Rogue State of Israel VI : Licenced to Lie Cheat Kill?

A Cisjordânia acorda e entra na linha de mira da IDF 

The West Bank in the Line of Fire of the IDF

Democracy Now: Turning Point in the West Bank?
Análise de uma jornalista israelense dos eventos na Cisjordânia

Vídeos abaixo em ordem cronológica dos recentes acontecimentos
na Cisjordânia

Three Palestinians have been killed in huge protests in the occupied West Bank. Protesters attempted to reach the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to mark Laylat al-Qadr, one of the holiest nights in Islam, and protests have been reported in other areas of the occupied territory. The demonstrations escalated on Friday prayers (Friday is Muslim's Sunday).

Earlier yesterday, Thursday, at least 15 people were killed when a UN-run school being used as a civilian shelter was bombed. Israel says the school may have been hit by an errant Hamas rocket. The Gaza health ministry says it believes the shelling was Israeli. It was the fourth attack on a UN installation in Gaza in four days. 

The UN agency in Gaza, the UNRWA, said it had given the Israeli army the precise GPS coordinates of the school.As of 10pm GMT, the Gaza health ministry said the death toll in Gaza stood at 800 killed and more than 5,250 injured in 17 days of Israeli invasion. Two Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian rocket fire in Israel and 32 Israeli soldiers have been killed inside Gaza.

In the first shooting on Friday in Hawara, near Nablus, an Israeli settler shot dead an 18-year-old and injured three other Palestinians. Two hours later at the same protest Israeli soldiers open fire, killing a 22-year-old.
Three other Palestinians were shot dead as Palestinians clashed with Israeli soldiers in Beit Ummar, near Hebron. One of those killed reportely worked for the Defence for Children International charity.

Três dos centenas de policiais israelenses 
à paisana infiltrados na Cisjordânia, 
imobilizam um palestino durante
um protesto em Jerusalém ocupada

Na Cisjordânia, três palestinos foram mortos durante as enormes passeatas ao longo da noite de Quinta para Sexta-feira. Os manifestantes tentaram chegar à mesquita Al-Aqsa em Jerusalém para celebrar Layat al-Qadr, uma das festas religiosas islâmicas mais importantes e foram barrados pelos soldados da IDF que atiraram na multidão e mataram dois palestinos. É bem possível que as manifetações aumentem até a hora da Oração na Cisjordânia inteira.
Antes, um colono judeu matou um palestino de 18 anos e feriu mais três outros jovens desarmados. Duas horas depois um soldado da IDF (Forças Israelenses de Ocupação) matou um universitário palestino de 22 anos. Três outros foram mortos pela IDF perto de Hebron. Um deles era funcionário da ONG caritativa internacional Defense for Children.

Ontem, pelo menos 15 gazauís foram mortos quando as forças aéreas israelenses bombardearam um abrigo das Nações Unidas em Gaza (vídeo no blog de ontem. Israel argumentou que o local foi alvo de foguete errado do Hamas, mas o Hamas negou peremptoriamente e tudo indica que a bomba é da IDF.

As perdas palestinas esta manhã era de cerca de 800 mortos - 40% de mulheres e crianças - e de mais de 5.250 feridos durante os 17 dias de invasão israelense. Israel perdeu 32 soldados e dois civis.  

A dupla macabra Binyamin Netanyahu e Avigdor Lieberman estavam achando que a Solução Final que haviam previsto para a Faixa de Gaza iria funcionar sem que a Cisjordânia reagisse. Planejavam não deixar pedra sobre pedra e os 1 milhão e 800 mil gazauís mortos ou aleijados. Porém, vai ter uma Terceira Intifada. A última, é o que se ouve falar na Cisjordânia.

Today, MPs Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Jim Fitzpatrick, along with the film director Ken Loach, and Hugh Lanning (Chair) and Sarah Colborne (Director) of Palestine Solidarity Campaign handed in an open letter to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street calling for an immediate arms embargo on Israel.
The letter was signed by 17 MPs, two peers, and others including Bryan Adams, Jemima Khan, Hanif Kureshi, Will Self, Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, actors David Morissey, Laura Bailey and Maxine Peake, authors William Dalrymple and Ahdaf Soueif, and Ken Loach.
PSC put the letter on its website on the morning of Wednesday 23^rd July. By the evening of Thursday 24^th, the open letter had been signed by more than 21,000 members of the public. Their signatures were also handed in with the letter.
Speaking outside Downing Street today, Hugh Lanning said: “Our aim is to stop the Israeli government getting military aid and equipment from the British government. Our aid and arms help kill innocent Palestinian civilians. We need to isolate apartheid Israel now and impose sanctions now.”
Jeremy Corbyn MP: “The UK has a very close relationship with Israel, including buying and selling arms, and it’s time that this relationship was brought to an end since Israel is now under investigation for war crimes over the bombing of Gaza. I received an email from Dr Mads Gilbert, working in Shifa Hospital, and it brought tears to my eyes when he was describing the pools of blood, the electricity cut off, the lack of clean water and the continuous surge of the dead and injured pouring into the hospital. It’s people like that who are saving lives, and Israel which is taking lives.”
Ken Loach: “It’s disgraceful that our government is arming the state of Israel to continue its slaughter of civilians, of women and children. Everyone must be devastated by the sight of the maimed and the dead in Gaza, and everyone must direct their anger towards the Israeli war machine.”
Bobby Gillespie, who signed the letter, said: “Our hearts and love are with the Palestinian people. We support their continuing fight for human rights and dignity and righteous resistance to Israeli imperialism, occupation and war crimes.”
PSC and other organisations have called a march and rally in London tomorrow (26th July), which will also demand an end to the arms trade with Israel.
Protesters will gather at the Israeli embassy, Kensington, at midday and march to Parliament. Speakers including children’s author and poet, Michael Rosen, comedian Jeremy Hardy and guitarist and music producer Dave Randall, will be among those addressing the rally at Parliament Square at 2.30pm.

BBC Hard Talk com Khaled Meshaal em Doha

"On July 7, Israel unleashed Operation Protective Edge against Gaza. When it launched a ground invasion on July 18, Israel had already killed 230 Gazan Palestinians — of whom 75% (171) were civilians and 20% (48) children — wounded more than 1,700, and destroyed or rendered uninhabitable hundreds of homes leaving more than 10,000 Gazans without shelter. On the other side, according to daily updates, Palestinian projectiles had killed one Israeli civilian, wounded 18, and damaged three Israeli homes. It is hard to conceive of a more disproportionate balance sheet in an alleged “war.”
Nonetheless, Human Rights Watch (HRW), in its legal reckoning, did not so much even out, as reverse, the balance sheet. It never explicitly accused Israel of committing war crimes, whereas its first press release already accused Hamas of committing them. If in fact HRW accurately interpreted the laws of war, the only rational conclusion would be that these laws are morally bankrupt and deserving of contempt: they would not be distilling but instead grossly distorting the moral realities of war, as they exonerate the major perpetrators of war crimes. But did HRW accurately interpret the laws of war, or did this influential human rights organization give Israel a green light to commit war crimes on a yet more massive scale during the ground invasion? Let us look at the record.
In its first press release on July 9, HRW stated: “Israeli attacks targeting homes may amount to prohibited collective punishment.” In its second press release on July 16, HRW stated: “Israeli air attacks in Gaza … have been targeting apparent civilian structures and killing civilians in violation of the laws of war. Israel should end unlawful attacks that do not target military objectives and may be intended as collective punishment or broadly to destroy civilian property.” It then proceeded to legally define the meaning of war crimes, but artfully avoided accusing Israel of committing them.
In these statements HRW doubly distanced itself from alleging Israeli war crimes. First, it qualified the weight of the incriminating evidence — “appear,” “may,” “apparent,” “may be.” Second, it recoiled from explicitly charging Israel with war crimes and instead settled for lesser or vaguer charges — “collective punishment,” “violation of the laws of war,” “unlawful attacks.” The cautiousness perplexes in light of the evidence assembled by HRW itself.

Israel consequently has no legal right to use force to suppress the Palestinian self-determination struggle. Israel also cannot contend that, because this self-determination struggle unfolds within the framework of an occupation, it has the legal right, as the occupying power, to enforce the occupation so long as it endures.

In conformity with tenets of international law, HRW stated that “indiscriminate or targeted,” “deliberate or reckless,” attacks directed at civilians or civilian structures constituted “war crimes.” If Israel had a declared policy of targeting civilian homes and 75% of casualties were civilians, Israel prima facie committed war crimes. Why did HRW not reach this conclusion?
Although acknowledging that Israel targeted homes of Hamas militants “that do not serve an immediate military purpose,” HRW denounced these targeted attacks on civilian structures as mere “collective punishment.” Contrastingly, in an July 11 press release,  Amnesty International forthrightly and unequivocally stated that Israel’s targeting of Hamas militants’ homes not making an “effective contribution to military action … constitutes a war crime and also amounts to collective punishment against the families.”
HRW investigated four Israeli strikes in Gaza that resulted in civilian casualties. It consistently found “no evidence,” and “the Israeli military has presented no evidence,” that Israel was “attacking lawful military objectives or acted to minimize civilian casualties.” HRW also observed that “Israel has wrongly claimed as a matter of policy that civilian members of Hamas or other political groups who do not have a military role are ‘terrorists’ and therefore valid military targets” (emphasis added). “Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks,” HRW’s Middle East director stated in the second press release, “but attacks with no military target and many civilian deaths can hardly be considered precise.” If, however, Israel’s “precision attacks” killed civilians in the absence of any military objective, did these not precisely constitute war crimes?
“Israel launched 1,800 air raids in one of the most densely populated areas of Gaza,” Raji Sourani, the respected human rights lawyer and founder of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, observed. “It’s a shame that Israel and the international community allow this to happen. These are war crimes, just as simple as that.” It really is that simple, and it is worse than a shame that HRW, by its muted legal findings, enables this to happen.

“Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel appear to be indiscriminate or targeted at civilian population centers,” HRW’s first press release stated, “which are war crimes.” On this point, Amnesty concurred. But are projectile attacks by Hamas (used here as short-hand for all Palestinian armed groups) war crimes or even illegal? In fact, the law is more ambiguous than often allowed.
International law prohibits an occupying power from using force to suppress a struggle for self-determination, whereas it does not prohibit a people struggling for self-determination from using force. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) stated in its 2004 advisory opinion that the Palestinian people’s “rights include the right to self-determination,” and that “Israel is bound to comply with its obligation to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” Israel consequently has no legal right to use force to suppress the Palestinian self-determination struggle. Israel also cannot contend that, because this self-determination struggle unfolds within the framework of an occupation, it has the legalright, as the occupying power, to enforce the occupation so long as it endures. In 1971, the ICJ ruled that South Africa’s occupation of Namibia had become illegal because it refused to carry out good-faith negotiations to end the occupation. It is beyond dispute that Israel has failed to carry out good-faith negotiations to end the occupation of Palestinian territory. On the Namibia precedent, the Israeli occupation is also illegal. The only “right” Israel can claim is — in the words of the United States at the time of the Namibia debate — “to withdraw its administration … immediately and thus put an end to its occupation.”
The ultimate question is: Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or must they lie down and die?
Although claiming for itself the right of self-defense against Hamas projectiles, in fact, Israel is claiming the right to maintain the occupation. If Israel ceased using force to suppress the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, the occupation would end and the projectile attacks would cease — if they did not stop, the legal situation would, of course, be different. If it ended the occupation, Israel would not need to use force. The refrain that Israel has the right to self-defense is a red herring: the real question is: Does Israel have the right to use force to maintain an illegal occupation? The answer is no.
It might be said that, even if Israel cannot use force to suppress the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, Hamas’ use of indiscriminate projectiles and its targeting of Israeli civilians still constitute war crimes. Here, it is useful to first recall another instance of HRW’s egregious double-standard. In 2008, HRW issued a report entitled Flooding South Lebanon: Israel’s Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006. The report found that Israel dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster munitions on South Lebanon during the 2006 war. It was, in HRW’s words, “The most extensive use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the 1991 Gulf war,” while relative to the size of the targeted area the density of the attack was historically unprecedented. Some 90% of these cluster munitions were dropped during the final three days, “when Israel knew a settlement was imminent” (HRW) — the UN ceasefire resolution having already been passed but not yet gone into effect.
But, although finding that Tel Aviv committed “extensive violations” of the laws of war, HRW did not go beyond stating that Israel’s massive resort to cluster munitions was “in some locations possibly a war crime.” Yet the evidence HRW itself assembled showed that cluster munitions are indiscriminate weapons; the cluster munitions carriers used by Israel were, on HRW’s own terms, indiscriminate; and the cluster munitions were fired indiscriminately and deliberately targeted civilian population centers.
It is not altogether clear what constitutes an indiscriminate weapon. The apparent standard is a relative one set by the available technology. If an existing weapon has a high probability of hitting its target, then any weapons with a significantly lower probability are classified as indiscriminate. But, by this standard, only rich countries, or countries rich enough to purchase high-tech weapons, have a right to defend themselves against high-tech aerial assaults. It is a curious law that would negate the raison d’être of law: the substitution of might by right.

HRW has argued that, even if its civilians are being relentlessly targeted, a people do not have a legal right to carry out “belligerent reprisals” — that is, to deliberately target the civilians of the opposing state until it desists. “Regardless of who started this latest round, attacks targeting civilians violate basic humanitarian norms,” HRW’s Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director Joe Stork stated in the first press release. “All attacks, including reprisal attacks, that target or indiscriminately harm civilians are prohibited under the laws of war, period.”
This is not so. International law does not — at any rate, not yet — prohibit belligerent reprisals. The United States and Britain, among others, have staunchly defended the right of a state to use nuclear weapons by way of belligerent reprisal. By this standard, the people of Gaza surely have the right to use makeshift projectiles to end an illegal, merciless seven-year-long Israeli blockade, or to end Israel’s criminal bombardment of Gaza’s civilian population.
Indeed, in its landmark 1996 advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons, the ICJ ruled that international law is not settled on the right of a state to use nuclear weapons when its “survival” is at stake. But, if a state might have the right to use nuclear weapons when its survival is at stake, then surely people struggling for self-determination have the right to use makeshift projectiles, when they have been subjected to slow death by a protracted blockade, and recurrent massacres by a state determined to maintain its occupation.
One might legitimately question the political prudence of Hamas’ strategy. But the law is not unambiguously against it, while the scales of morality weigh in its favor. Israel has imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza. Ninety-five percent of water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption. By all accounts, the Palestinian people now stand behind those engaging in belligerent reprisals against Israel. In the Gaza Strip, they prefer to die resisting than to continue living under an inhuman blockade. Their resistance is mostly notional, as makeshift projectiles cause little damage. So, the ultimate question is: Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or must they lie down and die?"

Norman Finkelstein. 
Norman Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years, he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He currently writes and lectures. Finkelstein is the author of nine books, which have been translated into 50 foreign editions, including: Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land (2014); Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End (2012); What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage (2012); This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion (2012); Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005); The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000); and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995).