal to set up a Russian-Turkish axis. “The August crisis showed that we can deal with problems in the region by ourselves, without the involvement of outside powers,” Medvedev told a joint press conference. The Turkish leader effectively agreed, pointing to “substantially close or identical positions” the two countries took on “an absolute majority” of international issues.

But world politics is not all win-lose. Both Russia and the US, as members of the Minsk Group founded by the OECD to resolve the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, want to see that stand-off resolved peacefully. Making it happen would be a feather in US President and Nobel laureate Barack Obama’s cap and a concrete step in improving relations with Russia. A truly win-win situation.

As NATO continues to flounder and power continues to shift away from the US towards BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the SCO, issues like the above will be shaped by a complex of forces, and their outcomes will not be enforced by any one diktat. Just as NATO’s Cold War nemesis unravelled with unpredicted speed, the seemingly immutable Western military alliance could find itself paralysed not only by its infamous bureaucracy, but by countervailing forces on the ascendant outside of its orbit.

All the Kosovos, Georgias and Azerbaijans, all the GCC+2s, Dialogues and Partnerships in the world won’t be able to stave off the inevitable. Indeed, they can only act as a millstone, pulling NATO deeper into the quagmire it itself created during its short post-Cold War life as world policeman.

Our political and military leadership has already encountered the third, fourth and fifth person. All of them say that they must investigate what happened in the “Molten Lead” operation.

They have three options:

- to conduct a real investigation.
- to ignore the demand and proceed as if nothing has happened.
- to conduct a sham inquiry.

It is easy to dismiss the first option: it has not the slightest chance of being adopted. Except for the usual suspects (including myself) who demanded an investigation long before anyone in Israel had heard of a judge called Goldstone, nobody supports it.

Among all the members of our political, military and media establishments who are now suggesting an “inquiry”, there is no one – literally not one – who means by that a real investigation. The aim is to deceive the Goyim and get them to shut up.

Actually, Israeli law lays down clear guidelines for such investigations. The government decides to set up a commission of investigation. The president of the Supreme Court then appoints the members of the commission. The commission can compel witnesses to testify. Anybody who may be damaged by its conclusions must be warned and given the opportunity to defend himself. Its conclusions are binding.

This law has an interesting history. Sometime in the 50s, David Ben-Gurion demanded the appointment of a “judicial committee of inquiry” to decide who gave the orders for the 1954 “security mishap”, also known as the Lavon Affair. (A false flag operation where an espionage network composed of local Jews was activated to bomb American and British offices in Egypt, in order to cause friction between Egypt and the Western powers. The perpetrators were caught.)

Ben-Gurion’s request was denied, under the pretext that there was no law for such a procedure. Furious, Ben-Gurion resigned from the government and left his party. In one of the stormy party sessions, the Minister of Justice, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, called Ben-Gurion a “fascist”. But Shapira, an old Russian Jew, regretted his outburst later. He drafted a special law for the appointment of Commissions of Investigation in the future. After lengthy deliberations in the Knesset (in which I took an active part) the law was adopted and has since been applied, notably in the case of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Now I wholeheartedly support the setting up of a Commission of Investigation according to this law.

The second option is the one proposed by the army Chief of Staff and the Minister of Defense. In America it is called “stonewalling”. Meaning: To hell with it.

The army commanders object to any investigation and any inquiry whatsoever. They probably know why. After all, they know the facts. They know that a dark shadow lies over the very decision to go to war, over the planning of the operation, over the instructions given to the troops, and over many dozens of large and small acts committed during the operation.

In their opinion, even if their refusal has severe international repercussions, the consequences of any investigation, even a phony one, would be far worse.

As long as the Chief of Staff sticks to this position, there will be no investigation outside the army, whatever the attitude of the ministers. The army chief, who attends every cabinet meeting, is the largest figure in the room. When he announces that such and such is the “position of the army”, no mere politician present would dare to object.

In the “Only Democracy in the Middle East”, the law (proposed at the time by Menachem Begin) stipulates that the Government as such is the Commander in Chief of the Israel Defense Forces. That is the theory. In practice, no decision at variance with the “position of the army” has ever been or will ever be adopted.

The army claims to be investigating itself. Ehud Barak represents – willingly or unwillingly – this position. The cabinet has postponed dealing with the matter, and that’s where things stand today.

On this occasion, the spotlight should be turned on the least visible person in Israel: the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, the ultimate Teflon-man. Nothing sticks to him. In this debate, as in all others, he just is not there.

Everybody knows that Ashkenazi is a shy and modest man. He hardly ever speaks, writes or speechifies. On television, he merges into the background.

This is how he looks to the public: an honest soldier, without tricks or ploys, who does his duty quietly, receives his orders from the government and fulfills them loyally. In this he differs from almost all his predecessors, who were boastful, publicity-crazy and loquacious. While most them came from famous elite units or the arrogant Air Force, he is a grey infantry man. The Duke of Wellington, seeing the huge amount of paperwork in his army, once exclaimed: “Soldiers should fight, not write!” He would have liked Ashkenazi.

But reality is not always what it seems. Ashkenazi plays a central role in the decision-making process. He was appointed after his predecessor, Dan Halutz, resigned after the failures of Lebanon War II. Under Ashkenazi’s leadership, new doctrines were formulated and put into action in the “Molten Lead” operation. I defined them (on my own responsibility) as “Zero Losses” and “Better to kill a hundred enemy civilians than to lose one of our own soldiers”. Since the Gaza war did not lead to a single soldier being put on trial, Ashkenazi must bear the responsibility for everything that happened there.

If an indictment were issued by the International Court in The Hague, Ashkenazi would probably be accorded the place of honor as “Defendant No. 1”. No wonder that he objects to any outside investigation, as does Ehud Barak, who would probably occupy the No. 2 place.

The politicians who oppose (ever so quietly) the Chief of Staff’s position believe that it is impossible to withstand international pressure completely, and that some kind of an inquiry will have to be conducted. Since not one of them intends to hold a real investigation, they propose to follow a tried and trusted Israeli method, which has worked wonderfully hundreds of times in the past: the method of sham.

A sham inquiry. Sham conclusions. Sham adherence to international law. Sham civilian control over the military.

Nothing simpler than that. An “inquiry committee” (but not a Commission of Investigation according to the law) will be set up, chaired by a suitably patriotic judge and composed of carefully chosen honorable citizens who are all “one of us”. Testimonies will be heard behind closed doors (for considerations of security, of course). Army lawyers will prove that everything was perfectly legal, the National Whitewasher, Professor Asa Kasher, will laud the ethics of the Most Moral Army in the World. Generals will speak about our inalienable right to self-defense. In the end, two or three junior officers or privates may be found guilty of “irregularities”.

Israel’s friends all over the world will break into an ecstatic chorus: What a lawful state! What a democracy! What morality! Western governments will declare that justice has been done and the case closed. The US veto will see to the rest.

So why don’t the army chiefs accept this proposal? Because they are afraid things might not proceed quite so smoothly. The international community will demand that at least part of the hearings be conducted in open court. There will be a demand for the presence of international observers. And, most importantly: there will be no justifiable way to exclude the testimonies of the Gazans themselves. Things will get complicated. The world will not accept fabricated conclusions. In the end we will be in exactly the same situation. Better to stay put and brave it out, whatever the price.

In the meantime, international pressure on Israel is increasing. Even now it has reached unprecedented proportions.

Russia and China have voted in favor of the endorsement of the Goldstone report by the UN. The UK and France “did not take part in the vote”, but demanded that Israel conduct a real investigation. We have quarreled with Turkey, until now an important military ally. We have altercations with Sweden, Norway and a number of other friendly countries. The French Foreign Minister has been prevented from crossing into the Gaza Strip and is furious. The already cold peace with Egypt and Jordan has become several degrees colder. Israel is boycotted in many forums. Senior army officers are afraid to travel abroad for fear of arrest.

This raises the question once more: can outside pressure have an impact on Israel?

Certainly it can. The question is: what kind of pressure, what kind of impact?

The pressure has indeed convinced several ministers that an inquiry committee for the Goldstone report has to be set up. But no one in the Israeli establishment – no one at all! – has raised the real question: Perhaps Goldstone is right? Except for the usual suspects, no one in the media, the Knesset or the government has asked: Perhaps war crimes have indeed been committed? The outside pressure has not forced such questions to be raised. They must come from the inside, from the public itself.

The kind of pressure must also be considered. The Goldstone report has an impact on the world because it is precise and targeted: a specific operation, for which specific persons are responsible. It raises a specific demand: an investigation. It attacks a clear and well-defined target: war crimes.

If we apply this to the debate about boycotting Israel: the Goldstone report may be compared to a targeted boycott on the settlements and their helpers, not an unlimited boycott of the State of Israel. A targeted boycott can have a positive impact. A comprehensive, unlimited boycott would – in my opinion – achieve the opposite. It would push the Israeli public further into the arms of the extreme Right.

The struggle over the Goldstone report is now at its height. In Jerusalem, the rising energy of the waves can be clearly felt. Does this portend a tsunami?

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Powless, a Power Shift organizer and member of such groups as the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition and the Indigenous Environmental Network. He had just returned from the Green For All Academy in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, where 50 attendees, 49 from the United States and one—Powless himself—from Canada, were coming up with ways to bring green jobs to the forefront of both the environmental and social/economic justice movements.

“We [the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition] started setting up our own working groups [on green jobs], and really not seeing a lot of movement on the ground around green jobs: I mean you can find a few policy documents by some environmental groups, you can find some stuff on their website, but nobody’s out there in the streets talking about it.

“The focus around green jobs is to try and imagine a society and an economy—a way of life—that is environmentally sustainable: to try and imagine the actual jobs and the transition that we would have to go through,” said Powless.

“[Green jobs] are positions from all aspects of the economy, from typically what’s called ‘blue collar’ work right up to ‘white collar’ work, from research to actual design, to manufacturing,” said Powless. “As well as things like simply going into houses and fixing them up: construction, manufacturing. So it really focuses on…fundamental aspects of our society, from our energy sources, our food sources, to the way we build things and the way we consume things, and eventually [the way we] have to recycle [those things].”
A march in support of green jobs legislation in New Mexico. Photo: Navajo Green Jobs

A march in support of green jobs legislation in New Mexico. Photo: Navajo Green Jobs

Granted, the effort is more than understanding what “green work” entails. It is also about coordinating a just transition in implementing these programs, to ensure that we are working toward social, economic, and environmental justice together.

“[The concept of green jobs] tries to address at the same time the fundamental social inequalities in our societies, especially tackling issues of poverty…[and] marginalized communities frequently not having access to most aspects of the environmental movement and not having access to a clean, healthy, safe environment.”

Green jobs are not just about making the world a cleaner place. According to Powless, there is “a human rights basis to it: that people of colour, people from poor communities, have just as much a right—in many cases even more of a right where their communities have been marginalized in the past—to participate in this new economy.

“If we don’t actually make sure that it’s led by communities, it’s not going to be the poorer communities who get access to their own sources of energy, who get access to energy audits.

“And it’s going to be especially immigrant and poorer communities who don’t have access to education and training [and] who are not going to be able to get those jobs, and are not going to be able to be involved in setting up any of those programs.”

To break the cycle of marginalization of poor and immigrant communities as the green jobs movement expands, Powless says it’s crucial for the green jobs movement “to make sure that…these communities are able to be there at the table as some of the main initiators of this discussion. And I think that’s why…we have to really start getting these people involved now.”

Another key aspect of the transition is keeping a local focus. “Remodelling a house, doing energy audits, installing renewable energy systems…local community agriculture, community gardens—these are all fundamentally local processes, and it can be replicated on a wide scale in most urban and even semi-urban centres across North America, and in a lot of other places.

“And these are the kind of things that can’t be outsourced, and [they] provide secure employment for people.”

Netanyahu again called on this leadership to agree to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, saying this was, and remains, the key to peace. And he went on and on and on about it.

“For 62 years the Palestinians have been saying ‘No’ to the Jewish state. I am once again calling upon our Palestinian neighbours – say ‘Yes’ to the Jewish state. Without recognition of the Israel as the state of the Jews we shall not be able to attain peace… Such recognition is a step which requires courage and the Palestinian leadership should tell its people the truth – that without this recognition there can be no peace… There is no alternative to Palestinian leaders showing courage by recognising the Jewish state. This has been and remains the true key to peace.”

As Ha’aretz noted in its report, Netanyahu’s demand for Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state is for him “a way on ensuring recognition of Israel’s right to exist as opposed to merely recognising Israel” (my emphasis). This, as Ha’aretz added, is the recognition which Netanyahu and many other Israelis see as the real core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the name of pragmatism, willingness to “merely to recognise” Israel – meaning to accept and live in peace with an Israel inside its pre-June ‘67 borders – has long been the formal Palestinian and all-Arab position. Why does it stop short of recognising Israel’s “right to exist”, and why, really, does it matter so much to Zionism that Palestinians recognise this right?

The answer is in the following.

According to history as written by the winner, Zionism, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is propaganda nonsense.

• In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
• Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
• The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
• So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state, which came into being mainly as a consequence of pre-planned ethnic cleansing, had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist UNLESS … Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved.

And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not and cannot take from the Palestinians by force.

No wonder Prime Minister Netanyahu is more than a little concerned on this account.

Israel’s leaders have always known the truth summarised above. It’s time for the rest of the world to know it.

Hart has the credentials to tackle the subject of Zionism (specifically, political Zionism: that a certain collection of non-native people has a, purportedly, God-given right to a particular piece of real estate that overrides the rights of Indigenous Palestinians) having worked for over three decades covering history unfolding in the Middle East. Much of his experience is first hand. The False Messiah is volume one of, what is planned to be, a three or four volume series Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
Volume One: The False Messiah
By Alan Hart
Paperback: 337 pages
Publisher: Clarity Press (2009)
ISBN-10: 0932863647
ISBN-13: 9780932863645

Disseminating information that challenges the immensely influential Zionist bloc is difficult. Hart wrote, “… all in the UK were too frightened to publish this book out of fear of offending Zionism too much and being falsely accused of promoting anti-Semitism.” Here Hart exposes the absurd inversion of morality: Zionists accuse defenders of Palestinian human rights as being racist against the abuser of Palestinian human rights!

Hart identifies it as a smear tactic and a phony one since Arabs are Semites.

That the morality of Zionism is challengeable was keenly illustrated by an exchange between Hart and erstwhile Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Hart queried Meir on-air: “You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?”

Meir’s prompt response: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

How do Zionists get away with crimes against humanity? Hart points to the suffering Zionists experienced in the WWII Holocaust. To this an obvious question arises: does victimization give the victims the right to victimize another people?

Paulo Freire in his opus Pedagogy of the Oppressed warned that oppression creates a recycling dynamic that dehumanizes not only the oppressed people but also the oppressor. Hart touches on this dynamic.

Zionism and Judaism

Hart has to cover a lot of ground.

He points out that Zionism is not Judaism. Hart describes Zionism as “brutal and cruel [behaviors], driven by self-righteousness of an extraordinary kind, without regard for international law and human rights conventions” which “makes a mockery of the moral values and ethical values of Judaism.”

Hart does not delve deeply into these moral and ethical values of Judaism, but he leaves this reader with the impression that Judaism is an principled faith. However, the laws and morality underlying many religions are often interpreted variously. The late Israel Shahak, a chemistry professor and social justice activist, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years rued that classical Judaism had been subverted toward profit and Jewish supremacism. I submit that much as no people should be seen as a monolith neither should a religion be regarded as a monolith.

The Legitimacy of a Jewish Claim to the Holy Land

Hart reasons that there is no legitimacy to Israel’s claim to a “right to exist.” Moreover, the Jewish claim to the Holy Land does not hold up under scrutiny.

The bloodlines of the majority of Israeli Jews do not tie them with the Holy Land. Ashkenazim stem from eastern and central Europe and are converts to Judaism. Hart cites the work of Joseph Reinach, Alfred Lilienthal, Arthur Koestler, and Shlomo Sand in outlining this case. The refutation of Jewishness as an ethnicity is important because, quoting Sand, “…it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews” that allows Zionists to claim Israel as a Jewish state.

Furthermore, writes Hart, the Mizrahim (Semitic Jews indigenous to the Middle East) were strongly opposed to Zionism.

Hart focuses on two different sets of Jews: Haskala Jews who sought to make the place they lived their home and Zionist Jews who strive to separate Jews and Gentiles. Haskala Jews see themselves threatened by a backlash to crimes committed by Zionist Jews.

Early Zionism

Hart paints a picture of early Zionist history and the roles of early Zionist figures such as Zionism’s “founding father,” Theodr Herzl, key lobbyist, Chaim Weizmann, and the financier of Zionism, Lionel de Rothschild.

Hart details the collaboration of Britain with the Zionists from Arthur Balfour whose letter provided a pretext to dispossess Arabs. The chicanery was such that Britain reneged on its promise to recognize the sovereignty of its WWI Arab allies. Britain, writes Hart, laid the foundations for a Zionist takeover: “Without the British presence Zionism could not have entrenched itself in Palestine. On their own the Palestinians could have pushed the Zionists out.”

Britain went so far as to declare war on the Palestinians and assassinate Palestinian leaders.

All along the way, Zionist Jews were opposed by Haskala Jews who, as history shows, always lost out. After WWII, the Holocaust card was effective at backing down Haskala Jews.

Yet, Zionism has also flourished among Jews living abroad. Citing humanist Lilienthal: the migrating Jews carried a “nation complex” within them. According to Hart, this “made many of them susceptible to Zionism’s nationalist propaganda.”

Later, Zionists such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Vladimir Jabotinsky would terrorize the British out of Mandate Palestine. Hart sources Ralph Schoenman on the Koening Memorandum that made transparent the Zionists’s plans for terrorism against Palestinians: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

Israel today, Hart notes, defines legitimate Palestinian resistance as terrorism. The author holds, “… all peoples have the right to use all means including violence to resist occupation.”

The US and Zionism

As Imperial Britain headed into decline, Imperial USA was ascending. The US would have a greater role in the Middle East.

Hart lauds US president Woodrow Wilson, “a real, towering statesman, a true giant among men.” Woodrow was apparently hamstrung on Palestine by his lobbying for the League of Nations. Hart blames “Imperial Britain-and-Zionism and their allies in [the US] Congress and the media; with … France” for screwing Wilson on Palestine.

Hart presents many “what if” scenarios. For example, he quotes British official John Hope Simpson: “Had the Jewish authorities been content with the original object of settlement in Palestine – a Jewish life without oppression and persecution in accordance with Jewish customs – the national home would have presented no difficulty.”

Or what if president Franklin Roosevelt had not died when he did? Hart speculates that Roosevelt would have rejected a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hart identifies influential Zionist agents in the White House, among others, David K. Niles. Although Truman is depicted as a president who grappled with the Zionist lobby, he had a vulnerability exploitable by Zionists.

Biting the Hand that Feeds

Ends would justify the means for Zionists. Even though Britain had set the stage for Jewish immigration to Palestine, even though Britain was at war with Nazi Germany — Zionists sought out a possible collaboration with Britain’s wartime enemy and an enemy to Jews. Hart sources Marxist writer Lenni Brenner who disclosed the Zionist negotiations with Nazi Germany. Zionists were dedicated to thwarting Jewish immigration to elsewhere than Palestine and were even willing to sacrifice Jewish lives to realize the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine.

And it was Jewish terrorism that forced Britain out of Palestine.

Zionism and Terrorism

The Zionist plan was to drive the British out, then drive the Palestinians out. Hart relates the strategy of the man who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, for keeping all the land: creating facts-on-the-ground. The problem with this strategy is that if old facts-on-the-ground can be erased to establish new ones, what is to stop new facts-on-the-ground from being created again?

The methods for creating these facts-on-the-ground were incredibly gruesome. The massacre at Deir Yassin is a historical testament to Zionist war crimes – “in its own tiny way it was another holocaust.” The village was a “soft and easy target”; “the butchers of Deir Yassin” killed 254 victims, mainly the elderly, women, and children. One-hundred-and-forty-five women were killed, 35 of them pregnant. Many were raped before being killed.

Hart quotes Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.” [emphasis added by Hart]

Abdul Khader, portrayed as a respected Palestinian resistance leader, died the day after the Deir Yassin Massacre. Gloom set in on the Palestinian side. Deir Yassin had its intended effect, sowing fear in the hearts of Palestinians, and the expulsion was underway.

Arab and International Complicity with Zionism

The Palestinians did not just have to deal with British treachery, they “were at the mercy of the Arab League” who at British insistence kept the Palestinians unarmed, much as the illegal sealing of Gaza’s borders today and control of the West Bank borders keeps Palestinians unarmed under brutal occupation and creeping dispossession.

Hart wonders: what if the Arab regimes of the time had sought an alliance with Stalin to defeat Zionism? He speculates that Truman might have had to stand up to Zionism.

Hart points out that the United Nations General Assembly, in defiance of its own charter which calls for respect for the principle of self-determination, would, aided by Zionist manipulation (disinformation, bribery, threats), decree an illegal partition of Mandate Palestine. Not only was the partition illegal, he argues, it was also unfair. Jews would receive 56.4 percent of the land while being 33 percent of the population and owning only 5.67 percent of the land. The valuable coastal and fertile areas were in Jewish hands while mountainous, infertile areas were left to the Palestinians. Hart calls it “a proposal for injustice on a massive scale.”

In the end, Truman capitulated to Zionism and recognized the partition. Truman had been subjected to “a political hit-squad of 26 pro-Zionist U.S. Senators” beholden to Jewish votes and money.

Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall resisted Zionism, putting “America’s national interests first and, to the limit of the possible within that context, doing what was legally and morally right.” Joining Marshall in opposition was US secretary of defense James Vincent Forrestal who might have been the most steadfast opponent of the corrupting influence of Jewish money on the Democratic Party had he not, according to Hart, died under suspicious circumstances. Nonetheless, the Zionists had access to a more influential actor on Truman.

Hart takes a sympathetic slant toward Truman, noting he had kept the Zionist lobby at bay until it discovered his Achilles heel: his good friend Eddie Jacobson, a non-Zionist Jew. Through Jacobson, Zionists could reach Truman.

It appears that Truman, although much irked by the selfishness of the Zionist lobby, bore much of the responsibility for opening the door to the influence of money from lobbyists. Grant F. Smith in his book America’s Defense Line supports this view: “The historical record reveals how Truman’s policy on the Palestine question became heavily influenced by his need for campaign contributions…” Smith credits Truman with starting a “competition to see who was more ‘pro-Israel’” among US presidential candidates. Smith presents evidence that Truman was swayed by “massive funds” for his 1948 presidential campaign raised with the help of arch-Zionist Abraham J. Feinberg.

The Brazilian pedagogue Freire theoretically described — without referring to it –what underlies the Zionist-Palestinian dynamic: that of the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire argued that oppression and the struggle of liberation from oppression are both oppressing. Oppression, he contends, is necrophilic. “Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation that oppresses them.’”

To overcome the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, the oppressed must see themselves as agents of change. Revolution requires solidarity, and this, said Freire, is achieved through love — affirmation of one’s humanity. The act of rebellion by the oppressed is a gesture of love. The desire to be human saves oppressors from their own dehumanization caused by oppressing other humans.

“It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors,” wrote Freire.

Many Haskala Jews believe that liberation for all Jews will come from Palestinians achieving their liberation.

This looks like the direction Hart is heading with his Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews series. Volume One: The False Messiah is an important reference on what has transpired in the lead up to and formation of the Jewish State by Zionists. He brings valuable first-hand perspective, such as what lay behind Meir’s statement that there were no Palestinian people.

Hart gives a human face to some of the historical protagonists, portraying them not merely as actors but delving into the character of the persons. It is as if Hart seeks to humanize some of the persons who capitulated to Zionism.

However, there is no reason that evil should always appear in the guise of a demon. Humans come in all shades. Evil acts are evil despite the appearance of the evil-doer. Yes, it is probably much easier to perpetrate evil acts in cherubic rather that demonic guise, but why play to such stereotypes?

Hart’s book is a good act, a brave act for someone from British state media. He says he has to live with himself, and it is obvious this book comes from a place of integrity. Volume One: The False Messiah augurs well for the rest of the series.

The about-turn, following vigorous lobbying from Israel and the United States, appears to have buried the damning report of Judge Richard Goldstone into the fighting, which killed some 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

Israeli diplomats suggested on Sunday that Washington had promised the Palestinian Authority, in return for delaying an inquiry, that the United States would apply “significant pressure” on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to move ahead on a diplomatic process when the US envoy, George Mitchell, arrives in the region tomorrow.

But, according to Israeli and Palestinian analysts, diplomatic arm-twisting was not the only factor in the PA’s change of heart. Haaretz newspaper reported last week that, behind the scenes, Palestinian officials had faced threats that Israel would retaliate by inflicting enormous damage on the beleaguered Palestinian economy.

In particular, Israel warned it would renege on a commitment to allot radio frequencies to allow Wataniya, a mobile phone provider, to begin operations this month in the West Bank. The telecommunications industry is the bedrock of the Palestinian economy, with the current monopoly company, PalTel, accounting for half the worth of the Palestinian stock exchange.

The collapse of the Wataniya deal would have cost the Palestinian Authority hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, blocked massive investment in the local economy and jeopardised about 2,500 jobs.

Omar Barghouti, a Jerusalem-based founder of a Palestinian movement for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, denounced the Palestinian Authority’s move: “Trading off Palestinian rights and the fundamental duty to protect the Palestinians under occupation for personal gains is the textbook definition of collaboration and betrayal.”

The deal to establish Wataniya as the second Palestinian mobile phone operator has been at the centre of the international community’s plans to revive the West Bank’s economy and show that Palestinians are better off under the rule of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, than Hamas.

Tony Blair, the Middle East envoy representing the so-called Quartet of the United States, Russia, the UN and the EU, brokered the agreement last summer, saying Wataniya’s investment of more than $700 million over the next 10 years would “provide a much-needed boost to the Palestinian economy”.

Wataniya is a joint venture between Palestinian investors, including close allies of Mr Abbas, and Qatari and Kuwaiti businessmen.

But while Mr Netanyahu has welcomed the deal as part of his plans for an “economic peace”, an option he prefers to Palestinian statehood, Israel has been dragging its feet in allocating the necessary frequencies.

Wataniya’s planned launch earlier this year had to be pushed back and the company has threatened to pull out of the deal if the new October 15 deadline is missed. If it does, the Palestinian Authority will have to repay $140m in licensing fees and could be liable for hundreds of millions more that Wataniya has invested in building 350 communication masts across the West Bank.

According to Who Profits?, an Israeli organisation that investigates links between Israel and international companies in exploiting the occupied territories, Israel has a vested interest in limiting the success of the Palestinian mobile phone industry and protecting its control over extensive parts of the West Bank it wants for Jewish settlement.

The only existing Palestinian operator, Jawwal, a subsidiary of PalTel, has been blocked from building communications infrastructure in the so-called Area C of the West Bank, comprising 60 per cent of the territory, which is designated under full Israeli control.

Instead, four Israeli companies – Cellcom, Orange, Pelephone and Mirs – have built an extensive network of antennas and transmission stations for Jewish settlers in Area C. Mirs, a subsidiary of Motorola Israel, also has an exclusive licence to provide cellular services to the Israeli military.

Typically, Palestinians travelling outside the major population areas of the West Bank find a limited or non-existent Jawwal service and therefore have to rely on the Israeli companies.

A World Bank report last year found that as much as 45 per cent of the Palestinian mobile phone market may be in the hands of the Israeli companies. In violation of the Oslo Accords, these firms do not pay taxes to the PA for their commercial activity, losing the Palestinian treasury revenues of up to $60m a year.

Israeli companies also rake off additional surcharges on connections made by Palestinians using Jawwal, including calls between mobile phones and landlines, between the West Bank and Gaza and many within Area C, and international calls.

Dalit Baum, a founder of Who Profits?, said the importance of the telecommunications industry to the Palestinian economy made it a point of leverage over the PA at moments of diplomatic crisis, such as the Goldstone report.

She said: “This case highlights not only how Israel restricts Palestinian economic development through the occupation but also how it uses that control for its own economic and diplomatic advantage.”

Israel’s chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, was reported last week to have conditioned his approval for Wataniya’s launch on the Palestinian leadership withdrawing demands for a referral to the war crimes tribunal.

Defence officials were reported to be angry that the PA had supported the attack on Gaza when it was launched last winter but were now pressing for Israeli soldiers to be put in the dock. One senior figure was quoted by the Haaretz newspaper saying: “The PA has reached the point where it has to decide whether it is working with us or against us.”

Under the Oslo accords, Israel retained ultimate control over the “electro-magnetic spectrum”, including the allocation of radio frequencies, in both Israel and the occupied territories.

Allan Richardson, Wataniya’s chief executive, who has previously launched mobile services in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan, blamed Israel for the company’s problems during an interview in July: “The obstacles we’re suffering from are obstacles you’ll never get anywhere else in the world.”

Last year Israel committed to providing Wataniya with a bandwidth of 4.8MHz, the absolute minimum required to provide coverage over the West Bank, but so far has offered only 3.8MHz.

Jawwal finally received 4.8MHz from Israel in 1999, two years after it launched. Despite the number of its subscribers growing tenfold to 1.1 million today, its bandwidth has remained the same. In comparison, Israel’s Cellcom company, with three times as many subscribers, has 37MHz.

Abdel Malik Jaber, PalTel’s chief executive, complained last year that millions of dollars of imported telecoms equipment was stuck at Israeli customs, some of it since 2004. Wataniya has made similar accusations against Israel.

And at the United Nations we saw the process swing into action as Netanyahu tried to whip up support for another Middle East war for Israel’s benefit.

“Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium… To those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

Who with a speck of decency would have given Netanyahu a hearing after the atrocities of the Gaza blitzkrieg and the Goldstone Report condemning Israel’s war crimes?

“This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism… anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.”

Netanyahu could be describing the Israeli regime.

“…The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

He should know. Israel is bristling with both.

“The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

That would be nice for the warmongers in Tel Aviv, who already have them.

“Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?”

I do hope so. But are we all agreed who they are?

“Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.”

Substitute American for Iranian and it begins to make sense.

“In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza… We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.”

Defenceless Gazans know all about nightmares. Israel, camped on their doorstep and still occupying Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters, lobs high explosives into the tiny enclave’s 1.5 million starving civilians, and there’s no escape.

“There is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.”

The Nazis launched sophisticated rockets with huge destructive power at London and Southern England from territory they had invaded and occupied. They weren’t firing makeshift missiles built in a garden shed to defend their homeland.

“Israel… tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way.”

How considerate. But where were Gaza’s terrified civilians supposed to run to? Into the sea? Bombing their homes was the ultimate terror act. There’s no excuse.

“…If Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.”

What exactly are these “risks for peace” Israel has so bravely taken? In 61 years what peace dividends has Israel’s risk-taking delivered?

The pot calls the kettle black

Netanyahu has a rare genius for irony, except that he himself doesn’t see it. That’s what makes him such a comedian. The irony of what he says is totally lost on him. Nearly every offensive remark he makes about Iran and Palestine can be flung back in his face because Israel is no better and in most respects far worse. Netanyahu’s speech to the UN was the most hilarious example in history of the pot calling the kettle black.

His scriptwriters evidently feed off the Zionists’ propaganda training manual, which teaches the art of lying and distortion and how to sugar-coat it all for easy swallowing by gullible audiences. Notice how everything Israel dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed”… and how everyone else, too, is in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in Israel’s axis of aggression. Also note how situations are defined in language that suit only Israel’s case.

Less amusing is Netanyahu’s arrogant rejection of the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report condemning Israel’s conduct.

By these twisted standards… [they] would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice… Will you accept this farce? If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us — my people, my country — of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

The false choice in that last sentence is a propaganda favourite. Why would anyone with any sense wish to stand alongside either?

And how dare Netanyahu equate Roosevelt and Churchill’s epic struggle against the rampaging Nazis with Israel’s brutal crushing of Palestinian resistance against the illegal occupation of the Holy Land?

What has the UN come to when a regime that is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty can call on the world’s nations to gang up against another country for starting its own nuclear programme? Israel itself refuses to submit to inspection and poses an alarming nuclear threat. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either, nor the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And is it not an insult to everyone’s intelligence to hear the UN being lambasted by the leader of a regime that is in open defiance of international law and countless UN resolutions?

The UN Human Rights Council is due to debate the Goldstone report today, when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted on. There are fears that the British government plans to reject the report’s key recommendations. If that’s the case and others follow suit, Israel will be let off the hook and allowed to continue its crime spree.

It will hand Israel’s comic genius a personal triumph. The Zionist network will no doubt show their gratitude in the usual way.

Don’t You Mess With Our Shoa

Israelis love their Shoa, for the Shoa is no doubt their best selling Hasbara (propaganda) product. It somehow allows them to kill en masse and to do it indistinguishably while insisting that it is they who happen to be the victims.

“I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee.” Said Netanyahu. “There, on January 20,1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people.”

PM Netanyahu, if you are genuinely interested in ‘extermination plans’ you do not have to travel to Wannsee, Berlin. All you have to do is visit your IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Your chief commanders will guide you through their IDF ‘solutions’ for the Palestinians. At the end of the day, it is your army that surrounds Palestinians with barbed-wire, it is you who keep civilian populations in a siege with inadequate food supplies and medicine. It is your army that poured WMD over the most densely populated neighbourhoods on this planet. While the real meaning of the ‘Nazi Final Solution’ (Die Endlösung) is still discussed by historians who fail to agree between themselves what it really meant, the true reality of the Israeli murderous solution has been seen by us all.

However, it is almost amusing to see PM Netanyahu rushing to defend the Zionist holocaust narrative. Looking at Netanyahu presenting the protocol of the Wannsee conference to the UN assembly gives a clear impression that the Israeli PM believes that the Shoa needs an urgent pump of credibility. For the first time, the Shoa is on the defence.

“Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?” asks the Israeli PM.

PM Netanyahu, may I suggest to you that not a single humanist cares about the exact numbers: whether it was one or four million Jews who died in Auschwitz, no one doubts that the camp was a horrible place. Yet, two questions must be answered once and for all: how is it that the Jews, who suffered so much during that war, managed to get themselves involved in a colossal racist crime against the Palestinians (1948 Nakba) just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz? How is it that the Israeli leadership, that happens to be so sensitive to Jewish suffering, manages to neglect the pain they inflict on millions of Palestinians?

Supremacy and Beyond

As a National movement, Zionism fails to respect other national and popular movements. Seemingly Netanyahu fails to respect the Iranian people and their regime. “Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.” Netanyahu, must know that the Judaic law is not very different from Islam on these matters. He must also remember that it is in his country that gays were murdered in the street just a month ago. It is almost amusing that Netanyahu chooses to equate Iran with Barbarism and the Middle Ages for its treatment of minorities. As far as minorities are concerned, the Jewish state is actually the darkest place on this planet. In Netanyahu’s promised land half of the population cannot participate in the democratic game just for failing to be Jewish.

Israel according to Netanyahu is the embodiment of Western modernity: “We (the Westerners) will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet. I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances.”

I must admit that I am not at all overwhelmed by Israeli scientific or technological achievements. Nor have I ever seen any evidence of Israeli attempts to save humanity or even the planet. In fact all I see is quite the opposite. However, if Netanyahu welcomes scientific progress, he should be the first to rally for the Iranian nuclear project. As we all know, this doesn’t seem to be the case. He, for some reason, thinks that, at least regionally, nuclear energy and weapons must remain Jew only property.

Netanyahu argues that “if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time.” Netanyahu may well be correct but one should point out to him that the above applies to Israel more than any other country, state or society. For the time being it is the Jewish State that has been caught pouring WMD on its imprisoned civilian population. It is the Jewish State that is dragging us all into an ‘eye for an eye’ primitive Biblical fanaticism. As if this is not enough, it is also America and Britain that launched illegal wars orchestrated by Zionist led Neocons and fundraisers. This war has cost more than one million lives so far.

However, for once I agree with Netanyhau:

“The greatest threat facing the world today,” he says, “is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

In fact, no one could describe the danger posed by the Jewish state and Zionism any better. Israel is indeed a deadly marriage between Old Testament gross genocidal barbarism, Zionist fanaticism and a huge arsenal of WMD, chemical, biological and nuclear that has already been partially put into action.

Sabbath Goyim

Like other Zionist operations around the world, Netanyahu is convinced that the Goyim should fight the Jewish wars. “Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?”

I actually would like to stress that PM Netanyahu is all wrong here. If the United Nation is interested in bringing peace to this region and the world, it is of the essence to help Iran to develop its nuclear project and even its military nuclear capacity. This seems to be the only thing that may curb the English Speaking Empire’s lethal expansionist enthusiasm as performed recently in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will surely stop the Zionists from celebrating their symptoms at the expense of their neighbours.

Following the successful transformation of the American and British armies into an Israeli subservient mission force, Netanyahu seems to expect the UN to follow and to fulfill the very same role. “Hamas,” he says, “fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks.” I guess that someone should remind the Israeli PM that the dispute between Hamas and Israel is not exactly an international quarrel, for Palestine is not a sovereign state and Gaza is nothing less than an Israeli-run concentration camp. In other words, the practicality of the matter is simple. The UN should only deal with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel, its leadership and its army. It is not down to the UN to pass any kind of judgment on the oppressed.

Mass Murder Fantasies

It doesn’t take long before Netanyahu lists his ideological mentors and the core of his lethal inspiration “When the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II…” Actually the allies levelled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of victims… By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice. Delegates of the United Nations, will you accept this farce?”

Netanyahu is almost correct. In his recounting of the 2nd WW he surely admits here that Israel follows Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s mass murder tactics. But he surely fails to realise that if it was indeed down to ethics and Justice (rather than the usual dirty politics) Roosevelt and Churchill would have been charged with war crimes on a most severe scale. Shockingly enough, Netanyahu falls into the most obvious legal trap equating Israeli activity with acts of carpet bombardment on a huge scale. For those who fail to see it all, this is a rapidly blinking red light hazard. In Netanyahu’s perception of reality nuking countries and flattening towns is a justifiable act. Roosevelt and Churchill seem to be his moral entitlement. In fact these statements are enough to make it clear to every reasonable human being that Israel is a genocidal entity that is capable of bringing our civilisation to a devastating end.

This is a wake up call: it is not just the Palestinians or the Iranians. It is actually all of us.

Bibi¹ the Peace Maker

By now, the Israeli PM is ready to state his Judeo-centric peace mantra. “Ladies and Gentlemen, all of Israel wants peace.” Yet as far as statistics are concerned, we have recently learned that 94% of the Israeli Jews also approved the carpet bombardment of their next door neighbours. It is impossible not to see a clear discrepancy between the ‘peace loving’ verbalism and the murderous reality.

“We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state.” Once again, I happen to agree with PM Netanyahu. The Palestinian may as well say YES to a Jewish state, but not in Palestine or in the Middle East. If Obama, Brown, Merkel or any other deluded world leader who is still insisting to approve the validity or necessity of a racially orientated ‘Jewish national homeland,’ he or she is more than welcome to allocate land to such a project within his or her own territory. Palestinians should say NO to a Jewish state in the Holy Land or in the region. Palestinians should never agree to the existence of a Jewish state on their land. In fact the UN must follow this line and do whatever it can to dismantle this evil apartheid regime.

Khazarian United

To a certain extent, Netanyahu’s UN speech expresses some deep concerns Jews tend to keep to themselves. At the end of the day, the Israelis and Ashkenazi Israelis in particular know pretty well that Palestine is not exactly the land of their ancestors. If the Israeli Ashkenazi Jews, including Netanyahu, do want to find their roots, Khazaria is the place to start. However, Netanyahu tries to defuse these historical facts. “The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers… We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland,” says Netanyahu with total conviction.

PM Netanyahu, I will make it plain and clear. Not only are you foreign to the land, you are also foreign to almost every possible understanding of the notion of humanity. In fact, the Separation Wall that is going to be left after the inevitable disappearance of your ‘Jew only democracy’ will serve generations to come with an astonishing historical monument of Jewish national identity estranged from ethics, universalism and human brotherhood. The crime against humanity committed by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people is not something that will be wiped out from the history text books in a short time. Quite the opposite; it will stand as another mythological chapter in this never-ending saga of supremacist compulsive pathological self-loving.

“We must have security” says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as he ends his speech. And I am here to disappoint him. Israel will never be secured. It was born in a sin, and its existence surpasses any notion of ethics or human existence. The Jewish state has passed the ‘no return zone.’ It is doomed to vanish. We can only hope that once this happens the process of Jewish assimilation and integration into humanity will re-embark. At the end of the day Jewish Nationalism both left, right and centre was there to keep Jews apart. The history of the 20th century teaches us that this tendency to segregate oneself is bad for humanity and it is also devastating for the Jews.

1. Netanyahu’s nickname is Bibi

Let us remember, here, that the UN has illegally and immorally created and sponsored the terrorist state of Israel in Palestine; the heart of the Arab World. One should understand that the UN, with all its organizations, was established mainly by WWII victorious Western countries as a tool to serve their interests and to expand their authority on the expense of other weaker and poorer countries.

It is so obvious that the UN has no interest in solving the Israeli/Arab conflict in any way. Since its establishment in 1948 Israel has perpetrated a pre-meditated genocide against Palestinians, uprooted the whole population from their country and driven them into refugee camps into the desert, wiped Palestine off the map and is building the rogue terrorist state of Israel in its place. In this process, during the last 61 years, Israel had committed many war crimes, violated all international laws and all humanitarian laws, had broken hundreds of UN resolutions, and even murdered UN personnel and destroyed its facilities. Yet the UN did not lift one finger against Israeli crimes, and did not send its troops to protect Palestinians the way it sent its troops into old Yugoslavia (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia), Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan. The UN’s disregard of Palestinian life was reflected in the visit of the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, to Gaza last January to inspect only the damage Israel inflicted on UN buildings, and did not take even one single look at the human sufferings of Palestinians.

In the few incidents the UN was pressured to deal with the Israeli/Arab conflict (Israeli occupation of Palestine) it had sent investigating committees usually led by a pro-Zionist or a Zionist Jewish officials. The latest such officials was the Zionist Jewish Judge Richard Goldstone (Goldstein). His daughter Nicole describes him as a “Zionist who loves Israel.” When the UN Human Rights Council asked Goldstone to chair the mission with the mandate to investigate Israel’s crime during its onslaught on Gaza last December 2008, Goldstone, as a good Zionist, refused the offer unless the mandate is modified to include “crimes on all sides”; a clear pre-biased assumption that Palestinians had also committed war crimes rather than defending themselves.

Goldstone is a well known official with a long international judicial history. He also serves on the Board of Directors of several nonprofit organizations, has affiliations with famous American universities (Harvard, Fordham, and New York University Schools of Law), and he is a trustee in the board of directors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. With the many clear evidences of Israeli war crimes in Gaza broadcast by all televised media (except American media), and with the Israeli objections against such investigation calling it pre-biased, one could not but raise the question why would a well-known Zionist Jewish supporter of Israel accept such a mission knowing very well that his reputation would be attacked and smeared by all Zionists and Jewish organizations the same way they did to Jimmy Carter for just criticizing Israel?

Goldstone, like many other misguided Zionist Jews with blind loyalty to Israel, who sacrificed everything they had, even their own lives, for the sake of Israel (God’s chosen people) might have thought that he could reduce the damage to Israel’s reputation, and use his well-known reputation and judicial expertise to induce, in the report, some legal loopholes to divide the blame, and to give Israel a chance to blame Palestinians, or even some “few rotten apples” in the “most moral” Israeli army, and to justify her massacres in Gaza as some type of self-defense, although disproportionate. And that he did.

Goldstone’s report aimed to annul the many previous investigative reports done by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and many other Israeli and international human rights organizations. Such reports incriminated only Israel. Goldstone’s report sought to incriminate both parties.

Goldstone’s investigations were launched with the false perspective that there was a war between Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Authority, and his report was thus restricted in the language of violations of the international laws of war. It equated the poor, bankrupt, besieged, hungry, thirsty, unjustly ignored and persecuted by the international political system, and unarmed Gaza Authority with limited security forces plus the few hundreds lightly armed, barely trained militia cadres of the resistance groups on one side, with the well trained, well armed with the most technologically advanced (American) weapons, well supported, and well financed Israeli army on the other side.

The report states, “The Israeli armed forces are, in technological terms, among the most advanced in the world”, “… have an elaborate legal advice and training system in place … possess very advanced hardware and a market leader in production of the most advanced pieces of military technology available, including UAVs … have a very significant capacity for precision strikes…”

It was not war that happened in Gaza. It was a pre-meditated Israeli onslaught against all kinds of lives in Gaza; humans, animals, and plants. It was genocide; a burning holocaust with nuclear (DU) weapons producing 5,000 degrees of burning heat equals to the heat of the sun according to Dy Williams; the British weapons expert on Al-Jazeera. It was an immediate and long term destruction of life, and contamination and destruction of mother earth. The report stated in this regard:

“Taking into account the ability to plan, the means to execute plans with the most developed technology available [weapons], and statements by the Israeli military that almost no errors occurred, the Mission finds that the incidents and patterns of events [genocide, holocaust] considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions.”

Although Goldstone’s mission was to investigate Israeli war crimes his mission chose not to investigate the weapons of the crime. His report states: “This chapter does not intend to present a comprehensive analysis of all the aspects raised on the kinds of weaponry used during the military operations. It is rather a summary of the Missions’s views”.

While the Mission did not exclude the use of nuclear DU bombs by Israel “the Mission decided not to investigate the matter further”. The report justified Israel’s use of white phosphorous, flechette missiles, and DIME munitions as “not prohibited under international law”.

While sidelining the holocaustal Israeli weapons Goldstone’s report found the time and the expertise to describe in details and in numbers the types of rudimentary home-made missiles the Palestinians fired at the Israeli colonies.

Although Goldstone’s report accused the Israeli army of bombing civilian infrastructure; homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and UN facilities, it did not “…discount the possibility that Palestinian armed groups were active in the vicinity … launched attacks close to civilian protected buildings, unnecessarily exposed civilian population of Gaza to danger”. The report stated that Israel showed concern about civilian lives by sending warnings before bombing the area; the mission “accepts that Israel dropped leaflets, made phone calls, left recorded messages and dropped smaller explosives on roofs as stated by the Israeli Government.”

Goldstone’s report gave Israelis the best justification of their attack (holocaust) on Gaza when it considered Palestinian launching missiles at Israeli communities as terror attacks. “The Mission finds that there is significant evidence to suggest that one of the primary purposes of the rocket and mortar attacks is to spread terror amongst the Israeli civilian population, a violation of international law”. It explains further the economical and social disruptions and the psychological trauma suffered by populations in the Israeli communities of Sderot, Netivot, Beer Sheba and others by those missiles.

Goldstone here ignores historical events and distorts the facts by switching them to the opposite direction. He ignored the fact that Israel had occupied Palestine since 1948, and that the southern Israeli communities such as Sderot, Netivot, Ashdod, and others are not Israeli towns, rather are Zionist colonies built on stolen Palestinian land. He also ignored the fact that these colonizers in these communities are usually armed and hostile against neighboring Palestinian town, many of them are either on military active duty or on military reserve.

These Zionist occupiers are like an enemy, who occupy your own house, imprison you and your family in one room and deny you all means of existence. Thus it becomes your duty and your human obligation to defend yourself and your family. The mere existence of such Zionist colonies on occupied Palestine is an act or war. The Israeli wall surrounding Gaza Strip and the military siege are acts of genocide that break all humanitarian and all international laws. Genocide is not only the use of weapon to murder people; it is also depriving them from all means of living.

Goldstone faults Palestinians for resisting Israeli aggression from within Palestinian civilian areas, yet he neglects to mention that Israel has a history of attacking civilian areas, and thus would face resistance from within these civilian areas.

In an attempt to portray Palestinians as violent people, even against their own citizens, Goldstone faults the intra-Palestinian conflict between Ramallah’s authority, dominated by rogue small faction of Fatah, and Gaza’s authority, dominated mainly by Hamas faction. What he ignored is the fact that such conflict was planned, orchestrated, and fed by previous American Bush administration, as reported by Vanity Fair, in order to topple down the democratically elected Hamas government.

To maintain credibility Goldstone’s report could not but criticize the obvious blatant Israeli crimes witnessed by the whole world. Yet it did not spare any opportunity to fault Palestinians themselves, deny them the right of self-defense, and even call them violent and terrorists. For defending their lives and the lives of their children the report is accusing the victims (the Palestinians) of the crime inflicted on them by the criminals (occupying Zionist Israelis), who claim to protect the lives of their own children. Israel’s rejection and the pro-Zionists’ harsh criticism of the report meant only to divert the attention away from these facts.

In conclusion, Goldstone’s mission proposes the following major recommendations, among others: that the UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council) brings the report to the UN Security Council in order to require both parties to launch appropriate independent investigations, establish an independent committee of experts to monitor such investigation, and refer the situation in Gaza to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

The report also recommends that Israel ceases border closure and blockading access to sea, and pays reparations into a special fund to compensate Palestinians, although the Mission views “the current constitutional structure and legislation in Israel leaves very limited room, if any, for Palestinians to seek compensation.” Therefore the report urges international aid providers to step up financial and technical assistance for organizations providing aid to Palestinian (paying for Israel’s crimes).

The report recommends the Palestinian armed groups renounce attacks on Israeli civilians (indirectly calling their self-defense terror), yet it did not recommend Israel to do the same.

Finally, knowing the UN’s ineffective history in dealing with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, one wonders whether the Security Council would respond seriously, this time, to the report, given the fact that the powerful members of the Council are now busy with what they consider the Iranian nuclear threat.

From December 7-18, in Copenhagen, Denmark, 190 or so nations will come together in for the annual U.N. Climate Conference, but this one is particularly important. One reason is that it will be the first one in eight years where the U.S. delegation will be led by people who believe that climate change is real, serious and that action is needed to address it. But much more significant is that this is the U.N. conference that was planned, two years ago at a UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, as the place and the time that the world had to come up with a much stronger international climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol became operative on February 16, 2005, and as of sometime in 2012 it will no longer be in effect. The countries which signed it and agreed to reduce their emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels have until then to do so. At that point, if there is no international treaty that has been negotiated, ratified by enough countries and gone into effect, there will be nothing that replaces the expired Kyoto treaty.

Since it is expected that it will take at least two years for enough countries to ratify a treaty, the Copenhagen conference has been seen as critical so that there’s no gap in between Kyoto and a new treaty. However, as we’re less than three months out from Copenhagen, with 15 actual negotiating days between now and the end of Copenhagen (including five days in Barcelona, Spain Nov. 2-6), and with a significant number of major issues unresolved and points of conflict, especially between the countries of the Global South (developing countries) and the Global North (developed), it is not looking hopeful for any kind of treaty, much less a good one, to be adopted and signed at Copenhagen.

In March, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and primary treaty negotiator, outlined his main priorities short of a finalized treaty. The talks, he said, needed to deliver clarity on near-term (by 2020) emissions cuts for both industrialized countries and developing countries, while industrialized countries needed to devote significant resources to help poorer nations invest in clean-energy tech and adapt to climate change. De Boer said if those things happened, “we have a robust architecture for a resounding response to climate change at the international level.”

The Major Issues

Over the last several months, the issue of climate justice obligations has become contentious and major. At the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh next week this issue is supposed to be worked on; Obama proposed that this be a central issue for this meeting at an earlier G20 meeting in July.

There are various projections for how much money is needed. The lowest figure by objective sources (not developing countries shirking their obligations) seems to be around $100 billion/year. Oxfam, the International Climate Action Network (CAN), the Alliance of Small Island Nations and African countries are calling for $150-160 billion/year. But a United Nations report that came out on September 1 said that the developing nations need a $500-600 billion/year “Marshall Plan” to tackle climate change. The World Economic and Social Survey called for a “Global Sustainable New Deal” to overcome the “woefully inadequate” estimate of 21 billion dollars annually currently set aside internationally to adapt to and cope with climate change.

$500-600 billion is 1% of world GDP. It’s also less than what the U.S. spends each year on its military budget.

It is not a good sign that, about a week ago, the European Union announced that they would contribute no more than $15 billion/year of direct assistance. Their proposal included language suggesting the EU could use part of the future development aid it has already promised for poor countries as part of its climate change contribution. An Oxfam leader said the proposal would “rob tomorrow’s hospitals and schools in developing countries to pay for them to tackle climate change now.”

The other major issue, of course, is how much the countries of the Global North will reduce their emissions. Related to this, for some countries, is how much the developing countries are willing to commit to doing—this is where the financing issue comes in very directly.

Things don’t look good as far as this issue. Obama’s current position is that it’s OK for the US to get back to or just above 1990 levels by 2020. The EU took a position many months ago that 20% below 1990 levels was what they were prepared to do. One recent positive development is that the newly-elected Japanese government has said they would aim for a 25% reduction by 2020.

At the 2007 Bali, Indonesia conference, there was agreement that 25-40% below 1990 levels is what was needed. Since then, International CAN, the Alliance of Small Island Nations, China and other countries have called for 40-45% cuts as the climate crisis has deepened.

Climate Movement Mobilizing Internationally

Fortunately, the growing, grassroots international climate movement is not sitting back and hoping for the best. There are several major mobilization efforts that have been developing for months.

The first, after the New York and Pittsburgh actions this week, is an International Day of Climate Action on October 24th taking place, as of right now, in 116 countries, and those numbers are steadily growing. Initiated by Bill McKibben and 350.org (www.350.org), this day promises to give a major push to the efforts for a treaty that is commensurate with the seriousness of the climate crisis.

The Mobilization for Climate Justice (MCJ) is a network of more radical and grassroots-based groups which is planning an international day of action on November 30th. In the US, CPR for the Planet, connected to the MCJ, is gathering up thousands of names of people willing to do nonviolent civil disobedience if 10,000 sign up. Some of these activists will be in Copenhagen where there will be efforts during the conference to engage in direct action to underline the urgency of the crisis.

During the Copenhagen conference, on December 12th, there will be a Global Day of Action being organized by the Global Climate Campaign, which has been steadily building up the international movement since 2005. This year the Global Campaign for Climate Action, with significant resources and organizational networks, has taken up the call for actions on December 12th, as well as the 350.org October 24th actions, which will make both of them more extensive and larger.

One other initiative, smaller but potentially of much significance, is a Climate Justice Fast, being organized to begin on November 2nd and continue, for six people as of now, until and through the Copenhagen conference. Others will be fasting for shorter periods of time. Begun by young people in Australia, there are currently people from a dozen countries part of this growing network.

For the core group of six and any others who join them before November 2, they will be eating nothing and drinking only water over the course of these 47 days. Some of them will be inside the Copenhagen conference, visible every day to delegates from around the world and the world’s press.

A Time of Testing

These next three months will be a serious reality check for those throughout the world who understand the seriousness of the climate crisis, and for those people of all political persuasions who see themselves as responsible human beings. Time is literally running out.

Those of us living now have an awesome responsibility. Our situation is not hopeless, but it is extremely urgent. We must force the governments of the world to take action ASAP if we are to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change. This fall is decisive.

The Human Rights Council (HRC) today announced the appointment of Richard J. Goldstone….to lead an independent (four-person) fact-finding mission to investigate international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the recent conflict in the Gaza Strip…. The team will be supported by staff of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights…. Today’s appointment comes following the adoption of a resolution by the Human Rights Council… to address ‘the grave violations of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly due to the recent Israeli military attacks against the occupied Gaza Strip.

Established by the UN General Assembly on March 15, 2006, the HRC’s 47 member states are “responsible for strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe.”

As a former South African Constitutional Court justice, Goldstone is a respected jurist. He also served as chief prosecutor for the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals and is a Hebrew University board member. As a Jew, he promised to be fair and even-handed, and “hope(s) that the findings… will make a meaningful contribution to the peace process… and will provide justice for the victims.”

At the time, Israel refused to cooperate, Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, saying: “This committee is instructed not to seek out the truth but to single out Israel for alleged crimes.” He then accused the Council of having “practically (no) credibility at all.”

On September 15, the HRC released the Commission’s 575 page report, titled Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.

It covered Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza siege, the impact of Israel’s West Bank military occupation, and much more including:

• events between the “ceasefire” period from June 18, 2008 to Israel’s initiated hostilities on December 27, 2008;
• applicable international law
• Occupied Gaza under siege;
• an overview of Operation Cast Lead;
• the obligations of both sides to protect civilians;
• indiscriminate Israeli attacks on civilians resulting in many hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries;
• “the use of certain weapons;”
• attacking “the foundations of civilian life in Gaza: destruction of industrial infrastructure, food production, water installations, sewage treatment plants and housing;”
• using Palestinians as human shields;
• detention and incarceration of Gazans during the conflict;
• the IDF’s objectives and strategy;
• impact of the siege and military operations on Gazans and their human rights;
• the detention of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit;
• internal Gaza violence — Hamas v. Fatah;
• the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem;
• Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, including excessive or lethal force during demonstrations;
• Palestinians in Israeli prisons;
• Israeli violations of free movement and access rights;
• Fatah targeting Hamas supporters in the West Bank, and restricting free assembly and expression;
• rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians;
• repression of dissent, access to information, and treatment of human rights defenders in Israel;
• Israeli responses to war crimes charges;
• proceedings by Palestinian authorities;
• universal jurisdiction;
• reparations; and
• conclusions and recommendations.

The introduction stated that:

“The Mission interpreted (its) mandate (to) requir(e) it to place the civilian population of the region at the centre of its concerns regarding the violations of international law.”

It repeatedly tried to get Israel’s cooperation, but failed. However, it “enjoyed the support and cooperation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and of the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations.” Israel denied the Commission access to the West Bank and had to meet with PA officials in Amman, Jordan. “During its visits to the Gaza Strip, the Mission (also) held meetings with senior (Hamas) members, and they extended their full cooperation and support….”

The Commission’s “normative framework” was international law, international humanitarian law, the UN Charter, and international human rights and criminal law.

Information gotten included:

• reports from different sources;
• interviews with victims, witnesses, and others with relevant information;
• visitations to specific Gaza sites where incidents occurred;
• an analysis of video and photographic images, including satellite imagery;
• medical reports about injuries to victims;
• forensic analysis of weapons and munitions remnants collected from incident sites;
• meetings with interlocutors;
• information received in response to requests to provide it; and
• public hearings in Gaza and Geneva.

The Commission conducted 188 interviews, received over 300 reports, submissions, and other documents comprising more than 10,000 pages, 30 videos, and 1,200 photographs. As much as possible, it relied on material gathered first-hand. Secondary sources were then used for corroboration. Overall, enough information was obtained “of a credible and reliable nature for the Mission to make a finding in fact.” It established clear evidence of crimes, and in almost all cases was able to determine if the acts in question were deliberate or reckless.

“By refusing to cooperate with the Mission, the Government of Israel prevented it from meeting Israeli government officials, but also from traveling to Israel to meet with Israeli victims and to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian Authority representatives and Palestinian victims.”

Commission’s Findings

A UN September 15 press release stated that the Mission concluded that “there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.” Examples included numerous incidents of civilians shot waving white flags while trying to leave their homes for safer locations. Other instances of Palestinians used as human shields, arbitrary arrests, and extra-judicial assassinations in Gaza and the West Bank.

In particular, the Commission noted that:

“While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right of self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.” Rocket attacks were a pretext for naked aggression.

Calling them war crimes, the Mission found evidence that “Palestinian armed groups” launched rockets and mortars into Southern Israel, but they were minor incidents compared to the Israeli onslaught.

The Commission called the Gaza siege collective punishment through a “policy of progressive isolation and deprivation,” and that Operation Cast Lead destroyed vast amounts of Gaza infrastructure, homes, public buildings, factories, schools, hospitals, police stations, and other structures and facilities.

It cited the death toll at over 1,400, families still living in rubble, the blockade preventing reconstruction, and significant immediate and long-term trauma, especially on children.

It blamed Israel for depriving Palestinians of a means of subsistence, employment, housing, water, free movement, the right to leave and return to their own country, and access to judicial redress constituting a “crime of persecution (and) against humanity….”

Israel also violated the principles of “distinction” between combatants and military targets v. civilians and non-military ones, and “proportionality” that prohibits disproportionate indiscriminate force likely to cause extensive damage and great loss of life.

The Commission found numerous incidents of Israeli forces launching “direct (disproportionate) attacks against civilians with lethal outcomes.” These are war crimes because “no justifiable military objective” was pursued.

It cited “a justice crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory that warrants action.” It said Israel conducted no “credible investigation into alleged violations,” and recommended that the Security Council (SC) require it to do so and report back within six months. It further asked the SC to establish an expert independent body to oversee the investigations and prosecutions progress and refer the matter to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor if Israel doesn’t comply.

The report concludes that the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population. The destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy which has made the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population.

Richard Goldstone’s September 17, 2009 New York Times Op-Ed

Goldstone said that, “above all,” he accepted the UN mandate because of his deep belief “in the rule of law and the laws of war, and the principle that in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected from harm.”

Yet Israel willfully killed hundreds of civilians as a result of “disproportionate attacks,” including on hospitals and civilian structures. “Repeatedly, the Israel Defense Forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require…. Pursuing justice in this case is essential because no state or armed group should be above the law.” Failure to do so “will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy. As a service to hundreds of civilians who needlessly died and for the equal application of international justice, the perpetrators of serious violations must be held to account.”

Amnesty International’s (AI) Response to the Goldstone Report

Donatella Rovera, head AI’s Operation Cast Lead investigation, called on the UN Human Rights Council to “endorse the report and its recommendations and request the UN Secretary-General to refer it to the UN Security Council. (It) and other UN bodies must now take the necessary steps to ensure that the victims receive justice and reparation that is their due and that perpetrators don’t get away with murder.” The Security Council “must refer the Goldstone findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor if Israel and Hamas do not carry out credible investigations within a set, limited period.” AI added that the report’s findings are consistent with its own.

The New York Times Response to the Goldstone Report

A September 15 Neil MacFarquhar article quoted the report citing Israel’s “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” but suggested that Hamas was equally culpable.

Then on September 17, it published two highly critical letters of Goldstone. One was from Richard Sideman, president of the American Jewish Committee saying:

“Richard Goldstone displays the same disregard for Israel and naivete regarding Hamas that permeates the report he wrote for the United Nations Human Rights Council.”

He then vilified the HRC as “consistently demoniz(ing) Israel while giving a free pass to some of the world’s worst tyrants, from Sudan to Iran, (and) Mr. Goldstone largely neglects what prompted Israel to act militarily against Hamas…. In sum, Mr. Goldstone’s conclusions are a disservice to the credibility of the United Nations itself.”

In the second letter, Matan Shamir, a Legacy Heritage Fellow, said Richard Goldstone is “absolutely right” about “the ‘corrosive effect on international justice’ and the ‘unacceptable hypocrisy’ of not holding Israel accountable… but through the select application of international law against one democratic nation, Israel.” By that standard, “United States troops would similarly be unable to defend themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan without being smeared as war criminals.”

On September 18, the Times ran two more anti-Goldstone letters condemning Hamas “terrorism,” defending Israel’s right to self-defense, and saying that since its founding, “Israel was plagued by attacks by rejectionist groups that continue to this day.”

It also ran a September 18 story headlined “UN Study Is Called Unfair to Israel” and quoted State Department spokesman Ian Kelly saying:

“Although the report addresses all sides of the conflict, its overwhelming focus is on the actions of Israel. Its conclusions regarding Hamas’ deplorable conduct and its failure to comply with international humanitarian law during the conflict are more general and tentative.”

Absent entirely from the Times, now and always, is an emphasis on the egregiousness of Israeli crimes, its ability to commit them with impunity, the unconscionable Gaza siege, and 42 years of oppressive military occupation and state terror against millions of Palestinian civilians. In covering a persecuted people, The Times looks the other way.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) Response

PCHR welcomed the Goldstone report and called for “effective judicial redress and the protection of victims’ rights.” It urged that the Mission’s recommendations be adopted to assure accountability, either through the Security Council; under the UN Charter’s Chapter VII that deals with breaches of or threats to peace and acts of aggression; or by referring the matter to the ICC for criminal prosecutions and to compensate Palestinians in accordance with international law.

PCHR stressed that normal relations can’t be conducted with states that commit crimes of war and against humanity. International pressure must be exerted to insure Israel’s compliance. The siege must be ended and reconstruction allowed to begin. So far, the international community is silent and has granted Israel impunity to act above the law.

“The results of this impunity are evident. The situation cannot be allowed to persist. If the rule of law is to be relevant, it must be upheld.” According to the UN Charter, individual states and the UN must fulfill their legal obligation “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war….reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights… establish conditions under which justice (and) international law can be maintained, (and resolve) to maintain international peace and security….”

Other Responses from Human Rights Organizations

Rabbis for Human Rights called on Israel to take the report seriously, study its findings, and investigate charges of “violat(ions of) the laws of war as well as human rights.” Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, co-chair, Rabbis for Human Rights-North American (PHR-NA) said:

“Our colleagues in Israel have been urging Israel to launch an independent and impartial investigation of its own. As we rabbis and our communities prepare to celebrate Rosh HaShanah, our hearts and minds are turned toward Israel, hoping than an investigation will begin shortly… to work toward justice and right in Israel and at home.”

The Arab Association for Human Rights (ARABHRA) endorsed the Goldstone report’s findings of “strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Gaza conflict.” It called for an end to Israeli impunity and action to hold it accountable.

“Taking into account the ability to plan, the means to execute plans with the most developed technology available, and statements by the Israeli military that almost no errors occurred, (it’s clear) that the incidents and patterns of events considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decision.”

B’Tselem said “Israel must investigate Operation Cast Lead” crimes, and called on its government “to take the report seriously and to refrain from automatically rejecting its findings or denying its legitimacy. Already it is clear that the findings of the report will join a long series of reports indicating that Israel’s actions (in Gaza) violated the laws of combat and human rights law.”

Other human rights organizations endorsed this statement including: Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Adalah, Bimkom, Gisha, HaMoked, Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), The Public Committee Against Torture (PACTI), and Yesh Din.

Israel’s Response

Not surprisingly, Israeli officials condemned the report and dismissed it out of hand. President Shimon Peres called it “a mockery of history” and charged that it “fails to distinguish between the aggressor and a state exercising its right of self defense…. The report legitimizes terrorist activity, the pursuit of murder and death. The report disregards the duty and right of self-defense….”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:

“The Goldstone report is a kangaroo court against Israel, whose consequences harm the struggle of democratic countries against terror.”

Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, called the report “a dangerous attempt to harm the principle of self-defense by democratic states and provides legitimacy to terrorism. (It’s) a cynical attempt at role reversal in blaming Israel for war crimes instead of terrorist organizations.” He added that Israel would enlist the support of Western democracies in a campaign “to prevent turning international law into a circus.”

Defense Secretary, Ehud Barak, said the report constituted “a prize for terrorism. The comparison between those who foment terrorism and its victims is unconscionable.”

UN ambassador, Gabriela Shalev, said: “The mandate of the Goldstone Commission was one-sided from the beginning and the initiative to establish the commission came from the UN Human Rights Council, which is known for regularly and routinely condemning Israel.”

The extremist Jerusalem Post called the report “nauseating (by equating) a democratic state with a terror organization.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said:

The whole purpose of the report, from the moment the decision was made to write it, was to destroy Israel’s image, in service to countries where the terms ‘human rights’ and ‘combat ethics’ do not even appear in their dictionaries. I can say wholeheartedly… that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, and it is forced to deal with the most vile terrorists, who set for themselves the goal of killing women and children, and hide behind women and children.

(The report) wishes to take the UN back to the dark ages…. (It) has no legal, factual or ethical value, (and) it is a testament to the writers of the report and those that sent them.

Lieberman heads the ultranationalist/revisionist Zionist Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) party, and has openly called for the assassination of Hamas leaders, saying: “They have to disappear, go to Paradise, all of them and there can’t be any compromise.”

He also wants the peace process abandoned, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ignored, and once urged that Israeli Arabs be deported and Arab Knesset members who met with Hamas or Hezbollah executed. Haaretz called him:

an “unrestrained and irresponsible man….a threat (to Israel for) his lack of restraint and his unbridled tongue (that may) bring disaster (to) the whole region.”

Like other Israeli leaders, confrontation with Iran is one of his top priorities as well as continued West Bank land seizures (including all of East Jerusalem) for settlement expansions, denying Palestinians their rights and freedom, and restricting them to isolated cantons.

New UN Report Says Israel Is Blocking Gaza’s Reconstruction

On September 18, the London Guardian reported on a leaked September UN report accusing Israel of causing “de-development” by keeping Gaza under siege, denying essential aid, and blocking its reconstruction.

From Jerusalem, Rory McCarthy wrote:

… much reconstruction work is still to be done because materials are either delayed or banned from entering the strip. The UN (Office of the Humanitarian Co-ordinator) Report, obtained by the Guardian, reveals the delays facing the delivery of even the most basis aid. On average, it takes 85 days to get shelter kits into Gaza, 68 days to deliver health and paediatric hygiene kits, and 39 days for household items such as bedding and kitchen utensils.

All sorts of essentials are either delayed or banned. The report accused Israel of “contraven(ing)” the Security Council’s January 2009 resolution 1860 calling for “unimpeded provision and distribution” of humanitarian aid.

Titled “Access for the Provision of Humanitarian Assistance to Gaza: An Overview to Delivering Principled Humanitarian Assistance,” it said:

… there has been no significant improvement in the quantity and scope of goods allowed into Gaza….The lack of construction materials, as well as equipment and material necessary for maintenance and repair of public infrastructure, has lead to a process of de-development in the Gaza Strip, which potentially could lead to the complete breakdown of public infrastructure and further deterioration in the economy.

In 2005, Israel signed an Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) with the PA. At the time, 9,470 monthly truckloads into Gaza were considered inadequate. During June and July 2009, only 2,406 entered monthly, a 75% reduction and 80% below the June 2007 12,352 level for the Strip’s 1.5 million people.

“The result is a gradual process of de-development across all sectors, devastating livelihoods, increasing unemployment, and resulting in increased aid dependency amongst the population.”

Everything is urgently needed, but blocked from entering, including vital construction materials for redevelopment. Getting in are inadequate amounts of food, hygiene, and some other items plus what enters through Gaza’s tunnel economy.

Final Comments

For over six decades, Israeli state terror continued its tradition of blaming the victim and choosing militarism, violence, intimidation, and naked aggression over peaceful coexistence, respect for human rights, and observance of international laws and norms. Israelization and De-Arabization are fixed policies. So is the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Beirut suburb that the IDF destroyed in the 2006 Lebanon war. It calls civilians a strategic target “at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot,” and for using disproportionate force against them, their property, and infrastructure.

Arabs are thus disenfranchised, denied rights, and deemed inferior as subhumans. Israeli policy is confrontation, conflict, oppression, impoverishment, displacement, slow-motion genocide, and state terror to depopulate historic Palestine for Jews only.

Operation Cast Lead was the latest episode, but Gaza remains isolated under siege. The West Bank is under military occupation. Land seizures, arrests, random killings, torture, checkpoint restrictions, home demolitions, crop destruction, permits, economic strangulation, and incarcerations occur daily, yet the world community is silent. The Goldstone Commission offers the latest evidence of what’s persisted for decades. Holding Israel accountable is essential. It’s high time world bodies and jurists demanded it.

This conflict, which has been raging for years now, continues to decimate the Palestinian population, destroy their lands and infrastructure, drain Israel ’s economy and seriously strain relations between the US and its Arab allies and Muslim nations all over the world.

It is obviously in the interests of not only Israel and the Palestinians but also the US and world at large to bring this conflict to an end.

The US, the international community, the Palestinians (both the Fatah and its supporters as also Hamas and its followers) and Israeli leaders have made public declarations to the effect that they are committed to a solution that embraces two states, Israel and Palestine, living in peace side by side. The entire Arab world has agreed to recognize Israel if it withdraws to the 1967 borders.

And yet, though the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians has been going on for generations now, a resolution of the dispute remains elusive.

There are two main reasons for this.

There are world powers eager to establish their presence in this strategic region. They fan the fires between Israel and the Palestinians and between Fatah (which controls the West Bank ) and Hamas (which controls the Gaza Strip). In the guise of helping one or the other, they pour in aid and armaments.

The chief reason however is that the Zionist leaders who control the government of Israel , though they pay lip service to peace and the two-state solution, persist in their determination and efforts to establish Eretz Yisrael on all of the land west of the Jordan River.

This was their intention when Zionism was born and this was the declared intention of the Israeli leaders when Israel was established in 1948. Israeli propaganda goes on claiming that Israel accepted the UN resolution but the Palestinians did not. In fact, Israel ’s acceptance was partial. It never accepted the boundaries as set out by the UN, and its leaders assured the Jews that the establishment of Israel was the first step to reclaim all of Palestine as it existed just prior to the creation of Israel. There is ample documentation of these assurances made by responsible Israeli leaders.

In pursuance of this goal, Israel fired the fist shot in 1967, launched the war, invaded and captured the West Bank, The Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, Sinai and the Golan Heights. Its dream of reclaiming all of Biblical Israel was realized.

Left to itself, Israel would not part with an inch of all this land. If it now talks of a two-state solution it is only because Israeli leaders realized, rather late in the day, that demographics would pose a serious problem to their holding on to all the land. Soon the Arab population would outstrip the Jewish population. Then Israel would cease to be Jewish. Alternatively, it would have to turn itself into an Apartheid State if it wanted to continue being a Jewish state. None of these two alternatives was acceptable.

And hence the “commitment” to two-states. But what Israel intends is to divest itself of as many Arabs as possible and corral them on small, disconnected pieces of land surrounded by Israel ! And call these conglomeration of Bantustans the state of the Palestinians, the second state with which it will live in peace side by side!

This, clearly, the Palestinians cannot and will never accept.

Bearing in mind this fundamental fact, all this talk of peace and the peace process is a farce, a façade to enable Israel to put more “facts on the ground” and consolidate its hold on the Palestinians. Israel’s refusal to meet the recent demand of the Obama administration to freeze all construction of settlements on Palestinian lands is stark proof of this.

Given Israel ’s firm resolve in this matter, seeking peace in the region through a negotiated resolution of the conflict by Israel and Palestinians is to keep barking up the wrong tree.

For the UN to take the Israeli-Palestinian issue out of its orbit and ask the Israelis and the Palestinians to resolve the “dispute” by bilateral negotiations was an error to start with. To keep pressing for such negotiations is a grave injustice to the Palestinians. On the one side you have a powerful country, with an army among the largest and most powerful in the world. On the other, people who have no army, no armaments worth the name, their homes destroyed, their economy ruined, living under the boots of their brutal occupiers. They have no leverage. The situation is obviously and unbearably asymmetric. In such circumstances, to expect a just negotiated settlement between the two parties is unrealistic and naiveté of the first order.

Israel has, in defiance of a number of UN resolutions, continued to illegally occupy the Palestinian lands for more than 40 years now. It has been the longest and most brutal occupation in current history. Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians, demolished their homes, devastated their cities, confiscated their lands, ruined their economy and driven them to poverty. It continues to humiliate them daily and make their life as miserable as possible through a myriad of checkpoints within West Bank itself, making it impossible for the Palestinians to travel freely in their own land, keeping families separated, preventing timely access to hospitals, creating hurdles for students to go to schools.

And all this, to its shame and disgrace, has been going on in full view of the entire world!

If world leaders are serious about resolving this dispute justly and establishing peace in the region, they need to accept that this is not a dispute to be settled between two parties but a case of aggression and illegal occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel – an occupation that needs to be vacated.

The farcical peace process must end. The UN needs to live up to its responsibilities and take firm steps to bring to an end this illegal occupation. If it cannot take any effective action, as a result of having its hands tied through a veto by Israel’s “best friend” and ally, then those nations of the world that believe in justice and rule of law must start unilaterally and independently bringing pressure on Israel to vacate its illegal occupation and let the Palestinians establish an independent, sovereign, contiguous and viable state, even if it be on a mere 22% of the land they enjoyed prior to the establishment of Israel.

That is all that the Palestinians want. Surely that is not too much to ask for.

Israel is a rogue state and it is time for the international community to start making demand of Israel and treating it as a pariah that it has become. It is time for world governments and organizations to start boycotting Israel, divesting funds from it and corporations that do business with it, and imposing sanctions against it.

The occupation and the Israeli settlements and land grab are the root cause of the problem. The world community has accepted that the occupation and the Israeli settlements outside of the 1967 borders are illegal. Israel must be forced to vacate this illegal occupation and dismantle the illegal settlements.

If at all there are to be any negotiations, it is for Israel to plead with the Palestinians for concessions and accommodation, not the other way around.

When Iraq, which had plausible reasons for wanting to “reclaim” Kuwait (Kuwait was a part of Iraq till the British drew a line in the sand, carved it out of Iraq and made it a separate state) — when Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, the international community acted swiftly and with resolve. Iraq was forced, and rightly so, to vacate the occupation. In fact, its army was chased almost to Baghdad , leaving a stretch of burned out tanks and personnel carriers and mangled bodies.

Why then is no effort being made to make Israel vacate its more than 40 years of brutal and devastating occupation? Why, instead of being treated as an aggressor and illegal occupier, is it being handled with kid gloves? Why is it being given an opportunity to decide when, with whom and on what terms will it “negotiate” the disgorgement of its ill gotten booty, and how much of that booty it will return to the rightful owners, the Palestinians?

The international community got the occupation of Kuwait vacated in quick time. It has given Israel more than 40 years to vacate its occupation of Palestinian lands. Israel has failed to do so till now and shows no signs of its intention to do so ever.

The comity of nations must act. There is not room for double standards here.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/gaza-under-siege/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/ashkelon-speaks/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/ashkelon-speaks/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:00:16 +0000 Dan Lieberman http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=9070 The modern Israeli city of Ashkelon, 20 kilometers north of the Gaza border, presents a picturesque setting along the Mediterranean coast. Sparkling white beaches matched by white-faced apartment buildings, green lawns and several wide boulevards depict a tranquil and content city. Ashkelon, the city with the biblical name, is not peaceful. Grad rockets from Gaza have struck the city on several occasions. By arguments of war, the damage has not been extensive, but no damage can be ignored; one fatality and dozens wounded. With the damage repaired, nothing out of the ordinary mars the senses in the Ashkelon of June 2009.

More noticeable is that Ashkelon has an important story, a narrative that describes the Middle East conflict. The story begins with the Canaanites of 1800 B.C.

Ashkelon’s archaeological park has a treasure; a Canaanite gate from the walled city that gave the modern city its name. The Canaanites constructed a port on the Mediterranean Sea and used the sea together with city walls to provide a unique defense against invaders. The archaeological park contains artifacts from the Canaanite and succeeding civilizations; Philistines, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Crusader, all of whom eventually ruled the area until the Mamluks destroyed Ashkelon in the year 1270 A.D..
Missing from the list of conquerors of Ashkelon are the Israelites. No substantiated history or archaeological finds indicate Israelite administration of the coastal areas. This lack of coastal identification is surprising because, if the biblical claims of the extent of David and Solomon’s realms are true, wouldn’t these empires include seaports and fortifications close to the defendable Mediterranean Sea? A Canaanite gate from 1800 B.C. is still extant, but not a single identifiable structure from the reported eras of David and Solomon has been uncovered along the coast.

Which brings us to the year 1596 A.D.. In that year, the Arab village of al-Majdal in the Ottoman Empire, located close to the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, had a population of 559 inhabitants. An industrious village, known for a weaving industry that produced silk for festival dresses, Al-Majdal’s population grew to 11,000 by 1948. The poetic naming of their fabrics: ji’nneh u nar (heaven and hell), nasheq rohoh (breath of the soul), and abu mitayn (father of two hundred) signified the pride and originality of the Al-Majdal weavers.

Al-Majdal and its citizens suffered the fate of many Palestinian villages that hoped to escape the hostilities, but became engulfed in the 1948-1949 war in the Levant. Its residents sustained more than the usual injustices that were committed after the passage of United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution 181, the Partition Plan for Palestine.

Not well recognized is that the territory awarded to the Palestinians in Resolution 181 extended along the coast to present day Ashdod, 38 kilometers above Gaza. Al-Majdal had been awarded to the new Palestinian state. Also, not sufficiently explored is the reason that the Egyptian army, after its entrance into the war, refrained from entering deeply into territory awarded to the Jewish state. Egypt’s army captured the Yad Mordechai kibbutz, which was eight kilometers south of Al- Majdal, and stopped at Ashdod. Its army crossed the Negev (awarded to Israel), and attacked Jewish settlements in the advance. The Egyptian military proceeded to defend Beer Sheeva, which had also been awarded to a Palestinian state, and continued through Palestinian territory to safeguard Hebron and other parts of the new Palestine state. Egyptian military attacked Tel Aviv by air and sea, but the Egyptian army did not capture territory awarded to Ben Gurion’s government. Reasons given for the Egyptian failure to seize territory awarded to Israel include: damage done to the Egyptian army in a battle at Ashdod halted its advance, four Messerschmitt aircraft delivered by Czechoslovakia to Israel alarmed Egyptian soldiers, and battles with Negev kibbutzim deterred the Egyptian army. All of these reasons are conjectural and are not convincing.

Despite the over expressed statement that the Egyptians, together with other Arab armies, intended to “throw the Israelis into the sea,” the Egyptians did not have the military strength to accomplish the task, and the path taken by Egyptian troops indicate more of a defense of the new Palestinian state rather than occupation of the new Jewish state. The inescapable reality is that the Israelis figuratively threw the Palestinians “into the sea,” or at least into refugee camps, by being complicit in the leaving and expulsion of 750,000 of the 900,000 Arabs who inhabited the British Mandate and by barring their return to the lands and homes they had possessed for centuries. History needs a more in depth analysis of Egypt’s intentions in entering the war.

With war raging in their midst, the citizens of Al-Majdal retreated 15 kilometers to a haven in Gaza. On November 4, 1948, Israeli forces captured the city. In August 1950, by a combination of inducements and threats, Al-Majdal’s 1000-2000 remaining inhabitants were expelled and trucked to Gaza. According to Eyal Kafkafi(1998),¹ David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan promoted the expulsion while Pinhas Lavon, secretary-general of the Histadrut, “wished to turn the town into a productive example of equal opportunity to the Arabs.” Despite a ruling by the Egyptian-Israel Mixed Armistice Commission that the Arabs transferred from Majdal should be returned to Israel, this never happened. I was told that only two Arab families live in Ashkelon today.

The nightmare for the expelled residents of Al-Majdal did not end with their arduous trip to Gaza. Without going into detail, the years from 1950 until the present have been years of internment in refugee camps, brutal occupation, constant strife, military raids in their neighborhoods, destruction of facilities, denial of everyday life, denial of livelihood, denial of access to the sea, denial of access to the outside world. In 1994, after the signing of the Oslo accords, Israel constructed a 60-kilometer fence around the Gaza Strip and from December 2000 to June 2001 reinforced and rebuilt parts of the fence. Israel might be correct in presenting the fence as a necessary deterrence to infiltration, especially for terrorist acts. Personal terrorist bombings on southern Israel have declined dramatically but have been replaced by terrorist rocket bombings. Infiltration by Israeli forces into Gaza did not decline and bombings of Gaza homes and citizens continued. Whatever the reason, the lives of the surviving Al-Majdal refugees and their descendants evolved from being wards of the United Nations to virtual imprisonment in an overly crowded environment.

The 2008 Gaza war became a coda to the horrific drama that plagued the Al-Majdal and other Palestinian refugees. The massive destruction inflicted upon the Gaza people is well documented and can be reviewed by searching the Internet. The accusation by Amnesty International and other agencies of war crimes committed by Israel is incomplete. Eye witnesses verify intentional destruction of small industrial businesses, educational institutions, animal husbandry and withholding of irrigation that resulted in extensive strawberry crop losses; evidence that Israel also targeted the Gaza economy.

No discussion of Ashkelon is complete without reference to its neighboring Erez Crossing. For those entering northern Gaza, the crossing’s concrete walls and huge terminals, the traces of the 60-kilometer fence around the Gaza Strip in the distance, and an overhead balloon, hanging in the sky like a full moon, evidently surveying the entire area, shock the senses. A description by someone who exited Gaza through the checkpoint was complicated and difficult to be absorbed.²

The Soviet Union previously set the bar for tyrannical control. Those who passed through a Soviet checkpoint between East Germany and Berlin during the Cold war know the fear and uncomfortable feeling of this control. Enter a barren room and look around in puzzlement. Finally, after several minutes, a slit in the wall opens and a voice announces: “Die papieren bitte.” Place the papers in the slit and wait in the room without knowing the time length of the wait. Realize that the room is wired and all words are being heard while hidden eyes observe all movements. It’s a sweating and terrifying experience. The exit from Gaza through Erez seems magnitudes more terrifying. Israel has raised the bar.

But what happens when a Palestinian attempts to enter Israel from Gaza? A story related from a person whose credentials are impeccable and words can be trusted, went like this.

A Palestinian who had moved to Canada and had a Canadian passport, returned temporarily to Gaza. A friend in Ashkelon (who told me the story) invited the Palestinian with the Canadian passport for a visit. It took several weeks to prepare documentation, submit the necessary papers and obtain approval from the Israeli military for the visit. With everything certified the Palestinian proceeded to the Erez Crossing for exit to Israel. His friend waited at the checkpoint, and waited and waited. The Palestinian did not arrive. Six weeks later, the drama unfolded.

Israel security stopped the Palestinian, not because Israel suspected he had compromised its security – just the opposite – Israel compromised his security. If the man agreed to inform on his associates in Gaza, Israel would make life easy for him, allow him to travel and receive conveniences. He was finally released after six weeks of being held incommunicado. Other Palestinians, when crossing the border, have complained of similar insidious activities.

The creation of modern Ashkelon and its consequences contain elements that have been subdued in public discourse but have been a major contributor to the Middle East conflict and a guide for one side of the struggle. We have Israel seizing control of an ancient area, which had for millennia been controlled by others. UN Resolution 181, which awarded the area to the Palestinian state, has been violated in the seizure. The original inhabitants are expelled without cause. The Arab town of Al-Majdal is mostly destroyed and memories of an Arab presence are erased. The town’s name is slowly changed, evolving from Al-Majdal to Migdal-Gad, Migdal-Ashkelon and finally to Ashkelon; as if the city descended directly from the original bronze era seaport.

The victims are consistently oppressed and reduced to impoverishment. Foreigners occupy the properties of the dispossessed. Sorrow, pain and feelings of helplessness burst into violence against the injustice and oppression. Although the violence is minimal the retaliation is major. Al-Majdal has no escape from suffering.

Ashkelon has a story. It is the story of the Middle East conflict.

1. ”Segregation or integration of the Israeli Arabs – two concepts in Mapai”. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 30: 347-367, as reported in Wikipedia.
2. A definitive description appears in a BBC report by Paul Wood, BBC Middle East correspondent in Gaza City, “Middle East diary: At the Erez Crossing,” May 14, 2002.

Does anyone find it interesting that Israel is the only country on the planet going around with this incessant insistence that everyone recognize her right to exist? Given that we Palestinians are the ones who have been dispossessed, occupied, and oppressed, one might expect that we should be the ones making such a demand. But t hat isn’t the case. Why? Because our right to exist as a nation is self-evident. We are the natives of that land! We know we have that right. The world knows it. That’s why Palestine doesn’t need Israel or any other country to recognize her right to exist. We are the rightful heirs to that land and this can be verified legally, historically, culturally, and even genetically. And as such, the only true legitimacy Israel will ever have must come from us abdicating our inheritance, our history, and our culture to Israel. That’s why Israel insists we declare she had a right to take everything we ever had — from home and property, cemeteries, churches and mosques, to culture and history and hope.

Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs who set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948. Those Palestinians and their descendants still languish in refugee camps. Israel attempted a similar scenario in 1967 when they conquered the remainder of Palestine, but Palestinians then couldn’t be dislodged from their homes as easily. This remains true, despite 40 years of Israel’s violent and oppressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Despite home demolitions, land confiscations, rapacious building of Jewish-only colonies, endless checkpoints, targeted assassinations, bombings of schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and malls, closures and denials; despite the massive human rights abuses, the imprisonment and torture of men women and children alike, the separation of families, the daily humiliations; despite the massive killings — Palestinians remain. We still resist. We still live, love, and have babies. As much as we can, we rebuild what Israel destroys. Such are rights!
Rights are inherent and inherently just, like the right to live with dignity and to be masters of one’s own fate. It is a human right not be persecuted and oppressed because you happen to belong to one religion and not another.

That Israelis simply take property belonging to Palestinians is not a right. That is theft. That Israel cut off the movement of food, medicine and other basic goods to the Gaza strip, causing massive malnutrition, economic collapse and misery because Palestinians elected particular leaders is not a right. That is an affront to humanity. That Israel rain death from the skies on an already battered and starved Gaza, murdering over 3000 human beings and maiming thousands more in a single month is not a right. It’s a war crime. That Israel has employed every imperialistic tactic to subjugate, humiliate, break, and expel an entire nation of principally unarmed civilians because of their religion is not a right. It is a moral obscenity. That every Jew from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia be entitled to dual citizenship, one in their native country and one in Israel, while the rightful heirs to the land linger as refugees without citizenship anywhere is not a right. It is an outrage.

I’m sure my words will be twisted in some way to imply that I’m advocating pushing Israelis “into the sea” or some other asinine claim. So let me be explicit: We all have the right to exist, to live, to be masters of our own destiny. We all have the right not to be oppressed by others. Such rights are inherent to every individual living in that land: Jew, Muslim, or Christian. But Israelis do not have the right to create particular religious demographics by causing the demise of the natives. To be a Jewish [or Muslim or Christian] state, where privilege is accorded to those belonging to a particular religion at the expense of those who do not is not a right.

A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight. And to recognize such racism as a human or national right goes against every tenet of international law. It defies the basic sense that the worth of a human being should not be measured by their religion, any more than it should be measured by the color of their skin or the language they speak.

The serious aspect of the Israeli maneuver has not gone unnoticed by the Jerusalem activists who support a peace process that has legs and will arrive at a destination. A panel of Jerusalemites expressed their convictions in a meeting organized by the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information at the Ambassador hotel in East Jerusalem on May 20, 2009.

Dr. Gershon Baskin, CEO and founder of the IPCRI, chaired the meeting. Meron Benvenisti, well known iconoclastic political commentator and a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Rami Nasrallah, Director of the International Peace and Cooperation Center, and Sarah Kreimer, Associate Director of Ir Amim, constituted the panel. The incendiary content ignited many surprising and explosive statements.

Dr. Baskin started the proceedings with a controversial remark: “Jerusalem is the most segregated city in the world. Common spaces of Jews and Moslems don’t exist and each Jerusalem space has a distinct identity. Even Catholic institutions, which are physically close, remain socially apart.”

According to Baskin, the hospitals of Notre Dame and St. Louis, which are next to one another, emphasize the separation. Notre dame caters to Palestinian Catholics and St. Louis accepts Israeli Catholics. From these observations, Dr. Baskin concluded: “It is easy to draw lines of separation.” The Palestinians and Israelis can manage legal sovereignty without promoting physical separation.

Meron Benvenisti, an early and consistent critic of Israel’s policies, politely contradicted some of Baskin’s well known assertions. The former deputy mayor expressed displeasure with what he called a ‘peace industry.’ “The peace process is only a psychological process, established to give hope but no concrete results. Meanwhile Israel has expanded Jerusalem’s boundaries to assure the city cannot be easily divided. As a matter of fact, there is now no concept of what is Jerusalem.” A bombshell: many Palestinians, especially those who don’t relish losing their Israel residency, don’t want East Jerusalem to be detached form Israel. These individuals are major supporters of a united Jerusalem. Benvenisti also questioned the importance of sovereignty. He claimed the division is only sociological and that no demographic threat to Israel exists. Why? The Israelis are well united against the ‘other,’ and the Palestinians, although increasing in numbers, remain fragmented and constrained.

Despite his less than positive attitude, Meron Benvenisti proposed a significant plan: “The Palestinians should establish a ’shadow government.’ They should take advantage of their legal and social arrangements to form a quasi government that provides services and needs for the Palestinian community in East Jerusalem.” How that would be done, from where the finances would arrive, and how to gain acceptance from an Israeli government that sends its police to deter Palestinian cultural expression, were not adequately explained.

Rami Nasrallah sees the conflict in more specific terms. “The Palestinians are struggling daily with survival. The Middle class and ‘elite’ have tired of the struggle and are fleeing to other places. This phenomenon reduces East Jerusalem to a city of the impoverished. Previously the undeclared capital of Palestine that contained one-third of the Palestinian economy, East Jerusalem has been severely crippled since the Oslo,’peace accords.’ Those spurious accords, by which East Jerusalem lost its autonomy, is the reason for the economic decline.” He added that Israel’s present thrust is to have the Holy Basin become the center of Judaism. Nasarallah’s statement coincides with many Israeli published statements that characterize ancient Israel as the center of the world and Jerusalem as the center of ancient Israel. He foresees only a shift from a harsh occupation to a harsher occupation.

The peace center director noted that Israel wants to avoid a bi-national state, which means either expulsion of Palestinians or acceptance of two independent states. His observation that Israel has not been able to obtain a Jewish character of Jerusalem might be correct. Central Jerusalem, close to and within the Holy Basin, reveals more identifiable Christian institutions and buildings than those of Jewish identity, and, except for the Haram al-sharif/Temple Mount complex, than those of the Muslim faith. He fears the conflict is shifting form a national conflict to a religious war.

So what to do? Rami Nasrallah’s suggestion is to create a ‘city of Bridges.’ Jerusalem needs two strong governments for two capitals. The city can be politically divided, enable cross-border cooperation and become an ‘open city.’ One problem: His admirable suggestion substantially contradicts Israel’s stated policies.

Sarah Kreimer, whose organization Ir Amim provides educational resources that realistically describe Israel’s settlement policies around Jerusalem but does not provide realistic solutions for halting the settlements, presented a legal position: “The Israelis and Palestinians should have an amicable divorce.” Her statement was later contradicted by Baskin, who noted that before a divorce there must have been a marriage and love.

The Ir Amim director contradicted her innocent statement with innocent remarks:

“The Israeli government is using divide and conquer techniques. It is trying to make the Old City more Jewish and capture it by using the usual ‘facts on the ground’ that will entwine the Palestinians. She suggested that Israel develop a transparent and inclusive process. The Palestinian institutions that were closed after 2001 should be reopened. Sarah Kreimer noted that her suggestions “were opposite to what is being done.” The unanswered question: Why would the present Israeli leaders change previous arrangements and modify anything to accommodate her suggestions?

Gershon Baskin, never short on words, very decisive and specific, added his own highly charged comments:

“The Palestinians didn’t realize that by signing the Oslo agreement they were agreeing to close many cultural centers. Israel claimed that the closings respected the Oslo agreements. Now, Israel claims that reopening requires a law from the peace agreement. As for the Holy Basin, the issue of who controls the Holy Basin only arose from the ‘peace agreements.’ And the constructions related to City of David and the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives are only excuses for expansion.”

Baskin summarized his views, which coincided with a later article by him in the Jerusalem Post.

“There is a change in Washington, which means the quartet will be used as the primary mechanism for resolving the conflict. The issue of Palestinian statehood has already been decided by the international community. Its directives will unfold over the years. The Security Council has stated it will replace Resolution 242 as a reference point. The Council has also decided on the size of the Palestinian state and that its borders be based on the 1967 demarcation line. Israel will no longer be able to annex territory, which includes land in a Jerusalem that will be the capital of two states.”

An interesting discussion that leads to this writer’s personal conclusions.

The significance of arriving at a just and agreeably acceptable solution to the status of Jerusalem in any peace accords cannot be underestimated. Jerusalem, the City of Peace, has always proved the ‘not theory’ of political discourse. Jerusalem has not been the City of Peace. The present trajectory of events has the debate on the future of Jerusalem serving to expand a constrained conflict to a wider Holy War. The present trajectory of events have the construction of a new Jerusalem leading to the destruction of the historical Jerusalem.