Tag: Human Rights

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How Israel fails to protect the rights of Palestinian children – Day 4

From the UN Children and armed conflict: Report of the Secretary-General (A/64/742–S/2010/181) of April 13 2010:

Nakba
Developments in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel

99. At the close of 2009, the effects of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, codenamed “Operation Cast Lead”, from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, were still being felt across the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Gaza residents, including children, are still living in alternative or temporary accommodation and many schools, health facilities and parts of vital water and sanitation infrastructure networks have not been rehabilitated or repaired. The ongoing blockade by Israel and the resulting lack of necessary materials in Gaza make such repairs and rehabilitation difficult.

100. A total of 374 Palestinian children were killed and 2,086 were injured during the reporting period, including at least 350 killed and 1,815 injured in Gaza alone during “Operation Cast Lead” by Israeli forces. The Israel/occupied Palestinian territory working group on grave violations against children confirmed 12 cases of Palestinian children who were killed while bearing arms and acting as combatants during “Operation Cast Lead”. The working group also confirmed one case of recruitment of a 16-year-old boy by the armed group Ezz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The actual number of cases is believed to be higher and there had been other reported incidents of children being trained and/or used by Palestinian militant groups in Gaza. Community members are, however, reluctant to provide information on this practice.

101. The working group confirmed reports of seven Palestinian children used by Israeli soldiers as human shields in three separate incidents during “Operation Cast Lead.” The office of Israel’s Military Attorney-General is investigating those incidents, although the United Nations is unaware of the actual process under way or the outcome of the investigations to date. On 11 March 2010, the Military Advocate for Operational Affairs brought criminal charges against two Israel Defense Forces staff sergeants who ordered a nine-year-old Palestinian child to open bags and suitcases suspected of being booby-traps. The criminal investigation of this case was launched in June 2009, following the report of my Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. The indictment was filed with the District Military Court for offences of excessive authority that endangers life or health and of unbecoming conduct.

102. Since the end of the offensive in January 2009, 24 children were killed and 271 were injured in incidents involving Israeli gun and tank fire in the Gaza buffer zone as a result of unexploded ordnance, and in settler-related incidents in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. One Israeli child was killed during the reporting period and three Israeli children were injured in two separate incidents in the West Bank. The working group was able to verify three incidents of Palestinian inter-factional fighting during 2009, resulting in the injury of six children and the deaths of two others. The two children, allegedly affiliated with the Jund Ansar Allah group, were killed in armed clashes between Hamas-affiliated security forces and members of the Jund Ansar Allah group in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.

103. No children were harmed as a result of rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip on Israeli communities in adjacent areas. However, attacks and the threat of attacks are known to cause high levels of prolonged anxiety among Israeli children residing there and among Palestinian children in Gaza.

104. In 2009 the working group documented at least five children who were requested to become informers for the Israeli intelligence while being subjected to violent interrogation by the Israeli authorities. The actual figure is suspected to be much higher, but as testifying puts the lives of the concerned children at risk, the United Nations does not actively seek information on this practice.

105. The number of Palestinian children arrested and detained by Israeli military authorities rose sharply at the beginning of 2009, immediately after the start of “Operation Cast Lead”, but has decreased steadily since then, although remaining systematic and widespread. As of December 2009, 305 children were being detained. There are serious concerns regarding the rise in the number of young children, from 12 to 15 years of age, being detained, with 42 children in that age category being held in Israeli detention in December 2009 compared to 30 in December 2008. The United Nations has documented over 87 reports of ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children during the reporting period, including 6 reports of threats of rape and sexual assault against the children to elicit confessions or in some cases collaboration from child detainees. Israeli authorities stress that the Israel Security Agency operates in strict compliance with Israel’s Supreme Court ruling (HCJ 5100/94), which states that investigations are free of torture, cruel inhuman treatment and any degrading handling, and absolutely prohibits the use of “brutal or inhuman means” in the course of an interrogation. Israeli authorities also stress that note should be taken of Israel’s commitment to investigate any allegation, irrespective of the source, and of Israel’s concern that more information should be provided in order to enable the appropriate authorities in Israel to investigate and respond substantively, where appropriate.

106. On 29 July 2009, the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Major General Gadi Shamni, issued a new military order (Military Order No. 1,644) establishing a juvenile military court in the West Bank. This attempt to incorporate juvenile justice standards within the military court system was met with concern by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child during its session in January 2010. Since the order came into effect on 1 October 2009, lawyers have observed that the military court judges, who adjudicate on juvenile matters in the West Bank, also continued to preside over cases involving adults. However, unlike previously, children under 16 years of age are now tried separately from adults and are brought into the courtroom individually, but are still taken to the courts from the detention facilities with adults.

107. In Gaza, 18 schools were destroyed and more than 260 were damaged, including 5 schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, by Israeli forces during “Operation Cast Lead”. In some cases, the Israel Defence Forces forcibly entered school compounds and used schools as interrogation centres. The lack of materials for reconstruction and rehabilitation of schools, coupled with chronic shortages of educational supplies as a result of an ongoing blockade forced thousands of students to learn in overcrowded schools operating on double shifts and often under unsafe and unsanitary conditions. To date, very few of the destroyed or damaged schools have been rebuilt or repaired. In addition, discrimination and neglect by Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem and Israel-controlled area C of the West Bank have also jeopardized children’s right to education. Inadequate structures, including tents, shacks and crude cement structures, are being used as schools owing to the difficulties in obtaining building permits needed to expand and upgrade existing schools and build new ones to accommodate the student population in area C, while in East Jerusalem, each year large numbers of Palestinian children are denied admission in the municipal schools run by the Jerusalem municipality and the Israeli Ministry of Education owing to a shortage of over 1,000 classrooms.

108. Almost half of Gaza’s health facilities were damaged or destroyed during “Operation Cast Lead” and Gaza’s health-care system is currently unable to provide adequate responses to children’s health-care needs. As a result, some patients must seek treatment outside Gaza — in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Egypt, Jordan and Israel — for a wide range of medical assistance. During the reporting period, while 1,407 of 1,648 applications for children who sought to obtain medical assistance outside Gaza were approved, nine children in Gaza died while waiting for the appropriate permits to travel outside Gaza. In 2009 there was also an increase in the number of interrogations at Erez crossing, including the interrogation of children leaving Gaza for medical treatment.

109. Throughout 2009, the continuing high rate of settler violence against children was registered. Palestinian children continue to be shot, beaten and threatened while walking to school, grazing their livestock or playing outside their homes. According to reports, it has been revealed that a new pattern of violence has emerged since 2009, which suggests that Israeli settlers undertake attacks against Palestinians and their property in response to attempts by the Israeli authorities to dismantle “unauthorized” settlement outposts, raising additional concerns regarding the protection of Palestinian children. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented at least two such incidents, in which 11 children were attacked by settlers. It is suspected that there are many more incidents that remain unreported. Perpetrators are never held accountable. This underscores the need for greater enforcement by the Israeli Government of the rule of law where violent settlers are concerned.

The Palestinian Campaign for Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel is trying to get UNICEF to comply with the boycott for the upcoming conference organised by the Minerva Centre for Human Rights at the Hebrew University, jointly with the Van Leer Institute.

In essence, this conference establishes a false symmetry between the Palestinians under occupation and the Israeli occupiers and totally ignores the vastly divergent contexts in which children’s lives are embedded. The conference omits, in fact covers up, the fundamental source of the vulnerability and suffering of all children in this “conflict” zone: Israeli colonisation of Palestinian land and multi-tiered oppression of the Palestinian people. By inviting Israeli “security personnel” — the very same people who devise and execute policies that indiscriminately target Palestinian civilians, killing and maiming hundreds of children, as was done in the Gaza massacre — this conference not only gives them a credible and ‘respectable’ voice, but goes further than most in attempting to whitewash Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, its accelerating colonization of the West Bank and its gradual ethnic cleansing of entire Palestinian communities in occupied East Jerusalem and the Naqab (Negev).

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Day 1 in the Thinking Chair – Mortification & Fascism

Whilst I’m suspended from our usual playground pending a complete exoneration, I’ve returned to my own patch to add thoughts and links which interest me. If folks stumble in, in search of their long lost mate, perhaps it’ll give them something to feast upon.

Here’s some shockers for today:

From the Defence of Children International [DCI] – Palestine submits 14 cases of sexual assault and threats to the UN for investigation

On 18 May 2010, DCI-Palestine submitted 14 cases to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture for investigation. The submission relates to the sexual assault, or threat of sexual assault, of Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli soldiers, interogators and police between January 2009 and April 2010. The ages of the children range from 13 to 16 years.

DCI-Palestine is becoming increasingly alarmed at reports contained in sworn affidavits received from children that they are being subjected to sexual assault, or threat of sexual assault, in order to obtain confessions.

DCI-Palestine has reviewed 100 sworn affidavits collected from children in 2009, and in four percent of cases, children report being sexually assaulted, whilst in 12 percent of cases, the children report being threatened with sexual assault. The sexual assault and threats of sexual assault documented by DCI-Palestine include grabbing boys by the testicles until they confess and threatening boys as young as 13 years with rape unless they confess to throwing stones at Israeli settler vehicles in the occupied West Bank. DCI-Palestine suspects that these figures may understate the extent of the problem.

Finally the MSM is leeching from my fond analysis of the predominant sinister political ideology underpinning the ziocolony – views which do not subscribe to the absolute necessity of a specific form of economic relations nor a non-negotiable charismatic leader to name its putrid essence definitively.

Bradly Burston from Haaretz opines mournfully that

No one knows fascism better than Israelis. They are schooled, drilled in the history, the mechanics, the horrendous potential of fascist regimes. Israelis know fascism when they see it. In others.

Ironic that it’s the octogenarian iconoclast Chomsky whose banning from the West Bank precipated the latest Israeli flurry of angst.

Wrote Boaz Okun, the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronot’s legal affairs commentator and a retired Israeli judge, of Israel’s ban on Noam Chomsky: “The decision to shut up Professor Chomsky is a decision to shut down freedom in the state of Israel.

“I’m not speaking of the stupidity of supplying ammunition to those who claim that Israel is fascist,” Okun wrote, “rather, of our fear that we may actually be turning that way.”

Burston goes on to grasp at that which he perceives to be associated with the present pungent aroma which in line with the gas used on non-violent Palestinian protestors and in their homes, is markedly redolent of skunk.

Why should we be concerned by any of this? Perhaps because we have made our peace with a number of factors that can turn a society toward fascism as a solution.

1. Losing a War.

We’ve lost two in the space of less than three years. Our targets, Hezbollah and Hamas, are better armed and entrenched than ever. Our strategic and diplomatic standing is in decline. Iran and Syria are ascendant. And there is abundant reason to suspect that the Gaza War, a major factor in the loss of our international standing, may have been altogether avoidable, the huge civilian death toll indefensible and unconscionable. This has, in turn, led to

2. International quarantine, a sense of being scapegoated, and a search for an internal fifth column.

3. A radical redefinition of positive values.

Look no further than the name of Jerusalem’s obscene Museum of Tolerance project.

4. Olfactory fatigue

We have grown desensitized to the consequences of actively denying basic staples and construction supplies to 1.5 million people in Gaza, many of them still waiting to rebuild homes we destroyed.

We have grown inured to the appropriation of Palestinian-owned West Bank land, to abusive treatment of law-abiding Palestinians at checkpoints, to the ill-treatment and summary expulsion of foreign workers, to racist, anti-democratic and, yes, fascistic rulings by extreme rightist rabbis, especially some of those holding official positions in the West Bank.

5. Fascism by rubber stamp.

“There are a million reasons why someone would be denied entry into Israel,” Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad said Monday, when asked about the ministry’s border policies in the wake of the Chomsky ban.

“There may be a million reasons, but try to find a single criterion for entry refusal and you’ll hit a blank wall,” said Association for Civil Rights in Israel attorney Oded Feller. “The Interior Ministry simply doesn’t publish them, despite a court ruling that ordered them to do so.”

6. The sense that despite everything, all is well.

There will be those who argue that the fact that I, or my Haaretz colleagues, are allowed to publish what we do, is proof that there is no fascism here, nor evidence of a police state.

The fact is that were we not Israeli Jews, and part of an establishment institution, any of us could find ourselves tossed out on the same pavement, and with the same lack of due process and due explanation, as Noam Chomsky.

7. The sense that there is a war on now, when there isn’t.

8. Selective enforcement of court rulings. Routine defiance of same, in particular by radical settlers

9. The 180-degree untruth that officials allow Israeli and Jerusalem Arabs to do what they want, while cracking down on their Jewish neighbors.

10. Equating criticism of the government with favoring the destruction of Israel.

This has become increasingly felt beyond Israel’s borders. In San Francisco, the canary in the coal mine of free discourse within the Jewish community, the Jewish Federation [JCF] recently revised and tightened the terms under which it agrees to grant funds to organizations.

“The JCF does not fund organizations that through their mission, activities or partnerships … advocate for, or endorse, undermining the legitimacy of Israel as a secure independent, democratic Jewish state, including through participation in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in whole or in part.”

The guidelines go on to state that “Presentations by organizations or individuals that are critical of particular Israeli government policies but are supportive of Israel’s right to exist as a secure independent Jewish democratic state” are “generally in accord with the policy statement,” but “early JCRC [Jewish Community Relations Council] consultation is strongly encouraged and the programming should be presented within an overall program strategy that is consistent with JCF’s core values.”

Can all this have spread this far, this fast? Because of Israel, have Bay Area Jews who do not believe in a specifically Jewish state, now forfeited their right to be part of the Jewish community? Have Jews who love Israel but are seen as too critical, or who support a boycott to make their criticisms manifest, been effectively excommunicated?

It’s a free country, I guess.

There’s other symptoms to which Burston fails to flesh out sufficiently or relate to the political ideology of zionism – the State Histradut trade union abomination which steals Palestinian money; super-nationalism where individuality is suppressed and heroism engendered in youth military service into a reflexive, militaristic collective with exceptionalist double standards; collective and ideology are infallible, disagreement is treasonous – like individuals, unhealthy collectives cannot withstand criticism; the syncretistic ideology of zionism, a toxic alloy of religious myth and political mores, eugenics and racism, blut und boden, wrought and fed from irrationality, anti-semitism and flight, western colonial privilege, hubris and entitlement; the justifications of crimes against humanity – collective punishment, apartheid, ghettoes, bantustans, detentions without charge nor trial even of children – the hideous oppression of and contempt for the ‘Other’; the straitjacket bonds between the zionist financial elite, the military and security apparatus; the Other is eternal scapegoat for the hierachy above; the arbitrary borders, expansionism, theft of Palestinian water, land and mineral resources; in the absence of recognised and legislated equal rights and citizenship, instead blooms a convoluted, poisonous system of arbitrary unequal rights; the subversion of the sexual, the disempowerment of women in their most vulnerable, critical relationships and catharsis within permanent militarism, permanent war and permanent enemies on all sides regardless of treaties and entreaties, broken promises and forgotten road maps, raison d’etres for permanent victimhood and humiliation, permanent military largesse from the US, a permanent peace process, the permanent occupation which is never relinquished because the other side ‘doesn’t want peace’ or ‘we have no partner for peace’, the permanent fertilisers which sustain the praxis between ‘rebalancing’.

Fascism is a form of societal auto-immune disease – it stunts and eventually withers, unsustainable because rigid hierachies and ideal individuals fashioned to defend enclosed collectives are ultimately unattainable. These truths are suppressed – with reason numbed or short-circuited in panic, inflexible political ideology as surrogate is refreshed and the system is restabilised back to a reduced temporary homeostasis with awe – fear-inspiring spectacle – another war, another persecution, another killing, another repression, another ghetto, another land theft, another olive tree uprooted, another martyr, another genocide. In the end, debilitated by its own excesses, political zionism like other varieties of fascism before will fall.

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Obama needs a history lesson and a course in human rights

A question from the audience after Obama’s poor SCOTUS speech reveals Obama has a shocking ignorance of the history of the Middle East and transparent double standards when it comes to the protection of the human rights of the stateless, defenceless Palestinian people. Has the Middle East been plaguing itself? He is a vapid tool of the Israel lobby.

The full transcript of Obama’s woeful answer is here.