Israel’s War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands

January 2010

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Tuesday that Israel would never cede control of united Jerusalem nor retreat to the 1967 borders, according to a statement.

Palestinian thief’s complaint against police abuse suggests policemen beat him, placed banana peals behind his ears while capturing all on cell phone. Five officers released after questioning, rest to face remand hearings.

IOA Editor: Israeli abuse of and violence against Palestinians is so complete, extensive, institutionalized, and far-reaching that it cannot be “explained” in terms of “battlefield” or “interrogation” conditions. It happens in wide-open spaces, on the street, and it continues once the “target” has been captured and is chained. There can be no justification for such violence, nor should any excuses for it be accepted.

Press reports highlighted the fact that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon made Ambassador Ahmet Celikkol sit on a low couch while the Israelis sat on high chairs, as he reprimanded the envoy over a Turkish television thriller which portrays Israeli Mossad agents as baby-snatchers.

A general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”. Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.

Because of this delay, the medical window of opportunity to perform the transplants for these patients was closed, because corneas can be transplanted only within the shortest time frame (24-48 hours after they are extracted from the donor’s body). The patients from Gaza whose exit was prevented will therefore have to wait for another donation, which may or may not happen.

The U.S. Army will double the value of emergency military equipment it stockpiles on Israeli soil, and Israel will be allowed to use the U.S. ordnance in the event of a military emergency, according to a report in Monday’s issue of the U.S. weekly Defense News.

The failure was a twin flop: An intelligence failure, which U.S. President Barack Obama has already stated, in the poor handling of information that arrived at the State Department and probably also the CIA from both the father of the would-be bomber and the British security service; and a failure within the security system, including that of the Israeli firm ICTS.

IOA Editor: The biggest “flop” is the refusal of the powerful to accept that terrorism is an outcome of underlying conditions which must be urgently reconsidered. As Seumas Milne argues powerfully in Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators, terrorism is the result of such support and “the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land.” As we already noted, this point, and the profound questions that follow, do not receive the public attention a single case of a would-be terrorist act (in the West) gets.

I mark the beginning of the new decade imprisoned in a military detention camp. Nevertheless, from within the occupation′s holding cell I meet the New Year with determination and hope… The price I and many others pay in freedom does not deter us. I wish that my two young daughters and baby son would not have to pay this price together with me. But for my son and daughters, for their future, we must continue our struggle for freedom.

My husband is a school teacher and farmer from the Palestinian village of Bilin. When Israel built its apartheid wall here, it separated Bilin from more than half of its land, in order to facilitate the expansion of the illegal settlement Mattityahu East. In response, Abdallah and fellow villagers began a campaign of nonviolent resistance. Every Friday for the past five years, we’ve marched, with Israeli and international supporters, to protest the theft of our land and livelihoods.

Egyptian FM Abul Gheit: “Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory”… Egypt accused Galloway, who once called at a London rally for the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, of trying to embarrass the country, which has refused to permanently open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza.

More on Mubarak’s position in Seumas Milne’s Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators

The Israeli authorities must immediately release, or bring before a fair trial, three Palestinian human rights activists detained in Israel following their protests against the construction of the West Bank fence/wall, Amnesty International said today.

Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

I wondered: Were the [Hamas] restrictions an order from above, or an unwise interpretation by lower ranks? Does Hamas think it can entirely prevent the few visitors – clearly pro-Palestinian – from hearing non-official versions? Don’t the people giving the orders realize what a bad image they were creating? Or was there really a security concern?

Many Israelis have no problems with this: Let the Muslims suffer for the sins of their brothers. But those of us who like to think of ourselves as liberal humanists find it too easy to ignore the sight of entire families having their luggage rummaged through in front of the entire terminal while we are waved through.

IOA Editor: Indeed, the dilemmas of the guilt-ridden Jewish (or other) liberal – could keep Woody Allen busy for decades. Warranted or not, this subject surely isn’t debated in Israel, which has long behaved as though it is exempt from “civilized-world” standards. As Seumas Milne argues powerfully in Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators (below), terrorism is the result of such support and “the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land.” This point, and the profound questions that follow, do not receive the public attention a single case of a would-be terrorist act (in the West) gets.

John Pilger: This is a very fine book: both a loving tribute to the author’s father and the struggle and pain of Palestine seen through the witness and insights of two generations. Together, they beckon freedom.

Marwan Barghouti: “The foundation for peace is the end of Israel’s occupation and the creation of a separate and independent Palestinian state.”

Israel will pay US $10m in compensation for damage caused to United Nations buildings in Gaza during the assault a year ago, officials have said.

IOA Editor: The $10m ultimately comes from the US, Israel’s on-going financing partner for all Occupation and destruction ventures… What about the billions of dollars required to rebuild Gaza’s homes and civil infrastructure? Who’s paying for that “collateral damage?”

From the wider international perspective, it is precisely this western embrace of repressive and unrepresentative regimes such as Egypt’s, along with unwavering backing for Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, that is at the heart of the crisis in the Middle East and Muslim world… The poisonous logic of this imperial quagmire is now leading inexorably to the spread of war under Barack Obama.

I’m an inveterate optimist, so someday there will be peace, but a lot of things have to change before that happens. If the occupation were to stop overnight, it would make all the difference in the world. Israel is the fourth-largest military entity in the world. They have the newest equipment, and it’s used on the Palestinians. Also, if the U.S. stopped funding Israel, that would be another way of bringing about peace.

MK Ahmed Tibi: “Since the foundation of the state, the Israel Lands Administration is solely used as Jewish land administration. The director of the Israel Lands Administration has used all the tactics, with the help of the Jewish Agency, to allocate state land only to Jews. Despite the bitter attempt over the decades, not even one Arab town has been established since the state’s foundation.”

It seems that the only value which we still have the power and means to instill is the value of refusal. To learn to say no. To teach our children who have not been poisoned yet to resist the brainwashing, to reject the viruses with which their brains are being injected. It is a hard and sysiphic task, but it is the only way of reasserting our humanity. To say no to evil, no to deceit and deception, no to trade in human beings, no to the racism which is spreading over here like wildfire… We stand here today as an alien and alienated minority, hated and persecuted. But together with our peace-seeking friends beyond the Wall, beyond the barbed wires, we might become a majority. Only the refusal to surrender to walls and checkpoints can open the gates of our ghetto so that we could pull down the walls of their ghetto. To see at last that there is an outside world, that there are regions around which the Jewish National Fund had not destroyed.

IOA Editor: Outstanding.

The Egyptian regime blocked access for the mission, citing “security” concerns, and refused to grant entry visas to the assembled group. Cairo’s position, undoubtedly backed by its masters the US and Israel, condemned most of the marchers as “hoodlums” and “criminals”. In fact, many participants were the elderly and the religious and non-violent, Gandhian tactics were the central ideology.

A country that believes in the morality of its actions and those of its soldiers should not behave like a permanent suspect and boycott institutions of international law. On the contrary: It must fight within those institutions for its positions and justice. Joining the International Criminal Court at The Hague will place Israel on the side of the enlightened nations, and will contribute to restraining forceful and harmful actions.

IOA Editor: It is not entirely clear whether Haaretz is saying that Israel should stop its thuggery and join the international (law) community, or that it should join the international community so that it can get away with its thuggery. It is clear, though, that the pressure of the international community is making the Israeli government, and public opinion, squirm – and that, of course, is a good thing.

In the wake of the release of the United Nation’s Goldstone report accusing Israel and Hamas of war crimes during the Gaza war, as well as efforts to issue warrants abroad for the arrest of senior IDF officers and former ministers, some Israeli officials have said the international rules of war need to be changed to better reflect the realities of asymmetric warfare… [E]efforts are being made to reach understandings with Western democracies and other countries… to adopt what some call a dynamic interpretation of existing rules of war that would be better suited to the changing realities. Such rules would not restrict armies from countering the threat of terrorism because of concern that its officers or political leadership would be accused of war crimes.

IOA Editor: As eloquently described by Daniel Machover, this new focus on international law is part of a strategy to blur the distinctions between military control of a population resisting occupation and a war against a terrorist organization such as al-Qaeda. If existing international laws of war were to undergo a “dynamic interpretation,” and be rewritten to “be better suited to the changing realities,” the occupiers will gain a far greater freedom of action – such as the ability to bomb civilian population centers and otherwise act “disproportionally,” without the threat of possible ICC charges.

[T]his strategy seems to require the blurring of any distinction between peoples fighting for self-determination or struggling against foreign occupation or internal repression and al-Qaeda or similar terrorist organisations… Tzipi Livni’s response to the arrest warrant against her: “what needs to be put on trial here is the abuse of the British legal system. This is not a suit against Tzipi Livni, this is not a lawsuit against Israel. This is a lawsuit against any democracy that fights terror.”

Instead of addressing the question of how to destroy the Iranian nuclear project by military means, the real interest of all peoples in the Middle East, including the Israeli and Iranian peoples, is to safeguard their security not through nuclear arsenals but through denuclearization of all states in the area. The opposition to the nuclear threat cannot be a selective issue, and should not be handled with double standards.

Baroness Scotland announces plans to alter laws after attempts to obtain warrants against Israeli generals for war crimes

BDS action is a life-saving antidote to violence. It is an action of solidarity, partnership and joint progress. BDS action serves to preempt, in a non-violent manner, justified violent resistance aimed at attaining the same goals of justice, peace and equality.

British government under pressure to remove threat of legal action against Israeli leaders for war crimes in Gaza

None of [the Gaza complexities] makes sense unless you bring in the larger picture of the occupation and the steadfast reluctance of Israeli governments to make peace. Seen in isolation, Gaza is too riddled with ambiguity to galvanize what’s left of the Israeli peace camp into action. The real contrast is with the burgeoning protests in East Jerusalem, in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah where several Palestinian families have recently been evicted from their homes and Israeli settlers planted in their stead.

“Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation… It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.” (Raphael Lemkin, 1943)

“IDF dogs are trained to pounce and attack any Arab who shouts Allah Hu Akbar, as a Pavlovian reaction,” said [MK Ahmed] Tibi. “So here I say: Allah Hu Akbar. Are there any dogs here to attack me?”

In Israel… institutional discrimination is meant to preserve the supremacy of a group of Jewish settlers over Palestinian Arabs. As far as discriminatory practices are concerned, it’s hard to find differences between white rule in South Africa and Israeli rule in the territories; for example, separate areas and separate laws for Jews and Palestinians.

The United States has recently signed major arms deals with several Arab states. Israeli officials have expressed concern at the scope and content of the agreements. Among the recipients of the advanced arms included in the agreements are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The shipments are to include anti-ship and antitank missiles as well as so-called smart and bunker-busting bombs.

“Since the foundation of the state, the Israel Lands Administration is solely used as Jewish land administration. The director of the Israel Lands Administration has used all the tactics, with the help of the Jewish Agency, to allocate state land only to Jews… [N]ot even one Arab town has been established since the state’s foundation.”

The real reason for harassing Vanunu is a vindictiveness towards a man who has been impertinent enough to come out of jail unbowed. Of course, if Vanunu had been allowed to leave the country, he would have drifted out of public consciousness. Now, every time he is arrested the world is reminded that Israel has a nuclear weapons facility, a fact used by its enemies to justify their own weapons programmes.

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