Politics

December 15, 2011December 11, 2020

Happy Summer Solstice 2011

Nutanyahoo expresses his wish that violent settler rioters will be prosecuted in military courts, as are occupied Palestinians. Does this presage the advent of similar juridicial trying of Israelis who are in solidarity with Palestinians, arrested for protesting Israel’s apartheid wall, land grabs and occupation?

Barak would rather treat the settler thugs as a terror group yet suggests ‘administrative arrests’. Lieberman worries about the impact of the rioters on the fortunes of Israel’s illegal settlements projects, seeing them as “weeds that must be uprooted.”

The ministers’ comments came after some 50 settlers and right-wing activists entered a key West Bank military base on Tuesday, throwing rocks, burning tires, and vandalizing military vehicles.

In an apparent price-tag attack earlier Wednesday, anonymous perpetrators set a historical Jerusalem mosque alight, spray painting phrases such as “Muhammad is dead” and “Muhammad is a pig” on its walls.

Also on Wednesday, Justice Minister Ne’eman is expected to form a list of proposals geared at toughening legal actions against right-wing activists and in the wake of recent price tag attacks.

Prosecution under military law would marginalise the settlers from Israel proper and could also move the goal posts contemporaneously for solidarity protesters.

The zionist ‘State’ has spoken – violent acts against its ‘defensive’ apparatus are not civil crimes, but acts of war regardless of whether the ‘crime’ is committed by the occupied, or those who steal from occupied Palestinians. (Crimes of theft from Palestinians and even crimes of violence against Palestinians by illegal settlers however are rarely prosecuted by Israel.) With its response to the settler assault on its IOF, the state is setting itself against its own nationals.

This is the sort of contradiction which exemplifies fascism. In fascist states, the state, the collective of ‘nationals’ (and only Jews are nationals in Israel) is deemed to be more important than the rights of the individual. Yet those who belong to the state – its nationals, are expected to have allegiance to the state, although it puts itself before their rights. To go against the state means pitting oneself against a collective of which one is a part by nationality and allegiance, to which one already has surrendered one’s individual rights.

Peres, the ‘soft’ face of Israel, pokes up his hypocritical head and wails about the Ten Commandments, as if zionists, other than the odd spiritual zionist, have ever cared about keeping them where Palestinians are concerned. Deceitfully, the Yesha (settler) Council chairman attempts to cover up for the settlers, setting the tone for the usual retreat back to the customary defensive posture of entitlement to land theft by claiming provocation, including an oblique slur toward Islam.

“most of the settlers are opposed to violence. There is no justification for (these) actions, no matter what the religion of the victims is.” However, Dayan added that “in recent days there is a trend of incitement… against the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.

Who is inciting again?

since the start of 2011, more than 500 Palestinian homes, wells and water containers and other basic infrastructure in the West Bank and Jerusalem have been destroyed, which led to the displacement of more than 1, 000 Palestinians according to UN statistics.

“This is more than double the number of people displaced over the same period in 2010, and the highest figure since at least 2005. More than half of those displaced have been children for whom the loss of their home is particularly devastating,”

Lebanon’s president highlights West’s hypocrisy on ‘democracy’ & treatment of Palestinians
Before the zionist invasion began in the 19th century, “Palestinians made up 95 percent of the indigenous population of Palestine”.
Maybe Newt can occupy Palestine, but Israel can’t
Palestinian flag raised at UNESCO marking admission as new member
The ugly face of ziofascism
Resistance key to freeing Palestine: Haniyeh
From Palestine to Syria: Free Razan @RedRazan

December 9, 2011December 11, 2020

Apologists for Israeli war crimes support for Arch Enemy on BDS page

The metal band Arch Enemy is scheduled to play apartheid Israel on 24th January, following their Khaos Over Europe Tour in conjunction with Amnesty International’s freedom of expression campaign.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) group Don’t Play Apartheid Israel (DPAI) created a Facebok page to support the Palestinian call for BDS and to try to persuade Arch Enemy to cancel the gig, in support of the oppressed Palestinian people.

Arch Enemy: Resist Playing for Apartheid Israel

The FB page was then attacked by some of Arch Enemy’s more unsavoury fans, those supporting apartheid Israel. They are very unlike the Arch Enemy fans that a DPAI representative spoke with on 6th December, who had completely different attitudes.

This is a sample of some of their posts, a flavour of the zionist fans of Arch Enemy. Some quotes: “you are missing the whole point, THERE IS NO PALASTINIAN PEOPLE, how can we occupy something that doesn’t exist? “ “fuck you asshole , go live in some non democratic muslim 3rd world country”

SOURCE

December 5, 2011December 11, 2020

Arch Enemy, Freedom of Speech and BDS

The metal band Arch Enemy is scheduled to play apartheid Israel on 24th January, following their Khaos Over Europe Tour in conjunction with Amnesty International’s freedom of expression campaign.

Amnesty International: Freedom of expression

Whilst Palestine is not one of the 9 cases on which Amnesty is focusing, those who do speak out in non-violent protest are targeted by Israel for example: Israel urged to lift Al-Haq director’s travel ban and also political prisoners of conscience detained in military prisons without trial or charge.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) group Don’t Play Apartheid Israel (DPAI) created a Facebook page to support the Palestinian call for BDS and to try to persuade Arch Enemy to cancel the gig in support of the oppressed Palestinian people.

Arch Enemy: Resist Playing for Apartheid Israel

PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) issued a very strong plea for Arch Enemy not to play apartheid Israel.

“Today, Palestinian civil society groups are calling on artists to shun Tel Aviv in the same way that South African activists called on artists to boycott Sun City. All we are asking is for you to refrain from crossing a picket line called by Palestinian society, endorsed by international organizations, and increasingly supported by progressive-Israelis [17]. Palestinian civil society is asking this of you as the most essential contribution to their struggle to achieve peace and justice. They are calling for nothing short of revolution, rebellion, and freedom, as echoed in the slogan of the BDS movement for Freedom, Equality and Justice.”

Arch Enemy: Stand with Revolution not Apartheid

While espousing freedom of speech, Arch Enemy engaged in censorship and deleted all posts which asked them to refrain from playing in Israel and urged them to listen to and really hear the Palestinian people from their official FB page.

On Saturday 3rd December, Angela Gossow from Arch Enemy posted this on the BDS Facebook page, as well as the USACBI page:

Arch Angela: if the constant threat, bullying and slander of arch enemy via email and online does not stop immediately, we will publish some of the threats we have recceived from your supporters, where they claim they will come to some of our shows and threaten to attack us, both verbally and physically.

i am making amnesty international aware of your criminal methods and your breach of freedom of choice, freedom of expression and freedom of art. it is up to us (and only us!) to chose in which countries we perform and bring our message to. it is NOT yours to tell us what to do and to force your will upon us. you are hurting our rights of freedom and you make us fear for our safety. SHAME ON YOU! Music should transcend all races, political issues and borders – we will not be instrumentalised, neither by you or any other organization or government. who are you to tell us what to do?! Yesterday at 17:23

There were absolutely no threats made against Arch Enemy by BDS campaigners, rather attempts to highlight the terrible injustices that Israel subjects the Palestinians to and efforts to get the band to live up to its talk of freedom and equality and not to endorse a state which occupies, dispossesses and imprisons a people.

Today, further posts were removed from the Arch Enemy page, giving the lie to their claims of: “End repression. Allow expression!”

So, if Arch Enemy believes in freedom of expression, why do they engage in censorship? If they think there is nothing wrong in ignoring the Palestinians and playing in apartheid Israel, why not engage in discussion?

SOURCE

UPDATE

Another post in support of freedom of expression in Israel and BDS has been removed from Arch Enemy’s facebook page wall.

Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory – Between Law and Practice [.pdf]

The detention of Palestinians by the IOF is carried out on the basis of article
78 (a-d) of Military Order No. 378 of 1970 on “Security regulations” (Judea
and Samaria), as well as subsequent military orders amending that order.
Based on these orders, any Palestinian can be held for eight days without
being informed of the reason for his or her arrest and without being
brought before a judge on the basis of secret information that neither
the detainees nor their lawyers have access to. The detainee can also be
prevented from meeting with his or her lawyer for two days and the IOF is
not required to notify the family of the detainee of the reasons for, or the
location of, his or her detention. Thus, it can be concluded that the IOF
violate the right of Palestinian detainees to be informed of the reasons for
their detention, as provided for in international humanitarian and human
rights law.

Addameer testifies at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Israel’s policies of large-scale and arbitrary arrest and detention of Palestinians are made possible by a discriminatory regime of law and institutions working in three main concurrent ways to maintain domination over Palestinians: first by applying a more advantageous legal regime to Jewish Israelis, whether residing in the oPt or in Israel; second by effectively criminalizing any opposition to the occupation; and finally by applying differing legal systems to different parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), thereby fragmenting and segregating the Palestinian territory and people.

In the West Bank, Israeli authorities carry out arrests and detentions of Palestinians by virtue of a system of military regulations in place since the beginning of the occupation. According to international humanitarian law, any new legislation enacted by the Occupying Power should be limited to regulations protecting the rights of protected persons or the security of the Occupying Power. The military orders issued by Israel, however, extend much beyond these limits and further criminalize any form of opposition to the occupation, legally cementing the oppression of the Palestinian people. Despite living in the same territory, Jewish settlers residing in the West Bank are not subjected to this legislation, but rather to Israeli civil law, applied extra-territorially. Under this separate and unequal legal regime, Palestinians are subjected to more severe detention and sentencing provisions than Jewish settlers, with little or no effective judicial oversight, most notably with regard to administrative detention. In addition, the military courts, through which these military orders are enforced, do not conform to international fair trial and due process standards, further contributing to the arbitrary nature of this regime.

Before Israel’s unilateral “withdrawal” from Gaza in 2005, a similar system of military orders governed the arrest of Palestinians in the Strip. Since then, however, Gazans have been subjected to a different legal regime than Palestinians in the West Bank and are instead mainly arrested on the basis of Israeli criminal law, under which they are automatically classified as “security” prisoners and suffer from harsher standards of detention and sentencing than their “criminal” counterparts.

In East Jerusalem, although Israel imposed Israeli civil law upon its illegal annexation of the city in 1967, Palestinian residents continue to be subjected to a dual system of law: Israeli civil law and Israeli military regulations. In that framework, Israeli authorities often detain and interrogate Palestinians from East Jerusalem under military orders, a system that permits longer periods of detention, before transferring them to the Israeli civil system for trial, where prosecutors can seek higher sentences based on the principle that security offenses are less common than in the military system in the oPt. The arrest and detention of Jewish settlers residing in East Jerusalem, however, is governed solely by Israeli civil law, which affords them greater protection and due process rights.

Finally, within the domestic criminal justice system itself, Israeli authorities discriminate between incarcerated Jewish and Palestinian citizens by defining them either as “security” or as criminal prisoners, with the overwhelming majority of the former being Palestinians. Classification as a security prisoner carries with it fewer legal guarantees and rights, with privileges such as receiving family visits without a glass divider, access to books or other items, and occasional visits outside the prison available only to criminal prisoners.

Furthermore, security prisoners are interrogated by the Israeli Security Agency, which often uses methods that amount to ill-treatment and torture. Criminal prisoners, on the other hand, are interrogated by the Israeli police, whose methods of operation are governed by a different set of rules. This has created two distinct regimes of interrogation, with the one affording less protection and rife with abuse used almost exclusively against Palestinians, whether from theoPt or Israel.

It therefore appears that Israel’s arrest and detention of Palestinians in the oPt and within Israel proper is governed by a regime of laws and institutions almost completely separate from the one administering the arrest of Jewish Israelis. Because this system enables the large-scale arbitrary arrest of Palestinians while generally affording them lower protections and guarantees than Jewish Israelis, it should be understood as a discriminatory institutional tool of domination and oppression against them.

Interview: Hunger strikes created “new sense of solidarity”
A Palestinian political prisoner’s take on Israel’s protest movement
PCHR Weekly Report: 2 Palestinians wounded, 23 abducted by Israeli troops this week
Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire on Palestine, Political Prisoners and Nuclear Weapons
Abraham Foxman in the Huffington Post: Israel’s democracy is eroding
Richard Falk on the Russell Tribunal : The importance of the RToP session is to strengthen the civil society case against the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people. As such, it adds a certain quality of gravitas to such international initiatives as the Freedom Flotilla and the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign.

December 2, 2011December 11, 2020

Netanyahu’s Transparent Dancing Demurral

The lying Nutanyahoo attempts to avoid the lobster quadrille with the Quartet, preferring to commence a secret hasbara tango with an illegitimate Abbas, who is making offers without consultation again. Anyone who’s read the Liekud Party platform, which remains unchanged, or Nutanyahoo’s Bar Ilan speech of June 09, knows how disingenuous Nutanyahoo really is. He can’t go against his own party platform which says, amongst other chauvinist, colonialist drivel that flies in the face of international law:

The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.
…
The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.

The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel’s existence, security and national needs.

Palestine / Gaza Links

Viva Palestina is finalising plans for the Kick Off for Palestine campaign to construct and maintain links with sporting venues in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Ali Abunimah makes a terrific post examining the differentiation between criticism of jewishness and zionism in matters of dual loyalty:

I agree fully with Jones’ reading of Flynn’s reported comments. If accurate it is indeed outrageous to suggest that a British person cannot be loyal to the UK just because he or she is also Jewish. And it’s even more outrageous to suggest that a Jewish person has no “roots” in the UK, just as it would be to suggest the same of a British Muslim or any other person.

But what Jones – and perhaps other critics of Flynn’s comments – have missed, is that the claims Flynn reportedly made have always been at the very heart of Zionism.

Joseph Massad has noted this in his crucial book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question as has international law expert Victor Kattan.

The basic idea is simple enough: Zionists, just like anti-Semites, believed that Jews were inherently alien and rootless in Europe and needed to be expelled physically. The “father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl in his seminal tract, Der Judenstaat, wrote this nauseatingly anti-Semitic passage:

The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country, and will remain so, even in those highly civilized—for instance, France—until the Jewish question finds a solution on a political basis. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.

Of course the “political solution” of which Herzl spoke was – Zionism – the removal of Jews from Europe and America so that they could not carry with them the “seeds” of their own persecution.Greatest British Zionist hero a vile anti-Semite

It is no coincidence then that the greatest British hero of Zionists to this day is Lord Arthur Balfour whose eponymous Balfour Declaration promised the Zionist movement that to which it had no right: the land of Palestine.

As Kattan points out in his book From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949, Balfour’s anti-Semitism was well documented and expressed in his writings. From Kattan:

Zionism actually provided Balfour and those who thought like him with the perfect pretext to reduce Jewish immigration into Britain whilst portraying themselves, falsely, as ‘humanitarians’ concerned about their welfare. This is what Balfour wrote in the conclusion to his introduction to Nahum Sokolow’s epic book, the History of Zionism, 1600–1918 (1919):

If [Zionism] succeeds, it will do a great spiritual and material work for the Jews, but not for them alone. For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of **a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason, it should receive our support.

That Balfour had the gall to write this in a book on Zionism was foreboding. One can only imagine what he wrote about the Jews in private or in correspondence that was destroyed or lost.

Indeed. And, as Kattan documents, such sentiments were shared by German anti-Semites who in the same period became enthusiastic supporters of Zionism.

U.S. military chief: Unclear if Israel would alert U.S. ahead of attack on Iran – protocols stuffed?

He said the United States was convinced that sanctions and diplomatic pressure was the right path to take on Iran, along with “the stated intent not to take any options off the table” – language that leaves open the possibility of future military action.

“I’m not sure the Israelis share our assessment of that.

And because they don’t and because to them this is an existential threat, I think probably that it’s fair to say that our expectations are different right now,” Dempsey said in an interview as he flew to Washington from London.

Asked whether he was talking about the differences between Israeli and U.S. expectations over sanctions, or differences in perspective about the future course of events, Dempsey said:

“All of the above.” He did not elaborate.

He also did not disclose whether he believed Israel was prepared to strike Iran.

Fayyad to Haaretz: I will not lead a Palestinian unity government
Survey released last week shows 57 percent Palestinians want Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to serve as head of the unity government.

December 1, 2011December 1, 2011

Freedom Carols for Palestine

Freedom Carols for Palestine, November 29, 2011 outside Dezire Cosmetics store at Broadway Shopping Centre. Dezire sells Ahava products and Ahava is targeted by the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israeli Apartheid because its products are made from stolen Palestinian natural resources. Organised by Coalition For Palestine to mark UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.