"We all know that Israel practices apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The only question is, whether it’s worse than in South Africa”
(John Dugard on Europe’s Hypocrisy and Cowardice)
Gaza: A Cruel Testing Ground for Israel's Weapons
Israeli occupation forces injured more than 1,100 protesters on the sixth consecutive Friday of mass protests along Gaza’s eastern perimeter under the Great March of Return banner.
No fatalities were reported besides the 41 killed so far. Gaza’s health ministry said that nearly 100 were wounded by live fire. Three were reported to be critically injured.
Five medical workers were injured during Friday’s protest, according to Al Mezan, as were five journalists.
Palestinian voices of resistance in Gaza | AJ+, after the first week of the Great March
Each time someone tells you people shouldn't take sides on Palestine, or that you should be more fair, or balanced, or neutral, send them this TEDs talk by lawyer Anna Baltzer.
PEN International strongly condemns the decision of the Nazareth Magistrate's Court to convict Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour of ‘support for a terrorist organization’ and ‘incitement to violence’. The conviction is mainly related to a YouTube video in which she recites one of her poems entitled, ‘Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum (Resist, my people, resist them).’
PEN International President Jennifer Clement, who met Dareen Tatour at her home in Nazareth last year, said: “Dareen Tatour has been convicted for doing what writers do every day – we use our words to peacefully challenge injustice. I was incredibly honoured to meet Dareen at her home last year and PEN will continue to call for justice in this case.”
PEN believes that Dareen Tatour was targeted for her poetry and peaceful activism, and has been campaigning for her immediate release and for the charges against her to be dropped. A sentencing hearing will take place on the 31st of May.
Abu Mazen-Mahmoud Abbas, was accused last week of anti-semitism and made his excuses after the Zonist lobby pushed all the "right" people in the owrld to ask him to do so, although he had only been not said a word .dthis saBinyamin Netanyahumain
Albert Einstein, along with other Jewish luminaries, including Hannah Arendt, published a letter in the New York Times on December 4, 1948. That was only a few months after Israel had declared its independence and as hundreds of Palestinian villages were being actively demolished after their inhabitants were expelled.
The letter denounced Israel’s newly-founded Herut party and its young leader, Menachem Begin.
Herut was carved out of the Irgun terrorist gang, famous for its many massacres against Palestinian Arab communities leading up to the Nakba, the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their historic homeland in 1947-48.
In the letter, Einstein, and others, described Herut (Freedom) party as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
For a letter of this nature to appear a mere few years after the end of World War II and the devastation of the Holocaust is a profound indication of the clear chasm that existed among Jewish intellectuals at the time: the Zionists who supported Israel and its violent birth, and those who took the high moral ground and objected to it.
Sadly, the latter group – although still in existence – had lost the battle.
Herut later merged with other groups to form the Likud Party. Begin received the Nobel Peace Prize and the Likud is now the leading party in Israel’s most right-wing government coalition. The ‘Nazi and Fascist’-like philosophy of Herut have prevailed, and it now engulfs and defines mainstream society in Israel.
This right-wing tendency is even more pronounced among young Israelis than previous generations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the leader of Begin’s party, the Likud. His current coalition includes Moldavian immigrant Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, founder of the ultra-nationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and an illegal settler in an illegal Jewish colony in the West Bank.
In response to ongoing popular protests by besieged Palestinians in Gaza, and in justification of the high number of deaths (41 so far) and injuries (more than 2.000) inflicted on the unarmed protesters by the Israeli army, Lieberman argued that “there are no innocent people in Gaza.”
When the Defense Minister of a country espouses this kind of belief, one can hardly be shocked that Israeli snipers are shooting Palestinian youngsters, while cheering on camera as they hit their target.
This kind of discourse – Fascist par excellence – is by no means a fringe narrative within Israeli society.
Netanyahu’s coalition is rife with such morally-objectional characters.
Israeli politician, Ayelet Shaked, has often called for the genocide against Palestinians.
Palestinians “are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads,” she wrote in a Facebook post in 2015. “Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs … They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
A few months after the publication of the statement, Netanyahu, in December 2015, appointed her as the country’s Justice Minister.
Shaked belongs to the Jewish Home Party, headed by Naftali Bennett. The latter is Israel’s Minister of Education and known for similarly violent statements. He was one of the first politicians who came out in defense of Israeli soldiers accused of violating human rights at the Gaza border. Other top Israeli politicians followed suit.
On April 19, Israel celebrated its independence. “The Nazi and Fascist” mentality that defined Herut in 1948 now defines the most powerful ruling class in Israel. Israel’s leaders speak openly of genocide and murder, yet they celebrate and promote Israel as if an icon of civilization, democracy and human rights.
Even cultural Zionists of old would have been terribly horrified at the creature that their beloved Israeli has become, seven decades after its birth.
Certainly, the Palestinian people are still fighting for their land, identity, dignity and freedom. But the truth is that Israel’s biggest enemy is Israel itself. The country has failed to part ways with its violent politics and ideology of yesteryears. On the contrary, Israel’s ideological debate has been settled in favor of perpetual violence, racism and apartheid.
In the supposed ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, the margin of critique has grown very limited.
It is the likes of Netanyahu, Lieberman, Bennett and Shaked who now represent modern Israel and, behind them, a massive constituency of right-wing religious and ultra-nationalists, who have little regard for Palestinians, for human rights, international law and such seemingly frivolous values as peace and justice.
In 1938, Einstein had contended with the very idea behind the creation of Israel. It runs counter to “the essential nature of Judaism,” he said.
A few years later, in 1946, he argued before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on the Palestinian issue: “I cannot understand why it is (meaning Israel) is needed … I believe it is bad.”
Needless to say, if Einstein was alive today, he would have joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, which aims at holding Israel accountable for its violent and illegal practices against Palestinians.
Equally true, he would have surely been branded anti-Semitic or a ‘self-hating Jew’ by Israeli leaders and their supporters. Today’s Zionists are, indeed, unfazed.
But this painful paradigm must be overturned. Palestinian children are not terrorists and cannot be treated as such. They are not ‘little snakes’, either. Palestinian mothers should not be killed. The Palestinian people are not ‘enemy combatants’ to be eradicated. Genocide must not be normalized.
70 years after Israel’s independence and Einstein’s letter, the country’s legacy is still marred with blood and violence. Despite the ongoing party in Tel Aviv, there is no reason to celebrate and every reason to mourn.
Yet, hope is kept alive because the Palestinian people are still resisting; and they need the world to stand in solidarity with them. They need you, me, us, to stand in solidarity with them. It is the only way for the ghost of Herut to quit haunting the Palestinians and for the ‘Nazi and Fascist’ philosophies to be forever defeated.
paesltin
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
With these commanding words, Robert H. Jackson, Chief Counsel for the United States, opened the War Crimes Tribunals at Nuremberg, Germany not long after the conclusion of World War II.
Empanelled to hold accountable military, political and judicial leaders for violations of international law… including war crimes, crimes against humanity and the law of war… the tribunals imposed personal accountability for genocide directed at Jews and others marked by the German state as a challenge to its declared racial, religious and political supremacy.
Although these offenses took many forms, at their core, each derived their evil from a common intersect that those targeted by the state for eradication were not just inferior, but unworthy of life itself… men, women and children, young and old, reduced to little more than objects of surreal derision whose mere existence contaminated the state’s supremacist lens.
There is no secret about the campaign of terror unleashed by the Third Reich as it swallowed states and triggered international violence unseen before or since. Nor are its tools of open warfare against military and civilians, alike, subject to any serious debate. While some choose to contest the number of victims or recast the precise instruments of persecution, no serious observer of history doubts the role that box cars, ghettos, siege, and ovens played in a conscious effort to silence the diversity of life while much of the world looked away.
The assault on humanity did not unfold overnight, or in a vacuum, with a sudden roundup. It followed a well calculated and implemented historical rewrite… a slow, but steady, recast of entire peoples… stripping them of their history, culture and collective purpose and decency.
What began with the burn of books and silence of press soon moved on to a successful reach of propaganda that cast a dark pall across millions whose wrong was to speak a different language, embrace another faith or to demand justice. Once there, it was a short walk to assault and worse.
With conscience, and vision as an outsider looking in, today, it is simply impossible not to feel an overwhelming sense of sheer revulsion when, if one is a caring being, an honest scan comes across Israel.
Forget about humanity and compassion or any broad notion of enlightened collective purpose. By now, Israel has reduced these cornerstones of fundamental decency to fabled fiction… a successful narrative of perverse existence that crushes truth and justice as little more than tedious impediments to its own, now decade’s old, ethnic and racial pogrom against others.
Israel is good at what it does. Damn good. No, not its slaughter, torture and endless detention and land theft; these are givens. A dark, very public, almost proud record of “achievement” that stands essentially unparalleled when it comes to recent contempt for international norm and law.
Like those before, what it really excels at is the grand lie… the convenient historical rewrite; the excuse; the ability to recast yesterday, today and surely tomorrow as so much a duty-bound journey in which no outrage is beyond the pale, no crime too extreme, no offense too offensive. Always, of course, cast in the talisman of survival. It’s a skill… a dodgy political art-form that converts inconvenient truth into self serving dogma with all too predictable deadly consequence.
Unlike that rare explosive autocrat or passing despotic regime, Israel has perfected its crafted control of selective reality in time-tested ways nothing short of masterful. Long before U.N. anthropologists discovered a European state in the midst of an Arab history, Zionists mastered the skill of expedient deception.
Thus, almost a hundred years ago, European terrorists became celebrated freedom fighters as they slaughtered Palestinians asleep in their beds and cribs. The Nakba, a forced stampede of almost a million Palestinians sparked by mass rape and murder, recast with historical ease to become a voluntary transition… a move by restive villagers to find a better time in a better place.
Kibbutzim, those enlightened socialist communes that, with magic-like remake, blossomed from long barren deserts. Could that be the rubble of age-old villages and decomposed remains just below the veneer of the sand?
Settlements, an employment opportunity for a troubled work force in need of purpose and discipline. The siege of Gaza… not at all a premeditated embargo of food, medicine, water, electricity and movement to break the will of its two million people, but rather a generous helping hand to liberate them from the limitations of their primitive vision and Hamas terror.
Advancing itself as a democracy under siege, Israel has long since abandoned any pretense of equality and justice in its limitless thirst to seize what little remains of Palestine as it exalts a racist de jureJewish state in its quest.
This supremacist drive has been occasioned not merely with the passage of time or through a loss of interest by the world community alone. Along the way, to be sure, by design, Israel has successfully exploited the ignorance and fear of Arab and Muslim communities by the West. Of late, it has found willing companion among some Arab states anxious to move on from proxy to full on partner as they’ve tired of the “dilemma” that is Palestine.
In Israel and the occupied territories, the catalog of ersatz narrative is endless. With a slap… a stab, a book… a bomb; a prayer… a provocation, the Zionist tale has long since swallowed any semblance of relevance, let alone reality. Yet, from time immemorial, much of the world has blinked, frozen in place, fixated by a steady broadcast of propaganda, both home spun in Israel and in echo abroad.
Yet, over the last ten days, that faux moral perch has begun to collapse as the winds of truth have blown away the mask of hate that is very much Israel. During this time, tens of thousands of peaceful unarmed demonstrators marched on the barricades of their Gaza prison only to be met by carnage.
It is unnecessary to repeat, in full, the tales of slaughter that ensued as hundreds of snipers, drones and tanks announced with deadly precision that all were fair game for nothing more than voice. When the tear gas cleared , “fortunate” young men, women and children, elderly and journalists, alike, lay paralyzed by a strain of chemical assault, similar to sporadic reported uses since 2001, which soon gave way to uncontrolled vomiting and trembles.
For others, less fortunate, thousands lay bloodied by explosive high velocity munitions designed to rip apart flesh and destroy organs. Some thirty-one were murdered. Almost all casualties shot in the back of their head or torso.
What is there about a peaceful march, the national flag, and a Dakbe song and dance that so enrages an occupation force as to drive its snipers to unleash deadly targeted fire as if surrounded by well armed enemy combatants?
Under international law, crimes against humanity include “murder and other inhumane acts carried out against any civilian population… when such acts are done or such persecutions carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.”
A war crime is an act that constitutes a “serious violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility and include intentionally killing civilians… destroying civilian property… and serious violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality, such as strategic bombing of civilian populations.”
Under the law of war, military necessity is governed by several constraints: an attack or action must be intended to help in the defeat of the enemy; it must be an attack on a legitimate military objective, and the harm caused to civilians or civilian property must be proportional and not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
Under international humanitarian law, proportionality is a principle that governs the legal use of force in an armed conflict, whereby belligerents must make sure that the harm caused to civilians or civilian property is not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected by an attack on a legitimate military objective.
Finally, “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him”.
That is to say it is not an acceptable defense to simply say “I was just following my superior’s orders.”
For years, as some have debated the reach of international law, much of the world has stood in silence and, accordingly, very much complicit as Israel has carried out unspeakable offenses against a largely civilian population in Palestine.
Although often nuanced, if not complex, the application of law to facts is not magic. At times a plain read of well settled legal covenants in the light of events at hand can lead even an unpracticed but principled eye to conclude that violations of law have in fact occurred.
Not before has Israel’s indifference to international law been so clear, so visible, so compelling as it has been through the lens of its repeated slaughter, over the last ten days in Gaza, as thousands of civilians have simply marched and marched in peace to say “enough”.
Today, more than 70 years after the judgments at Nuremberg, we are witness to an undeniable paradox as those victimized long ago by notions of racial, religious and political superiority have themselves become willing accomplished adherents of that same evil doctrine.
In words that shook the silence of the courtroom with the majesty of the moment war crimes prosecutor Robert H. Jackson passed, to generations to come, a reminder of the obligation companion to humanity: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”
PALESTINA
Norman Finkelstein on Gaza. Worth the time, I promess.
Addameer: Today, 3 May 2018, on the occasion of International World Press Freedom Day, freedom of thought and expression remain a constrained phenomena in the occupied Palestinian territory.
While events are taking place around the world to commemorate the day, 26 journalists currently sit in occupation jails, a poet has been convicted of incitement in an Israeli court, and the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) ‘Electronic Crimes Law’ remains a utilized piece of legislation.
Bushra Taweel, journalist and spokesperson for Aneen al-Qaid Network, remains under administrative detention after she was arrested in November 2017; as does Nidal Abu Aker, who hosted a radio show about the prisoner issue on the Sawt al Waheda station. Having been held under administrative detention on multiple occasions, Nidal’s current detainment has been ongoing since August 2016.
The situation is not much better for those Palestinians who hold citizenship from the occupying state. Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was today convicted of ‘incitement to terrorism’ and ‘support for terror organizations’ after she published a number of poems on social media.
As for the ‘Electronic Crimes Law’, the majority of charges brought against journalists by the PA last year remain on the books without any progress in their cases. Additionally, Ahmad Awartani has remained in Jericho prison since his arrest on the 22 April for a Facebook post.
Finally, the continued instances of occupation forces firing on individuals clearly marked as journalists in Gaza constitutes a severe violation of the special status afforded to the press.
For the whole of historical Palestine, the cause of press freedom looks bleak. For those who wield power, the one thing more dangerous that a material challenger is those who can propagate a resistance of consciousness. This is the exact role that a free press plays. It allows people to understand their political situation and, therefore, to chart a path forward. By inhibiting the freedom of press, not only is the freedom of expression stifled but so is freedom of thought. For without having a clear grasp on the reality, how can one begin to change it.
Addameer calls on both the occupying state and the Palestinian Authority to abide by their obligations under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to allow for freedom of expression and thought.
Palestinian footballer Muhammad Abu Obaid, shot in both legs by Israeli occupation forces during Great March of Return protests.
Jogador de futebol palestino Muhammad Abu Obaid foi baleado por snipers israelenses nas duas pernas, durante os protestos pacíficos da Grande Marcha do Retorno em Gaza.
Meninos palestinos em aula em uma tenda no lugar em que antes tinha sua escola demolida pelas forças de ocupação israelenses em Hebron, na Cisjordânia.
Palestinian pupils attend class in a tent at the site where their school, demolished by Israeli occupation forces, once stood in Hebron, in the West Bank.
Apartheid Adventures
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