IDF reprime passeata em Bil'in no dia 02 de fevereiro
O mês de fevereiro de 2008 comprovou que Annapolis, em novembro de 2007, fora mesmo mais um meio de anestesiar os palestinos e se deixarem espoliar calados.
Por outro lado, o mês mostrou que os palestinos da diáspora emergiam na inteligentzia internacional e queriam falar.
No dia 02, o escritor e crítico literário Saree Makdisi, sobrinho do grande Edward Said, e parte da geração de palestinos nascidos no exílio, escreveu esta carta aberta aos Beatles dando um grito de alerta sobre as condições em que se encontrava a pátria que lhe era negada.
"Forty-three years ago, the government of Israel banned your performance in the country for fear you would corrupt the minds of Israeli youth. Now, Israel is extending an apology and an invitation to you, hoping you will forget the past and agree to help celebrate its 60th “birthday.” The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urges you to say no to Israel, particularly since the creation of this state 60 years ago dispossessed and uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and lands, condemning them to a life of exile and destitution.There is no reason to celebrate! Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are “non-Jews.” It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.Now, more than ever, Israel is committing horrific war crimes, especially in the occupied Gaza Strip, where its illegal and immoral policy of collective punishment — through a hermetic military siege and an almost complete blockage of fuel, electric power, and even food and medicine — is pushing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians to the brink of starvation. Without electricity, incubators are shutting down; hospitals are fast coming to a standstill; water is not being properly purified nor separated from raw sewage; whatever is left from the local economy is undergoing a meltdown; and the most vulnerable sectors of the population, the children, the elderly, and the acutely ill, are languishing under unspeakable hardships.
Do you see any reason to celebrate?
Israel’s military occupation — the longest in modern history — is not an abstract notion to us. It manifests itself in willful killings of civilians, particularly children; wanton demolition of homes and property; uprooting of more than a million fruitful trees; incessant theft of land and water resources; denial of freedom of movement to millions; and cutting up the occupied Palestinian territory into Bantustans, some entirely caged by walls, fences and hundreds of roadblocks.
In light of the above, performing in Israel at this time is morally equivalent to performing in South Africa at the height of the apartheid era. Indeed, Israel has created a worse system of apartheid than anything that ever existed in South Africa, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights Prof. John Dugard, and South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils, among others.
In 2005, inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it fully complies with international law and recognizes the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine. A specific call for cultural boycott of Israel was issued a year later, garnering wide support. Among the many groups and institutions that have heeded the Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel are the British University and College Union; the two largest trade unions in the UK; the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); prominent British architects; the British National Union of Journalists; the Congress of South African Trade Unions; the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario; Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger; and Palme d’Or winner director Ken Loach.
We strongly urge you to uphold the values of freedom, equality and just peace for all by joining this growing boycott against Israeli apartheid. Nothing less would do justice to the legendary legacy of the Beatles.
The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom two weeks ago, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years — the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation — and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.
Gaza’s doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.
Now that Gaza’s fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to fade, the grim reality facing the territory’s 1.5 million people is once again looming large. “After feeling imprisoned for so long, it has been a psychological relief for Gazans to know that there is a way out,” said John Ging, the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). “But it does not resolve their crisis by any stretch of the imagination.”
Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns brought into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and other relief agencies have been blocked by Israel from delivering to the people who depend on them for their very survival. As long as the border with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses to open its own borders with Gaza to anything other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel to keep the territory’s one power plant operating at a subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a day.
UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid it had previously built up in Gaza. Only 32 truckloads of goods have been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel imposed its total closure on 18 January; 250 trucks were entering every day before last June, and even that was insufficient to meet the population’s needs.
On 30 January UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the daily ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component: the canned meat that is the only source of protein in the food parcels — which even under the best of circumstances contributes less than two-thirds of minimum daily nourishment — is being held up by Israel, and the stock of those cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food Program, which feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has brought in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks; in the seven months before that, it had been bringing in fifteen trucks a day.
Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical Israeli restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the population now depends on food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the aid, they were receiving “enough to survive, not to live,” as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) put it. Without it, they will die.
All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian militant groups’ firing of crude homemade rockets into Israel, which rarely cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal rocket attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying Gaza for four decades.
The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991. It was tightened with the institutionalization of the Israeli occupation enabled by the Oslo Accords of 1993. It was tightened further with the intensification of the occupation in response to the second intifada in 2000. It was tightened further still when Israel redeployed its settlers and troops from inside Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory into what John Dugard, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, referred to as a prison, the key to which, Dugard said, Israel had “thrown away.” It was tightened to the point of strangulation following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, when Israel began restricting supplies of food and other resources into Gaza. It was tightened beyond the point of strangulation following the deposition of the Hamas-led government in June 2007. And now this.
When Israel limited commercial shipments of food — but not humanitarian relief — into Gaza in 2006, a senior government adviser, Dov Weisglass, explained that “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger.”
Israel’s “diet” was taking its toll even before last week. The World Food Program warned last November that less than half of Gaza’s food-import needs were being met. Basics including wheat grain, vegetable oil, dairy products and baby milk were in short supply. Few families can afford meat. Anemia rates rocketed to almost 80 percent. UNRWA noted at about the same time that “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing, because our ration is only 61 percent of what people should have and that has to be supplemented.”
By further restricting the supply of food to an already malnourished population, Israel has clearly decided to take its “diet” a step further. If the people of Gaza remain cut off from the food aid on which their survival now depends, they will face starvation.
They are now essentially out of food; the water system is faltering (almost half the population now lacks access to safe water supplies); the sewage system has broken down and is discharging raw waste into streets and the sea; the power supply is intermittent at best; hospitals lack heat and spare parts for diagnostic machines, ventilators, incubators; dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.
Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer patients cut off from chemotherapy regimens, kidney patients cut off from dialysis treatments, premature babies cut off from blood-clotting medications. In the past few weeks, many more Palestinian parents have watched the lives of their sick children ebb slowly, quietly and (as far as the global media are concerned) invisibly away in Gaza’s besieged hospitals than Israelis have been hurt — let alone actually killed — by the erratic firing of primitive homemade rockets from Gaza, about which we have heard so much. (According to the Israeli human rights organizationB’Tselem, these rockets have killed thirteen Israelis in the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone, almost half of them civilians, including some 200 children.)
Israel’s squeeze is expressly intended to punish the entire population for the firing of those rockets by militants, which ordinary civilians are powerless to stop. “We will not allow them to lead a pleasant life,” said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when Israel cut off fuel supplies on 18 January, thereby plunging Gaza into darkness. “As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza’s residents can walk and have no fuel for their cars.”
Olmert’s views and, more important, his policies were reaffirmed and given the legal sanction of Israel’s High Court. In what human rights organizations referred to as a “devastating” decision, on 30 January the court ruled in favor of the government’s plan to further restrict supplies of fuel and electricity to Gaza. “The decision means that Israel may deliberately deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel and electricity supplies,” pointed out Sari Bashi, of the Gisha human rights organization in Israel. “During wartime, the civilian population is the first and central victim of the fighting, even when efforts are made to minimize the damage,” the court said. In other words, harm to the civilian population is an inevitable effect of war and therefore legally permissible.
That may be the view of Israel’s highest legal authority, but it is not how the matter is viewed by international law, which strictly regulates the way civilian populations are to be treated in time of war. “The parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants in order to spare the civilian population and civilian property,” the ICRC points out, invoking the Geneva Conventions and other founding documents of international humanitarian law. “Neither the civilian population as a whole nor individual civilians may be attacked.”
Moreover, no matter what Israel’s High Court says, what is happening in Gaza is not a war in the conventional sense: Gaza is not a state at war with the state of Israel. It is a territory militarily occupied by Israel. Even after its 2005 redeployment, Israel did not release its hold on Gaza; it continues to control all access to the territory, as well as its airspace, territorial waters and even its population registry. Over and above all the routine prohibitions on attacks on the civilian population and other forms of collective punishment that hold true in case of war, in other words, international law also holds Israel responsible for the welfare of the Gaza population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) specifically demands, for example, that, “to the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.”
Israel’s methodical actions make it clear that it is systematically grinding down and now actually starving people for whose welfare it is legally accountable simply because it regards Gaza’s 1.5 million men, women and children as a surplus population it would, quite simply, like to get rid of one way or the other: a sentiment made quite clear when Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed, shortly after the current crisis began, that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should just be removed and transferred to the Egyptian desert. “They will have a nice country, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace,” he said, without eliciting even a murmur of protest in Israel.
The overwhelming majority of Gazans are refugees or the descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes when Palestine was destroyed and Israel was created in 1948. Like all Palestinian refugees, those of Gaza have a moral and legal right to return to the homeland from which they were expelled. Israel blocks their return for the same reason it expelled them in the first place, because their presence would undermine its already tenuous claim to Jewishness (this is the nature of the so-called “demographic problem” about which Israeli politicians openly complain). As long as the refugees live, what Israel regards as the mortal threat of their right of return lives on. But if they would somehow just go away …
“Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and — some would say — encouragement of the international community,” the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.
The question now is whether the world will simply sit and watch, now that this unprecedented threshold is actually being crossed.
Having taken matters into their hands and destroyed the wall cutting them off from the outside world, it is most unlikely that the people of Gaza will simply submit to that fate. A hermetic closure ultimately depends not merely on Israel’s whims but on Egypt’s willingness — or ability — to cut off the Palestinians of Gaza and watch them starve. For all the US and Israeli pressure on Egypt, and for all the steps Egypt is now taking, it seems most unlikely that it would let things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow Arabs from the Israeli occupation is one thing; actually participating in their repression is quite another. The Egyptian government would have to answer not only to the people of Palestine but to its own people, and indeed to all Arabs.
Working together, Hamas and the people of Gaza have forced Egypt’s hand and made much more visible than ever before the role it had been playing all along in the Israeli occupation and strangulation of Gaza; now that its role in assisting Israel has been revealed, it will be difficult for Egypt to go back to the status quo. Gazans have thrown Israel’s plans into disarray, because Israel’s leaders could do little more than watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza burst out of their prison. And they have placed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the government of Ramallah in a corner: they will have to choose between defending their people’s rights and needs or confirming once and for all — as indeed they are doing — that the PA is there to serve Israel’s interests, not those of the Palestinians. In which case they too will one day be called to account."
Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. This essay was originally published by The Nation.
Saree fez barulho, mas falou em ouvidos moucos de Estados Unidos ainda sob o jugo da hasbara (propaganda, em hebraico) israelense que corria solta em Washington e na grande mídia internacional.
Em outro registro, o parlamentar palestino no Knesset em exílio Azmi Bishara, também botou a boca no trombone em sua palestra em Soweto no dia 03 de fevereiro.
Foi o discurso de enraizamento na África do Sul do termo "apartheid" em sua versão contemporânea, na ocupação da Palestina. Aconteceu durante a Quarta Semana Anual do Apartheid Israelense (IAW). O evento de conscientização da ocupação contou com debates em Soweto e em 25 cidades no mundo inteiro. Foi do dia 3-19 de fevereiro.
A palestra de Azmi abordou o aniversário fatídico que se aproximava. Em 2008, a Naqba completava 60 anos (blog 15/05/11).
Azmi disse então: “Reconciliation happened in South Africa after apartheid was dismantled, not instead. The message sent to the Palestinians is that you have to make peace and reconcile. We can reconcile after racism and occupation is dismantled.”
O objetivo dessa campanha Anti-Apartheid/Ocupação iniciada em 2005 era reivindicar igualdade total entre cidadãos israelenses judeus e árabes, o fim da ocupação e da colonização de terras palestinas, e a proteção do direito de retorno dos refugiados palestinos, como manda a Resolução 194 da ONU.
“It has become imperative for people around the world to isolate the Israeli apartheid regime, especially in the face of governments’ failure to ensure respect for human rights and to hold Israel accountable before international law and countless UN resolutions” disse então Ahmad Shokr, um dos organizadores do evento em Nova York, concluindo: “By supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign the international community can bring an end to Israeli apartheid and work toward a future of justice, equality and peace.”
Enquanto ativistas estrangeiros e as vítimas do êxodo palestravam sobre a situação insuportável em que se encontrava ua pátria amada, os invasores judeus continuavam a instalar-se na Cisjordânia, a IDF continuava a espezinhar e matar seus habitantes e continuava a matracar a Faixa de Gaza.
Durante a noite do dia 06 de fevereiro até a manhã do dia 07, a IDF feriu cerca de 10 palestinos e matou sete na Faixa. Aumentando para 17 o número de vítimas só em fevereiro.
Essas mortes ocorreram em sete ataques que afetaram sobretudo Khan Younis, al-Nuseirat e o norte da Faixa.
A IDF lançou vários mísseis de plataformas terrestres e aéreos, dos Apaches.
Na noite do dia 06, a IDF bombardeou Beit Hanoun, al-Nuseirat e o nordeste de Khan Yunis ferindo três pessoas, inclusive uma mulher e uma criança.
Em al-Nuseirat, causou danos materiais no campo de refugiados em uma loja de produtos agrícolas e em muitas casas vizinhas.
No mesmo dia 07 Israel reduziu o fornecimento de energia elétrica à Faixa.
O corte de eletricidade é contrário à Convenção de Genebra por prejudicar deliberadamente os civis, privados da energia necessária a serviços vitais. No entanto, foi aprovado pelo Supremo Tribunal de Israel abrindo um precedente grave no Direito Internacional.
Virtualmente, após os bombardeios das usinas, toda a energia da Faixa ficara dependente direta ou indiretamente de Israel, a custo elevado, ainda mais.
O novo corte exarcebou as medidas punitivas, impedindo que os gazauís acedessem a cuidados médicos, água potável, tratamento de esgoto, aquecimento, iluminação e funcionamento de eletro-domésticos, inclusive geladeira.
As ONGs de Direitos Humanos denunciaram a punição coletiva inflingida à população que em vez de diminuir, só fazia aumentar ressentimento e a resistência ao ocupante, em vão.
Com o corte de mais estes 5 por cento em várias linhas, Gaza perdeu mais 1.5 megawatts, além dos 25 cortados anteriormente.
A usina elétrica de Gaza, impossibilitada de funcionar em capacidade máxima - 80 megawwatts que já eram aquém de suas necessidades (devido à falta de petróleo e de peças bloqueados nos checkpoints) estava produzindo apenas 55 megawatts de eletricidade.
O bloqueio de diesel já causara um déficite de 20 por cento na Faixa. As consequências humanas e no meio ambiente estavam drásticas. Os blackouts eram constantes (cerca de 8h diárias) nas escolas, fábricas, escritórios, lares e até nos hospitais. Dezenas de milhares estavam sem acesso a saneamento básico e a falta de eletricidade impedia o tratamento dos esgotos - milhões de litros escoavam no mar.
Uma punição coletiva a curto, médio e longo prazo proibida em letras garrafais. Contudo, o mundo não estava nem aí para os palestinos. Israel ainda monopolizava o papel de vítima até no nosso país.
Enquanto na Cisjordânia os checkpoints fixos e os improvisados enfernizavam a vida dos palestinos, nos dias 9 e 10, a IDF renovou seus ataques aéreos em vários lugares da Faixa de Gaza.
Às 23:30 lançaram dois ataques em Rafah. Um deles, no bairro Brasil (pois é, tem um bairro na Faixa que homenageia o nosso país) onde matou um policial de 22 anos, Muhammad Ismail Abu Mteir.
O outro em um depósito de legumes no campo de refugiados al-Shabura. O depósito de 800m² foi destruído com seu estoque e 40 funcionários ficaram automaticamente desempregados. O proprietário, Abdul-Haidi Qishta, estimou as perdas em US$700 mil, sem contar os pais de família que perderam seu ganha pão.
No mesmo ataque os israelenses destruiram outro depósito de verduras da Sahabana Company com prejuizo de cerca de US350 mil e o desemprego de 80 funcionários em dois turnos. 14 casas vizinhas foram parcial ou totalmente destruídas. Ali viviam 106 pessoas das quais dez ficaram feridas; crianças, na maioria.
Por volta das 11:55, caças da IDF atacaram um campo de treinamento em construção em Khan Yunis. O único alvo militar desta operação relâmpago corriqueira.
Gaza sofreu quatro ataques no dia 10 de fevereiro, no bairro al-Zaitoun. Logo após a meia-noite uma fábrica de ferro foi destruída assim como a loja vizinha e casas da quadra foram atingidas. Devido ao horário noturno, 24 pessoas foram feridas, inclusive seis mulheres e quatro crianças que foram pegas desprevenidas, dormindo.
Durante este dia 10 de fevereiro, o co-fundador da Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, analisou a situação da seguinte maneira: "The next logical step for the Israeli government will have to be a decision whether to target the topo political leadership' of Hamas. So said an Israeli official quoted in The jerusalem Post. Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of prime Minister Ehud Olmert's kadima party and chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, echoed the call, arguing that 'There's no difference between those who wear a suide suit and a diplomat's suit." Following a cabinet meeting on 10 February, Israel's Interior Minister Shimon Sheetr specifaclly called for the execution of Ismail Haniyeh, the democratically-elected hamas prime minister, and added that for good measure 'We must take a neigborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map'.
Last September, Yossi Alpher, the co-founder of the European Union-funded publicationBitterlemons, wrote an article advocating “decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and ‘civilian.’”
Alpher, a former special adviser to Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak when the latter was prime minister, worried that Israel would “pay a price in terms of international condemnation,” for “targeting legally elected Hamas officials who won a fair election,” but that overall it would be well worth it.
Executing democratically-elected leaders may require more chutzpah than even Israel has shown, but the possibility and its disastrous consequences have to be taken seriously given Israel’s track record. Israel executed Hamas’ elderly, quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound co-founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, followed shortly afterwards by the execution his successor as the movement’s leader, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi.
Aside from the United States, Israel is the only country where the murder of foreign leaders is openly debated as a policy option.
Israeli official propaganda presents all its recent actions as defensive and necessary to stop the rockets fired by Palestinian fighters in Gaza. But if Israel’s goal was to achieve calm and a cessation of violence, the first logical step would not be to contemplate new atrocities, but to respond positively to Hamas’ repeated ceasefire proposals.
When it was elected in January 2006, Hamas had observed a unilateral ceasefire for more than a year. After the election, Hamas’ leaders offered a long-term total truce, tentatively following the political path of other militant groups including the Irish Republican Army (IRA), whose 1994 ceasefire paved the way for the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. (In December, US President George W. Bush received Martin McGuinness, former second in command of the IRA, and now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, at the White House.)
Last December, Haaretz reported that Hamas had secured the agreement of all factions to end rocket fire on Israel, provided Israel reciprocated. Hamas was also engaged in indirect negotiations for the release of Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for an Israeli prisoner of war held in Gaza.
Olmert rejected the December ceasefire offer. “The State of Israel,” he said, “has no interest in negotiating with entities that do not recognize the Quartet demands.” In other words there could be no ceasefire until Hamas unilaterally accepted all of Israel’s demands before negotiations could even begin.
The problem was not that Israeli officials did not believe Hamas could deliver. Barak was reported to be in favor of considering a hudna — a renewed truce, and a “senior Israeli security official” told Haaretz that “There’s no doubt that Hamas is capable of forcing a let-up on Islamic Jihad and the other small factions in the Strip … It won’t be a 100 percent decrease, but even 98 percent would be a big change.” (“Olmert rejects Hamas cease-fire offer,” Haaretz, 25 December 2007).
If even Israel believed that Hamas could reliably enforce a truce, why does it refuse to accept one? Why has it refused to engage with Hamas, as American and British policy-makers did with the IRA?
For Israel the potential that Hamas could turn to politics presents a threat, not an opportunity. Israel has no interest in facing Palestinian leaders who are at once committed to basic Palestinian rights, capable of delivering, and enjoy popular legitimacy and support.
So instead of engaging with Hamas, the US and Israel announced a complete boycott which was intended to turn the Palestinian population against the movement.
At the same time, the peace process show relaunched in Annapolis last November, followed by the international donors meeting in Paris where pledges of cash were showered on the Palestinian Authority to elevate the unelected, Israeli-backed Ramallah “government” of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad in the eyes of Palestinians. With this renewed patronage and prestige, Abbas and company were to be pushed to sign a deal giving up Palestinian refugee rights and agreeing to a Palestinian Bantustan under permanent Israeli domination.
Of course much more than Hamas stands in the way of the fulfillment of this Israeli fantasy. The Palestinian people would unite against such a deal. But Hamas is the most visible and well-organized obstacle.
Rather than breaking under pressure, Hamas has made some impressive tactical gains, even as Gaza’s agony increases. Even the dubious opinion polls that come out of EU-funded non-governmental organizations showed Hamas enjoying an upsurge of support after the breach of the Gaza-Egypt border. But with Israel and its backers steadfast in refusing to grant Hamas a political role, not even in operating the border crossings, the movement has no way to translate these tactical victories into strategic gains. Except for one: in the arena of world public opinion.
Israel and Egypt, the two countries most responsible for the blockade of Gaza, were deeply embarrassed by the popular surge that temporarily broke the siege. No recent event has done as much to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians and expose Israel’s crimes to international scrutiny. But one such action is not enough; already, Israel and Egypt with support from the quisling regime in Ramallah, the EU and the US are trying to reimpose the blockade. (In a repulsive echo of Yitzhak Rabin’s infamous order to Israeli soldiers during the first Intifada to break the bones of Palestinians, Egypt’s foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit promised to do the same to Palestinians if they continued to enter Egypt.)
Some Hamas leaders appear to understand the necessity and indeed the risks of mass, nonviolent resistance. “The next time there is a crisis in the Gaza Strip, Israel will have to face half a million Palestinians who will march toward Erez [crossing with Israel],” said Ahmed Yousef, a senior advisor to Ismail Haniyeh. “This is not an imaginary scenario and many Palestinians would be prepared to sacrifice their lives.” Properly planned, repeated mass actions of this kind could galvanize public opinion in Arab and European countries and even North America forcing some governments to abandon the pro-Israel consensus.
But here is where the great danger lies: with its escalation in Gaza and refusal to accept a ceasefire, Israel may be trying to provoke more rocket attacks and force Hamas into abandoning its political strategy altogether to provide the needed pretext to “decapitate” the organization. Unfortunately, there are signs that Hamas is jumping into the trap.
Some Hamas political leaders appeared to have been taken by surprise when the movement’s military wing took credit for a suicide attack inside Israel for the first time since 2004. The attack in the Israeli town of Dimona on 6 February killed an elderly woman as well as the bomber. As a consequence of Israel’s and the “international community’s” rejection of all of Hamas’ political initiatives, those within the organization advocating a resumption of full-scale armed struggle may be gaining the upper hand.
If they make such a tragic miscalculation, Israeli leaders may breathe a sigh of relief. After all, Israel is much more comfortable with rockets falling on Sderot, than it would be with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians marching on the checkpoints in Gaza or the West Bank.
The next logical step is for all Palestinian leaders still loyal to their people’s cause to work together to mobilize the population, not to gain factional advantage, but to expose Israeli apartheid to a sustained and irresistible surge of people power".
Ali Abunimah é autor de One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
O Dia de São Valentino (blog 17/02/13), comemorado na maioria dos países ocidentais como o Dia dos Namorados e dos Amorosos de maneira geral, na Faixa de Gaza, foi um dia de grande prejuízo.
Majed Hadaeid, de 43 anos, cultivador de cravos, esperava exportar para a Europa a recolta de seus 130 dunams (1 dunam = 1.000m), mas acabou assistindo impotente ao apodrecimento de seu estoque: “I have all carnations, in 30 different colors, and varieties yielding 16-17 million blossoms per year.” Sua perda o obrigou a demitir seus 200 funcionários e seus milhões de botões de flores acabaram virando comida de bodes, jumentos, camelos, carneiros e ovelhas.
Majed era um dos agricultores mais bem sucedidos da Faixa e duzentas famílias viviam direta e mais da metade indiretamente de seu negócio. No fim de fevereiro ele passaria da direção para o campo a fim de alimentar seus 13 filhos cujas idades iam de 20 anos a seis meses. Um pesadelo. Ele arrenda as terras e corria o risco de perdê-las. Normalmente usava o fruto das vendas de fevereiro para comprar fertilizantes, sementes, pagar os salários e contas atrasadas durante os meses do ano menos lucrativos. Sem as vendas de São Valentino, estava falido.
“I am not with Hamas or Fatah,” disse. “I didn’t vote for any party. Israel is to blame for this collective punishment for us all.”
Majed é um dos muitos cultivadores de flores na Faixa de Gaza onde 480 dunams eram reservados à cultura de flores e produziam até então uma média de 60 milhões de unidades por ano. A colheita ia de meados de novembro a meados de maio. Os cultivadores costumavam escoar seu estoque no mercado de flores da Holanda para os distribuidores comercializarem. O mês de fevereiro era o mês em que enchiam os bolsos para poder aguentar o ano inteiro com vendas menores.
Sabendo disso, Israel impediu a saída das caixas lotadas que os importadores holandeses esperavam e os produtores gazauís ficaram a ver navios, literalmente, da Força Naval da IDF. Sem porto próprio, com as fronteiras controladas por Israel e com os Acordos Oslo, os palestinos, tanto da Faixa quanto da Cisjordânia, não podem exportar nem importar sem autorização de Israel, que intermedeia o negócio, recebe o pagamento que adormece em seus bancos antes de serem repassados e recolhe os impostos, que repassa ou segura ad eternum a fim de perturbar o funcionamento das administrações públicas, desencorajar a produção e o comércio, e derrubar o moral da população ocupada.
Normalmente, a Faixa exportava 45 milhões de flores para a União Europeia. Em 2008, no mesmo período, só conseguiram evacuar (por meios indiretos) uma quantidade irrisória. “This year we managed to export only five million flowers to the Netherlands", disse Mahmoud Khlaiel, presidente da ONG local de Produtores de flores.
O caso de Majed Hadaeid é o mesmo de todos os cultivadores. Ayman Okal, há 14 anos no ramo, disse, enquanto dava cravos vermelhos de comida para um bode, “Every season I produce 8-9 million carnations for Christmas and Mothers Day. But Valentine’s is the biggest.” Except of course, this year. Felizmente ele é dono das terras que cultiva.
Para completar o arbítrio do ocupante, nos postos de fronteira em que suas caixas foram bloqueadas, os palestinos foram obrigados a assinar um documento que dizia que as flores não estavam sendo exportadas não por proibição do ocupante e sim “because Palestinian producers have decided not to continue shipping.”
A mentira era preventiva. Israel imprimiu estes formulários a fim de evitar queixas eventuais aos organismos internacionais. Assim se protegem "legal" e amoralmente.
“This is not true,” disse Khlaiel indignado. “Israel returns the flowers to Gaza after they are destroyed waiting at the crossings. It costs each grower four dollars to send each bouquet’s pots, in addition to the cost of the flowers. Once destroyed through the delays, the grower still must pay the costs.”
(Para informação, as flores provenientes da Faixa de Gaza são comercializadas na Europa com a marca "Coral". Quando for à florista, lembre-se disso e escolha a flor "certa" por solidariedade.)
PS. As entrevistas deste parágrafo foram feitas pelo jornalista palestino Mohamed Omert.
No dia 13 de fevereiro, foi a vez do jornalista irlandês David Morrison botar a boca no trombone sobre a situação da Palestina. Fez esta análise sob a hipocrisia do "Free Movement" com o qual Israel concordara em documento assinado: "How is Israel able to strangle the Gaza Strip when there is supposed to be an international crossing between Gaza and Egypt not controlled by Israelis?
Certainly, free movement was the promise held out in the comprehensive Agreement on Movement and Access, signed more than two years ago by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The first of the six components of this agreement was that there would be a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah, controlled by the PA and Egypt. At the time, this was hailed as an historic step on the road to a Palestinian state — for the first time, it was said, Palestinians would have access to the outside world free from Israeli control.
So, how was Israel still able to impose a suffocating blockade on the Strip, home to almost 1.5 million Palestinians, eighty percent of them refugees? After Palestinian forces opened the border wall on 23 January, breaking the siege, many Palestinians blamed Egypt for not doing the same much earlier to relieve the suffering and deprivation that had brought Gaza to within days of running out of food and medicine. But however complicit Egypt may have been it was not alone.
It was primarily through the good offices of the European Union (EU), which had a formal role in managing the Rafah crossing, that Israel always had a veto on the opening of the crossing. In practice, whenever Israel didn’t want the crossing open, the EU obligingly kept it shut.
The Rafah crossing was open almost every day from 25 November 2005 to 24 June 2006, though not for 24 hours a day as intended. However, after 24 June 2006, when an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinians, the EU, at Israel’s insistence, prevented it from opening regularly and then kept it closed completely since 9 June 2007, after Hamas took control of Gaza.
Quartet midwife
The so-called Middle East Quartet (the US, the EU, Russia and the UN) was the midwife of the agreement, and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Javier Solana (EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy) were in Jerusalem on 15 November 2005 to launch it.
Rice said that the agreement “is intended to give the Palestinian people freedom to move, to trade, to live ordinary lives.” She added that “for the first time since 1967, Palestinians will gain control over entry and exit from their territory. This will be through an international crossing at Rafah.”
Solana also hailed the arrangements: “This is the first time that a border is opened and not controlled by the Israelis. … So as you can imagine, this is a very important step that is the first time that takes place.”
One could be forgiven for thinking that the US and the EU had made arrangements for a border crossing between Gaza and Egypt that was “not controlled by the Israelis” and that from then on Gaza couldn’t be strangled by Israel.
EU third party
But reality fell far short of Rice and Solana’s claims. The agreement did not provide for commercial goods traffic through the Rafah crossing into Gaza, so it did not facilitate trade. And despite the cosmetics, the crossing has always been controlled by the Israelis. Even though Israel has no personnel, military or otherwise, physically present at the crossing, it has been able to close the crossing at will, just as it can close the crossings between Gaza and Israel itself.
This came about because, under the agreement, a third party must have personnel present at the Rafah crossing before it is allowed to open. The third party is the EU — and the EUhas always refused to man the crossing when Israel didn’t want the crossing open. In effect, the EU has acted as a proxy for Israel.
The agreement gives EU personnel at the crossing the authority “to ensure that the PAcomplies with all applicable rules and regulations concerning the Rafah crossing point and the terms of this agreement” and in the event of perceived non-compliance “to order the re-examination and reassessment of any passenger, luggage, vehicle or goods.”
For this purpose, the EU established the grandly titled EU Border Assistance Mission for the Rafah Crossing Point, or EUBAM Rafah. This is a force of less than a hundred, mostly policemen, which is based in Ashkelon in Israel.
In addition to the EU monitors, who are physically present at the crossing, Israeli security forces are able to monitor activity at the crossing remotely, via closed circuit TV and other data links, and can make a record of the individuals crossing. The Israeli monitors are based in Israel at the Kerem Shalom crossing with Gaza, where a liaison office (for liaison between Israel and the PA) is located. One of the duties of the EU, as the third party to the agreement, is to “lead” this office:
“A liaison office, led by the third party, will receive real-time video and data feed of the activities at Rafah and will meet regularly to review implementation of this agreement, resolve any disputes arising from this agreement, and perform other tasks specified in this agreement.”
Israeli veto
Ridiculous as it may seem, the EU takes the view that the opening of the crossing is a matter that may be disputed by Israeli representatives in the liaison office. And if they don’t agree to it opening, the EU doesn’t send its monitors to the crossing, as required for its opening under the terms of the agreement. So, Israel has a veto over the opening of the crossing, even though, according to Rice and Solana, it is “not controlled by the Israelis.”
But on the EUBAM website, the answer given to the question “Can EUBAM open the crossing point?” is: “RCP [Rafah Crossing Point] can only be opened by agreement between the Parties.EUBAM cannot itself open the crossing point.”
That is as plain as a pikestaff: in the opinion of the EU, the agreement gives Israel a veto on whether the crossing should open. There is nothing in the agreement to warrant such an interpretation — and it is in flat contradiction to the words of Rice and Solana that the crossing would “not be controlled by Israelis.”
What is more, in the opinion of the EU, the agreement gives Israel the right to close the crossing when it is open. According to a press statement on 14 December 2006, after the crossing opened that day, “the Government of Israel had requested that the crossing be closed due to the expected arrival of Prime Minister Haniyeh, who was reportedly carrying a large sum of money.” After consultations with Brussels, the EU closed the crossing.
Since the Israeli-built Gaza-Egypt border wall was torn down, Israel, the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Egypt and the EU have met to try to restore the arrangements under the agreement. Hamas, excluded from these meetings, has stated that it will not allow a return to the situation of de facto Israeli control through the “third party” proxy and has demanded a role in managing the crossing.
If Gaza is to be immune from strangulation by Israel in future, then the Israeli veto over the opening of the Rafah crossing will have to be ended. In addition, the crossing must cater for commercial traffic into Gaza, which is not provided for under the present agreement."
David Morrison writes for the Labour & Trade Union Review (www.ltureview.com), where a longer version of this article appeared. He lives in Belfast and his website is www.david-morrison.org.uk.
No dia 15 de fevereiro, o diretor do Centro de Nutrição Ard al-Insan em Gaza declarou "We receive 20-25 referrals every day, and we sse approximately 350 children a wekk here at the centre. Las year we treated more than 8.400 children here in Gaza city, plus another 8.0000 children at our centr in Khan Younis. All of them were under five years old, and all of them were malnourished".
O Centro cuida exclusivamente de menores de 5 anos. Quem transfere estes pacientes infantis para o Centro é a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) que cuida de problemas de refugiados e na Faixa lida com a população nos campos mais desfavorizados.
Mas o Centro recebe muitos mais pacientes. Mães chegam o dia todo carregando seus filhos sub-nutridos. É impressionante ver aqueles menininhos magrinhos, quietos, sem força nem para chorar, carinha triste, olhar apagado nos braços de mães de olhos arregalados de desespero de ver a si e a família à míngua não por não quererem trabalhar ou não terem condições de cultivar, como em outros países, e sim por verem suas lavouras destruídas sistematicamente e serem privados do direito de importar sementes.
O sítio-bloqueio afetava todo mundo, mas como toda tragédia, afetava mais ainda as crianças e os menos favorecidos. A escassa comida contrabandeada até as prateleiras das lojas chegava pelos túneis com custo dobrado ou triplicado e portanto inacessível às famílias de baixa renda ou sem renda alguma por causa do desemprego que avassalava a Faixa.
Fazia semanas que nem os gazauís de classe média viam carne ou comida fresca. Mais de cinquenta por cento da população, ou seja, então 750 mil pessoas, penavam com os longos cortes de energia e mais de dois terços careciam de alimentação.
Nesse dia órgãos oficiais comunicaram à imprensa que quase 11 por cento das crianças da Faixa de menos de cinco anos padeciam de deficiências inerentes à subnutrição, inclusive atrofia de crescimento.
O Dr. al-Wahaidi informou que "The major problem in the Gaza Strip is that we do not have sufficient natural food resources. We cannot grow the variety of fruit and vegetables that we need in order to provide ourselves, and our children, a well-balanced diet. We are dependent on food imports, but the food table in the Gaza Strip is now severely deficient because of the siege and closure. We have tens of thousands of families who now have no options or alternatives to humanitarian assistance. But if this siege is maintained, then current child malnutrition interventions and preventions will not be sufficient. Child morbidity and mortality will both increase. We will not be able to cope.”
Uma das perversidades da ocupação da Palestina é que Israel interdita totalmente a interação da Cisjordânia com a Faixa de Gaza. Por questões estratégicas e por crueldade, simplesmente.
A razão política é evidente, considerando a distância que Israel estabeleceu (contra as diretivas da ONU) entre os dois territórios. Israel, após ter retirado do mapa da ONU em 1948 a faixa de terra que ligava o futuro Estado palestino de terras descontínuas, negou a ligação rodoviária prevista nos Acordos de Oslo com o propósito de isolar a população gazauí e separá-la, aos olhos do mundo desinformado, da Palestina.
A segunda razão política é de afastar dos olhos e do coração compatriotas e privar os gazauís de manifestações concretas de solidariedade entre familiares e amigos que vivem na Cisjordânia com restrições de movimentos e com terras sendo roubadas todos os dias, mas que pelo menos não passam fome, por enquanto (no rítmo que vai a ocupação e a desapropriação de lavouras, daqui a pouco eles também estão famintos, além de sedentos).
A terceira razão é desumana. É a mais perversa de todas. Visa aniquilar a população aos poucos, matando-a de sub-nutrição e com água semi-potável que a enfraqueça a médio prazo até que os gazauís desapareçam do mapa. Um genocídio lento programado nos mínimos detalhes. Que começou em 2006 e estava se agravando.
Além deste novo tipo de genocídio velado, havia os bombardeios intermitentes que não cesssavam.
A casa de Ayman no campo de refugiados de Bureij foi bombardeada durante a noite, como sempre, para pegar a família desprevenida e causar o máximo de perdas. Com ele morreram seus dois filhos pequenos e mais cinco pessoas. Mais de cinquenta foram feridas com a explosão do prédio.
Ao contrário da Cisjordânia (onde os soldados da IDF bloqueiam as ambulâncias nos checkpoints durante horas para que os doentes graves e os feridos por um soldado ou um colono judeu não sejam socorridos a tempo de terem a vida ou um membro salvo) os para-médicos do hospital de Bureij chegaram depressa. Porém, esta diligência não facilitou o salvamento.
It’s very hard for us to rescue, or even locate bodies beneath the building,” disse um para-médico. O Dr. Hassan Khalaf do hospital al-Shifa foi mais claro: "This is a barbaric crime. They bombed residential areas where people were sleeping in their houses.” O médico do hospital infantil de Gaza estava indignado porque muitos dos feridos eram meninos de menos de 12 anos, inclusive um bebê.
Bombeiros e voluntários passaram horas cavando, buscando sobreviventes nos escombros e tentando apagar o fogo que se propagava pela vizinhança.
O último assassinato desse gênero em Gaza fora o do médico Nabil Abu Salmiya em julho de 2006, junto com a mulher e oito familiares, com "efeito colateral" de outros parentes e muitos vizinhos feridos.
O porta-voz do Jihad, Abu Ahmed, fez sua delcaração pública emocionado: “The Israeli occupation have lost their compasses. Shelling a house in the middle of a residential district, inevitably killing and injuring children and women … this is evidence of their failings. ” E prometeu que Israel pagaria pelo crime.
No auge da emoção, um gazauí disse: “This is an Israeli-made earthquake. Palestinian resistance fighters should fire homemade rockets, so Israelis suffer and feel what we are suffering as a result of their bombs.”
Uma multidão foi se aglomerando fora do hospital pedindo justiça. Um deles disse: “It is a war crime to bomb an entire neighborhood to kill just one person.”
O pior foi que este atentado mortífero aconteceu pouco depois de John Holmes, vice-secretário da ONU para assuntos humanitários, ter visitado a Faixa e apelado para a re-abertura urgente das fronteiras para que a população pudesse pelo menos alimentar-se.
John Holmes, ao deixar a Faixa, declarara à imprensa que o bloqueio interminável “makes for a grim human and humanitarian situation here in Gaza, which means that people are not able to live with the basic dignity to which they are entitled. I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things I have seen and heard about during the day.”
Quem vai à Cisjordânia e à Faixa de Gaza e não se choca? Só quem é cego ou desalmado.
A ONU recebeu a notícia do atentado como uma bofetada. Porém, a subserviência de Ban Ki Moon a Washington fez as línguas calarem. On the record. Off, reclamações não faltavam, pois os funcionários já não aguentavam mais.
John Holmes passara quatro dias entre Israel e os territórios palestinos ocupados. O ponto final foi Gaza e o hospital al-Shifa. Lá, ele desabafou aos jornalistas: "I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things I have seen and heard about during the day. They are the result of the current restrictions on the crossings into Gaza, and teh very limited amounts of foods and other materials being allowed in... all this makes for a grim human and humanitarian situation here in Gaza, which means that people are not able to live with the basic dignity to which they are entitled. So what is essenctially needed is an opening of the crossings, a lot more goods coming in."
John Holmes ignorava que sua presença e sua conclusão óbvia só serviriam para irritar ainda mais os causadores desta crise humanitária.
Os jornalistas ouviram as palavras de John Holmes e uns engoliram em seco. Estes se lembravam da declaração que vasara do Ministério do Interior de Israel, quando o ministro Meir Sheetrit, em reunião restrita, dissera sem papas na língua que a IDF podia escolher um bairro de Gaza, dar 24 horas para que os habitantes evacuassem, e “wipe it out” riscá-lo do mapa, como informara a BBC sem que o Ministro sofresse nenhuma reprimenda por sua franqueza. Afinal de contas, ele só disse o que muitos nos govenor diziam semi-abertamente.
Sheetrit foi até modesto em sua idéia de holocausto. "Bonzinho", ele falou em dar prazo de 24 horas para as famílias se salvarem, embora desabrigadas. Ora, neste ataque, como nos precedentes e nos que o sucederiam, não houve nenhum aviso preliminar. A "limpeza" foi humana e material.
Israel não temia a ONU, não temia críticas, não temia nem Deus e o Juízo Final. Só pensava no presente e só investia no genocídio que estava realizando paulatinamente.
Além disso, a IDF bombardeava a Faixa sem parar. Como no dia 23 em Beit Hanoun, onde matou três civis que faziam piquenique em Nazaz.
O ataque aconteceu pouco depois das 15:30 do sábado. O míssil visava os três amigos que estavam na cabana de um deles, a mais de um quilômetro da fronteira. O foguete atingiu os três rapazes em cheio. O universitário de Beit Hanoun Mohammad Talal al-Za’anin (20 anos), o motorista Ibrahim Ahmad Abu Jarad (20), e Mohammad Hasan Hussein (22) de Jabalia, morreram logo, aos pedaços.
Depois do assassinato, o porta-voz da IDF desfiou as mentiras de sempre ao jornal isralense Yediot Ahronot, disse que o alvo era um lançador de foguetes do Hamas.
Nem fazendo esforço dava para acreditar. Os rapazes foram atingidos em campo aberto, grelhando carne para os amigos que esperavam para jantar. Felizmente foram bombardeados antes de seus convidados chegarem porque senão teria havido muitos mais mortos.
O PCHR, Centro Palestino de Direitos Humanos, condenou o crime: "1. Affirms that this crime is part of a continuous series of Israeli war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, reflecting IOF disregard for civilian life. 2. Calls upon the High Contracting Parties (HCP) of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) to fulfill their legal obligation under Article 1 of the Convention and ensure that it is respected by all parties under any circumstances," e pediu que o HCP fulfill their obligations under Article 146 of the Convention to pursue persons suspected of perpetrating grave violations of the Convention, which are defined as war crimes under Article 147 of the Convention.
No mesmo dia, a Campanha Palestina para o Boicote Cutlural e Acadêmico de Israel, enviou esta carta aberta ao cantor Bono, do U2: The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has learned that you have been invited by Israeli President Shimon Peres to take part in a conference designed to mark Israel’s contributions to medicine, science and conservation. We urge you, as a prominent activist on issues of global inequality and a campaigner for basic human rights, to say no to Israel, especially since the invitation coincides with celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state. With the creation of this state 60 years ago, “Palestine ceased to exist except in the hearts and mind of Palestinians,” [1] of whom three quarters of a million were dispossessed and uprooted from their homes and lands, condemned to a life of exile and destitution.
Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are “non-Jews.” It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Israel is continuing the construction of its colonies and massive Wall in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of July 2004. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.
We urge you to reject the invitation from a man who has nothing to do with the lofty ideals of progress in science, medicine and the environment. His decades-long political career includes war crimes committed against the Lebanese and Palestinian people.
In 1996, when Israel still occupied southern Lebanon, Shimon Peres as Prime Minister launched “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” causing 400,000 Lebanese to flee their homes, with almost 800 of them fleeing to a UN base in Qana, South Lebanon. On 18 APRIL the Israeli army shelled the UN shelter in Qana, killing 102 civilians, mainly women, children and the elderly. Many more were injured. Human Rights Watch, the UN and Amnesty International subsequently disproved the myth that the Israeli army did not deliberately intend to shell the UN base. Shimon Peres said at the time, “In my opinion, everything was done according to clear logic and in a responsible way. I am at peace.”
Peres is on record for being responsible for other war crimes, from building colonies on occupied Arab land to endorsing a policy of extra-judicial killings, by which Palestinians and other Arabs are murdered without the benefit of a trial or, in fact, any evidence other than that provided by Israeli intelligence. Peres also supports the siege of Gaza and the elaborate system of checkpoints all across the West Bank. He defends the demolition of Palestinian homes, and he justified the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in its recent war on Lebanon in 2006.
We, like all other Palestinians and international supporters of human rights and international law, expect you to uphold the highest standard of respect for the human rights of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, which has been under a hermetic siege imposed by Israel for almost two years. Poverty is rampant, and the lives of the ill, children, and the elderly are in danger. Difficult and brave decisions need to be taken in support of Palestinians exactly like South Africa was supported long before it became fashionable to do so. Instead of legitimizing Israeli war criminals by accepting their invitations, people of conscience who respect international law and justice should shun them.
In 2005, inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it fully complies with international law and recognizes the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine.A specific call for cultural boycott of Israel was issued a year later, garnering wide support. Among the many groups and institutions that have heeded the Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel are Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; the Irish Congress of Trade Unions; the British University and College Union; the two largest trade unions in the UK; the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); prominent British architects; the British National Union of Journalists; the Congress of South African Trade Unions; the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario; celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger; and Palme d’Or winner director Ken Loach.
We strongly urge you to uphold the values of freedom, equality and just peace for all by rejecting the invitation to attend a conference in Israel celebrating that country’s contribution to science and scholarship. Israel is not a member in good standing of the global community of scientists and scholars, and cannot be honored as such. After all, “it’s not about charity, it’s about justice.”
No dia 26 de fevereiro, o embaixador de Israel no Canadá, Alan Baker, não satisfeito com a cumplicidade incondicional do Primeiro Ministro canadense com governo, ousou exprimir "indignação" por o Ministério das Relações Exteriores canadense incluir (em seu manual de formação de futuros diplomatas) Israel na lista de países que pratica tortura.
O lobby sionista conseguiu que o Ministro "revisasse" o manual. O que não exonerava o país da notória prática de tortura que as ONGs de Direitos Humanos israelenses são as primeiras a denunciar.
Aí cedo a palavra ao Public Committee Against torture in Israel (PCATI). Este comitê documenta e protesta regularmente contra a tortura e o tratamento desumano dos prisioneiros políticos palestinos: We seek to compel the state to stop using torture and at the very least, to honor the 1999 Israeli high court precedent handed down following a petition filed by PCATI and other organizations. Many people, including, apparently, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, claim that following the judgment torture has been abolished in Israel. This claim is mistaken.
The state continues to use torture. The judgment, as important as it was, did not categorically outlaw torture and ill treatment and one can argue that it even facilitated its continued use by institutionalizing the “ticking bomb/necessity defense” loophole.
Detainees continue to be illegally abused during arrest and later in interrogation. They are regularly held incommunicado, denied access to attorneys for extended periods. They are too often injured and then examined by physician, who may fail to properly document the injury and its cause and subsequently return the victim to an abusive interrogation.
Hundreds of complaints by torture victims have been served since the court’s judgment only to be “investigated” by an active General Security Service/Shin Bet security agent and systematically dismissed by the State Attorney’s office. One may choose to believe that torture has been “abolished in Israel” but it continues with impunity.
We seek to prevent torture where it exists and, by doing so, protect the most basic principles of democracy, human dignity and human rights. Torture is best prevented by the actions of civil society organizations: litigation; public education; holding torturers accountable; supporting monitoring mechanisms; and demanding an end to impunity. But as long as states, democratic or otherwise, continue to torture and deny it the scourge will remain," explicou Louis Frankenthaler, diretor do PCATI. PCATI’s new report, “Ticking Bombs: Testimonies of Torture Victims in Israel.”
Por outro lado, o mês mostrou que os palestinos da diáspora emergiam na inteligentzia internacional e queriam falar.
No dia 02, o escritor e crítico literário Saree Makdisi, sobrinho do grande Edward Said, e parte da geração de palestinos nascidos no exílio, escreveu esta carta aberta aos Beatles dando um grito de alerta sobre as condições em que se encontrava a pátria que lhe era negada.
Do you see any reason to celebrate?
Israel’s military occupation — the longest in modern history — is not an abstract notion to us. It manifests itself in willful killings of civilians, particularly children; wanton demolition of homes and property; uprooting of more than a million fruitful trees; incessant theft of land and water resources; denial of freedom of movement to millions; and cutting up the occupied Palestinian territory into Bantustans, some entirely caged by walls, fences and hundreds of roadblocks.
In light of the above, performing in Israel at this time is morally equivalent to performing in South Africa at the height of the apartheid era. Indeed, Israel has created a worse system of apartheid than anything that ever existed in South Africa, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights Prof. John Dugard, and South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils, among others.
In 2005, inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it fully complies with international law and recognizes the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine. A specific call for cultural boycott of Israel was issued a year later, garnering wide support. Among the many groups and institutions that have heeded the Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel are the British University and College Union; the two largest trade unions in the UK; the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); prominent British architects; the British National Union of Journalists; the Congress of South African Trade Unions; the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario; Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger; and Palme d’Or winner director Ken Loach.
We strongly urge you to uphold the values of freedom, equality and just peace for all by joining this growing boycott against Israeli apartheid. Nothing less would do justice to the legendary legacy of the Beatles.
The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom two weeks ago, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years — the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation — and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.
Gaza’s doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.
Now that Gaza’s fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to fade, the grim reality facing the territory’s 1.5 million people is once again looming large. “After feeling imprisoned for so long, it has been a psychological relief for Gazans to know that there is a way out,” said John Ging, the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). “But it does not resolve their crisis by any stretch of the imagination.”
Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns brought into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and other relief agencies have been blocked by Israel from delivering to the people who depend on them for their very survival. As long as the border with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses to open its own borders with Gaza to anything other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel to keep the territory’s one power plant operating at a subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a day.
UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid it had previously built up in Gaza. Only 32 truckloads of goods have been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel imposed its total closure on 18 January; 250 trucks were entering every day before last June, and even that was insufficient to meet the population’s needs.
On 30 January UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the daily ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component: the canned meat that is the only source of protein in the food parcels — which even under the best of circumstances contributes less than two-thirds of minimum daily nourishment — is being held up by Israel, and the stock of those cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food Program, which feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has brought in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks; in the seven months before that, it had been bringing in fifteen trucks a day.
Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical Israeli restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the population now depends on food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the aid, they were receiving “enough to survive, not to live,” as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) put it. Without it, they will die.
All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian militant groups’ firing of crude homemade rockets into Israel, which rarely cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal rocket attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying Gaza for four decades.
The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991. It was tightened with the institutionalization of the Israeli occupation enabled by the Oslo Accords of 1993. It was tightened further with the intensification of the occupation in response to the second intifada in 2000. It was tightened further still when Israel redeployed its settlers and troops from inside Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory into what John Dugard, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, referred to as a prison, the key to which, Dugard said, Israel had “thrown away.” It was tightened to the point of strangulation following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, when Israel began restricting supplies of food and other resources into Gaza. It was tightened beyond the point of strangulation following the deposition of the Hamas-led government in June 2007. And now this.
When Israel limited commercial shipments of food — but not humanitarian relief — into Gaza in 2006, a senior government adviser, Dov Weisglass, explained that “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger.”
Israel’s “diet” was taking its toll even before last week. The World Food Program warned last November that less than half of Gaza’s food-import needs were being met. Basics including wheat grain, vegetable oil, dairy products and baby milk were in short supply. Few families can afford meat. Anemia rates rocketed to almost 80 percent. UNRWA noted at about the same time that “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing, because our ration is only 61 percent of what people should have and that has to be supplemented.”
By further restricting the supply of food to an already malnourished population, Israel has clearly decided to take its “diet” a step further. If the people of Gaza remain cut off from the food aid on which their survival now depends, they will face starvation.
They are now essentially out of food; the water system is faltering (almost half the population now lacks access to safe water supplies); the sewage system has broken down and is discharging raw waste into streets and the sea; the power supply is intermittent at best; hospitals lack heat and spare parts for diagnostic machines, ventilators, incubators; dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.
Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer patients cut off from chemotherapy regimens, kidney patients cut off from dialysis treatments, premature babies cut off from blood-clotting medications. In the past few weeks, many more Palestinian parents have watched the lives of their sick children ebb slowly, quietly and (as far as the global media are concerned) invisibly away in Gaza’s besieged hospitals than Israelis have been hurt — let alone actually killed — by the erratic firing of primitive homemade rockets from Gaza, about which we have heard so much. (According to the Israeli human rights organizationB’Tselem, these rockets have killed thirteen Israelis in the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone, almost half of them civilians, including some 200 children.)
Israel’s squeeze is expressly intended to punish the entire population for the firing of those rockets by militants, which ordinary civilians are powerless to stop. “We will not allow them to lead a pleasant life,” said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when Israel cut off fuel supplies on 18 January, thereby plunging Gaza into darkness. “As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza’s residents can walk and have no fuel for their cars.”
Olmert’s views and, more important, his policies were reaffirmed and given the legal sanction of Israel’s High Court. In what human rights organizations referred to as a “devastating” decision, on 30 January the court ruled in favor of the government’s plan to further restrict supplies of fuel and electricity to Gaza. “The decision means that Israel may deliberately deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel and electricity supplies,” pointed out Sari Bashi, of the Gisha human rights organization in Israel. “During wartime, the civilian population is the first and central victim of the fighting, even when efforts are made to minimize the damage,” the court said. In other words, harm to the civilian population is an inevitable effect of war and therefore legally permissible.
That may be the view of Israel’s highest legal authority, but it is not how the matter is viewed by international law, which strictly regulates the way civilian populations are to be treated in time of war. “The parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants in order to spare the civilian population and civilian property,” the ICRC points out, invoking the Geneva Conventions and other founding documents of international humanitarian law. “Neither the civilian population as a whole nor individual civilians may be attacked.”
Moreover, no matter what Israel’s High Court says, what is happening in Gaza is not a war in the conventional sense: Gaza is not a state at war with the state of Israel. It is a territory militarily occupied by Israel. Even after its 2005 redeployment, Israel did not release its hold on Gaza; it continues to control all access to the territory, as well as its airspace, territorial waters and even its population registry. Over and above all the routine prohibitions on attacks on the civilian population and other forms of collective punishment that hold true in case of war, in other words, international law also holds Israel responsible for the welfare of the Gaza population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) specifically demands, for example, that, “to the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.”
Israel’s methodical actions make it clear that it is systematically grinding down and now actually starving people for whose welfare it is legally accountable simply because it regards Gaza’s 1.5 million men, women and children as a surplus population it would, quite simply, like to get rid of one way or the other: a sentiment made quite clear when Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed, shortly after the current crisis began, that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should just be removed and transferred to the Egyptian desert. “They will have a nice country, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace,” he said, without eliciting even a murmur of protest in Israel.
The overwhelming majority of Gazans are refugees or the descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes when Palestine was destroyed and Israel was created in 1948. Like all Palestinian refugees, those of Gaza have a moral and legal right to return to the homeland from which they were expelled. Israel blocks their return for the same reason it expelled them in the first place, because their presence would undermine its already tenuous claim to Jewishness (this is the nature of the so-called “demographic problem” about which Israeli politicians openly complain). As long as the refugees live, what Israel regards as the mortal threat of their right of return lives on. But if they would somehow just go away …
“Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and — some would say — encouragement of the international community,” the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.
The question now is whether the world will simply sit and watch, now that this unprecedented threshold is actually being crossed.
Having taken matters into their hands and destroyed the wall cutting them off from the outside world, it is most unlikely that the people of Gaza will simply submit to that fate. A hermetic closure ultimately depends not merely on Israel’s whims but on Egypt’s willingness — or ability — to cut off the Palestinians of Gaza and watch them starve. For all the US and Israeli pressure on Egypt, and for all the steps Egypt is now taking, it seems most unlikely that it would let things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow Arabs from the Israeli occupation is one thing; actually participating in their repression is quite another. The Egyptian government would have to answer not only to the people of Palestine but to its own people, and indeed to all Arabs.
Working together, Hamas and the people of Gaza have forced Egypt’s hand and made much more visible than ever before the role it had been playing all along in the Israeli occupation and strangulation of Gaza; now that its role in assisting Israel has been revealed, it will be difficult for Egypt to go back to the status quo. Gazans have thrown Israel’s plans into disarray, because Israel’s leaders could do little more than watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza burst out of their prison. And they have placed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the government of Ramallah in a corner: they will have to choose between defending their people’s rights and needs or confirming once and for all — as indeed they are doing — that the PA is there to serve Israel’s interests, not those of the Palestinians. In which case they too will one day be called to account."
Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. This essay was originally published by The Nation.
Em outro registro, o parlamentar palestino no Knesset em exílio Azmi Bishara, também botou a boca no trombone em sua palestra em Soweto no dia 03 de fevereiro.
Foi o discurso de enraizamento na África do Sul do termo "apartheid" em sua versão contemporânea, na ocupação da Palestina. Aconteceu durante a Quarta Semana Anual do Apartheid Israelense (IAW). O evento de conscientização da ocupação contou com debates em Soweto e em 25 cidades no mundo inteiro. Foi do dia 3-19 de fevereiro.
A palestra de Azmi abordou o aniversário fatídico que se aproximava. Em 2008, a Naqba completava 60 anos (blog 15/05/11).
Azmi disse então: “Reconciliation happened in South Africa after apartheid was dismantled, not instead. The message sent to the Palestinians is that you have to make peace and reconcile. We can reconcile after racism and occupation is dismantled.”
O objetivo dessa campanha Anti-Apartheid/Ocupação iniciada em 2005 era reivindicar igualdade total entre cidadãos israelenses judeus e árabes, o fim da ocupação e da colonização de terras palestinas, e a proteção do direito de retorno dos refugiados palestinos, como manda a Resolução 194 da ONU.
“It has become imperative for people around the world to isolate the Israeli apartheid regime, especially in the face of governments’ failure to ensure respect for human rights and to hold Israel accountable before international law and countless UN resolutions” disse então Ahmad Shokr, um dos organizadores do evento em Nova York, concluindo: “By supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign the international community can bring an end to Israeli apartheid and work toward a future of justice, equality and peace.”
Enquanto ativistas estrangeiros e as vítimas do êxodo palestravam sobre a situação insuportável em que se encontrava ua pátria amada, os invasores judeus continuavam a instalar-se na Cisjordânia, a IDF continuava a espezinhar e matar seus habitantes e continuava a matracar a Faixa de Gaza.
Durante a noite do dia 06 de fevereiro até a manhã do dia 07, a IDF feriu cerca de 10 palestinos e matou sete na Faixa. Aumentando para 17 o número de vítimas só em fevereiro.
Essas mortes ocorreram em sete ataques que afetaram sobretudo Khan Younis, al-Nuseirat e o norte da Faixa.
A IDF lançou vários mísseis de plataformas terrestres e aéreos, dos Apaches.
Na noite do dia 06, a IDF bombardeou Beit Hanoun, al-Nuseirat e o nordeste de Khan Yunis ferindo três pessoas, inclusive uma mulher e uma criança.
Em al-Nuseirat, causou danos materiais no campo de refugiados em uma loja de produtos agrícolas e em muitas casas vizinhas.
Na madrugada do dia 07, os mísseis começaram a chover às 3:15. Um deles atingiu um grupo de jovens reunidos no bairro al-Tuffah em Gaza matando Ahmed Zakaria Abu Hamid, de 25 anos; Hamouda al-Shurafa, 40; e ferindo dois outros homens.
Às 3:20, um grupo de jovens reunidos em um posto de gasolina foram atingidos por um míssil que matou Abdullah Nabhan, de 20 anos, e feriu seus dois amigos.
Às 04:15 a IDF fez uma pausa para que os gazauís baixassem a guarda e estes puderam recolher seus outros mortos: Jawdat Abdullah Nabhan, 23 anos; Muhammad Yusuf al-Mutuak, 26; Osama Fayez Assaf, 22, mortos em um posto de gasolina.
Às 7:30 do dia 07, o alvo do ataque foi a Escola Técnica de Agricultura de Beit Nanoun. O míssil matou o professor Hani Shaaban Naim, 41 anos, e feriu alguns alunos, todos menores. Dois deles, gravemente.
O corte de eletricidade é contrário à Convenção de Genebra por prejudicar deliberadamente os civis, privados da energia necessária a serviços vitais. No entanto, foi aprovado pelo Supremo Tribunal de Israel abrindo um precedente grave no Direito Internacional.
Virtualmente, após os bombardeios das usinas, toda a energia da Faixa ficara dependente direta ou indiretamente de Israel, a custo elevado, ainda mais.
O novo corte exarcebou as medidas punitivas, impedindo que os gazauís acedessem a cuidados médicos, água potável, tratamento de esgoto, aquecimento, iluminação e funcionamento de eletro-domésticos, inclusive geladeira.
As ONGs de Direitos Humanos denunciaram a punição coletiva inflingida à população que em vez de diminuir, só fazia aumentar ressentimento e a resistência ao ocupante, em vão.
Com o corte de mais estes 5 por cento em várias linhas, Gaza perdeu mais 1.5 megawatts, além dos 25 cortados anteriormente.
A usina elétrica de Gaza, impossibilitada de funcionar em capacidade máxima - 80 megawwatts que já eram aquém de suas necessidades (devido à falta de petróleo e de peças bloqueados nos checkpoints) estava produzindo apenas 55 megawatts de eletricidade.
O bloqueio de diesel já causara um déficite de 20 por cento na Faixa. As consequências humanas e no meio ambiente estavam drásticas. Os blackouts eram constantes (cerca de 8h diárias) nas escolas, fábricas, escritórios, lares e até nos hospitais. Dezenas de milhares estavam sem acesso a saneamento básico e a falta de eletricidade impedia o tratamento dos esgotos - milhões de litros escoavam no mar.
Uma punição coletiva a curto, médio e longo prazo proibida em letras garrafais. Contudo, o mundo não estava nem aí para os palestinos. Israel ainda monopolizava o papel de vítima até no nosso país.
Às 23:30 lançaram dois ataques em Rafah. Um deles, no bairro Brasil (pois é, tem um bairro na Faixa que homenageia o nosso país) onde matou um policial de 22 anos, Muhammad Ismail Abu Mteir.
O outro em um depósito de legumes no campo de refugiados al-Shabura. O depósito de 800m² foi destruído com seu estoque e 40 funcionários ficaram automaticamente desempregados. O proprietário, Abdul-Haidi Qishta, estimou as perdas em US$700 mil, sem contar os pais de família que perderam seu ganha pão.
No mesmo ataque os israelenses destruiram outro depósito de verduras da Sahabana Company com prejuizo de cerca de US350 mil e o desemprego de 80 funcionários em dois turnos. 14 casas vizinhas foram parcial ou totalmente destruídas. Ali viviam 106 pessoas das quais dez ficaram feridas; crianças, na maioria.
Por volta das 11:55, caças da IDF atacaram um campo de treinamento em construção em Khan Yunis. O único alvo militar desta operação relâmpago corriqueira.
Gaza sofreu quatro ataques no dia 10 de fevereiro, no bairro al-Zaitoun. Logo após a meia-noite uma fábrica de ferro foi destruída assim como a loja vizinha e casas da quadra foram atingidas. Devido ao horário noturno, 24 pessoas foram feridas, inclusive seis mulheres e quatro crianças que foram pegas desprevenidas, dormindo.
Durante este dia 10 de fevereiro, o co-fundador da Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, analisou a situação da seguinte maneira: "The next logical step for the Israeli government will have to be a decision whether to target the topo political leadership' of Hamas. So said an Israeli official quoted in The jerusalem Post. Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of prime Minister Ehud Olmert's kadima party and chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, echoed the call, arguing that 'There's no difference between those who wear a suide suit and a diplomat's suit." Following a cabinet meeting on 10 February, Israel's Interior Minister Shimon Sheetr specifaclly called for the execution of Ismail Haniyeh, the democratically-elected hamas prime minister, and added that for good measure 'We must take a neigborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map'.Last September, Yossi Alpher, the co-founder of the European Union-funded publicationBitterlemons, wrote an article advocating “decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and ‘civilian.’”
Alpher, a former special adviser to Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak when the latter was prime minister, worried that Israel would “pay a price in terms of international condemnation,” for “targeting legally elected Hamas officials who won a fair election,” but that overall it would be well worth it.
Executing democratically-elected leaders may require more chutzpah than even Israel has shown, but the possibility and its disastrous consequences have to be taken seriously given Israel’s track record. Israel executed Hamas’ elderly, quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound co-founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, followed shortly afterwards by the execution his successor as the movement’s leader, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi.
Aside from the United States, Israel is the only country where the murder of foreign leaders is openly debated as a policy option.
Israeli official propaganda presents all its recent actions as defensive and necessary to stop the rockets fired by Palestinian fighters in Gaza. But if Israel’s goal was to achieve calm and a cessation of violence, the first logical step would not be to contemplate new atrocities, but to respond positively to Hamas’ repeated ceasefire proposals.
When it was elected in January 2006, Hamas had observed a unilateral ceasefire for more than a year. After the election, Hamas’ leaders offered a long-term total truce, tentatively following the political path of other militant groups including the Irish Republican Army (IRA), whose 1994 ceasefire paved the way for the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. (In December, US President George W. Bush received Martin McGuinness, former second in command of the IRA, and now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, at the White House.)
Last December, Haaretz reported that Hamas had secured the agreement of all factions to end rocket fire on Israel, provided Israel reciprocated. Hamas was also engaged in indirect negotiations for the release of Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for an Israeli prisoner of war held in Gaza.
Olmert rejected the December ceasefire offer. “The State of Israel,” he said, “has no interest in negotiating with entities that do not recognize the Quartet demands.” In other words there could be no ceasefire until Hamas unilaterally accepted all of Israel’s demands before negotiations could even begin.
The problem was not that Israeli officials did not believe Hamas could deliver. Barak was reported to be in favor of considering a hudna — a renewed truce, and a “senior Israeli security official” told Haaretz that “There’s no doubt that Hamas is capable of forcing a let-up on Islamic Jihad and the other small factions in the Strip … It won’t be a 100 percent decrease, but even 98 percent would be a big change.” (“Olmert rejects Hamas cease-fire offer,” Haaretz, 25 December 2007).
If even Israel believed that Hamas could reliably enforce a truce, why does it refuse to accept one? Why has it refused to engage with Hamas, as American and British policy-makers did with the IRA?
For Israel the potential that Hamas could turn to politics presents a threat, not an opportunity. Israel has no interest in facing Palestinian leaders who are at once committed to basic Palestinian rights, capable of delivering, and enjoy popular legitimacy and support.
So instead of engaging with Hamas, the US and Israel announced a complete boycott which was intended to turn the Palestinian population against the movement.
At the same time, the peace process show relaunched in Annapolis last November, followed by the international donors meeting in Paris where pledges of cash were showered on the Palestinian Authority to elevate the unelected, Israeli-backed Ramallah “government” of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad in the eyes of Palestinians. With this renewed patronage and prestige, Abbas and company were to be pushed to sign a deal giving up Palestinian refugee rights and agreeing to a Palestinian Bantustan under permanent Israeli domination.
Of course much more than Hamas stands in the way of the fulfillment of this Israeli fantasy. The Palestinian people would unite against such a deal. But Hamas is the most visible and well-organized obstacle.
Rather than breaking under pressure, Hamas has made some impressive tactical gains, even as Gaza’s agony increases. Even the dubious opinion polls that come out of EU-funded non-governmental organizations showed Hamas enjoying an upsurge of support after the breach of the Gaza-Egypt border. But with Israel and its backers steadfast in refusing to grant Hamas a political role, not even in operating the border crossings, the movement has no way to translate these tactical victories into strategic gains. Except for one: in the arena of world public opinion.
Israel and Egypt, the two countries most responsible for the blockade of Gaza, were deeply embarrassed by the popular surge that temporarily broke the siege. No recent event has done as much to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians and expose Israel’s crimes to international scrutiny. But one such action is not enough; already, Israel and Egypt with support from the quisling regime in Ramallah, the EU and the US are trying to reimpose the blockade. (In a repulsive echo of Yitzhak Rabin’s infamous order to Israeli soldiers during the first Intifada to break the bones of Palestinians, Egypt’s foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit promised to do the same to Palestinians if they continued to enter Egypt.)
Some Hamas leaders appear to understand the necessity and indeed the risks of mass, nonviolent resistance. “The next time there is a crisis in the Gaza Strip, Israel will have to face half a million Palestinians who will march toward Erez [crossing with Israel],” said Ahmed Yousef, a senior advisor to Ismail Haniyeh. “This is not an imaginary scenario and many Palestinians would be prepared to sacrifice their lives.” Properly planned, repeated mass actions of this kind could galvanize public opinion in Arab and European countries and even North America forcing some governments to abandon the pro-Israel consensus.
But here is where the great danger lies: with its escalation in Gaza and refusal to accept a ceasefire, Israel may be trying to provoke more rocket attacks and force Hamas into abandoning its political strategy altogether to provide the needed pretext to “decapitate” the organization. Unfortunately, there are signs that Hamas is jumping into the trap.
Some Hamas political leaders appeared to have been taken by surprise when the movement’s military wing took credit for a suicide attack inside Israel for the first time since 2004. The attack in the Israeli town of Dimona on 6 February killed an elderly woman as well as the bomber. As a consequence of Israel’s and the “international community’s” rejection of all of Hamas’ political initiatives, those within the organization advocating a resumption of full-scale armed struggle may be gaining the upper hand.
If they make such a tragic miscalculation, Israeli leaders may breathe a sigh of relief. After all, Israel is much more comfortable with rockets falling on Sderot, than it would be with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians marching on the checkpoints in Gaza or the West Bank.
The next logical step is for all Palestinian leaders still loyal to their people’s cause to work together to mobilize the population, not to gain factional advantage, but to expose Israeli apartheid to a sustained and irresistible surge of people power".
Ali Abunimah é autor de One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
Majed Hadaeid, de 43 anos, cultivador de cravos, esperava exportar para a Europa a recolta de seus 130 dunams (1 dunam = 1.000m), mas acabou assistindo impotente ao apodrecimento de seu estoque: “I have all carnations, in 30 different colors, and varieties yielding 16-17 million blossoms per year.” Sua perda o obrigou a demitir seus 200 funcionários e seus milhões de botões de flores acabaram virando comida de bodes, jumentos, camelos, carneiros e ovelhas.
Majed era um dos agricultores mais bem sucedidos da Faixa e duzentas famílias viviam direta e mais da metade indiretamente de seu negócio. No fim de fevereiro ele passaria da direção para o campo a fim de alimentar seus 13 filhos cujas idades iam de 20 anos a seis meses. Um pesadelo. Ele arrenda as terras e corria o risco de perdê-las. Normalmente usava o fruto das vendas de fevereiro para comprar fertilizantes, sementes, pagar os salários e contas atrasadas durante os meses do ano menos lucrativos. Sem as vendas de São Valentino, estava falido.
“I am not with Hamas or Fatah,” disse. “I didn’t vote for any party. Israel is to blame for this collective punishment for us all.”
Majed é um dos muitos cultivadores de flores na Faixa de Gaza onde 480 dunams eram reservados à cultura de flores e produziam até então uma média de 60 milhões de unidades por ano. A colheita ia de meados de novembro a meados de maio. Os cultivadores costumavam escoar seu estoque no mercado de flores da Holanda para os distribuidores comercializarem. O mês de fevereiro era o mês em que enchiam os bolsos para poder aguentar o ano inteiro com vendas menores.
Sabendo disso, Israel impediu a saída das caixas lotadas que os importadores holandeses esperavam e os produtores gazauís ficaram a ver navios, literalmente, da Força Naval da IDF. Sem porto próprio, com as fronteiras controladas por Israel e com os Acordos Oslo, os palestinos, tanto da Faixa quanto da Cisjordânia, não podem exportar nem importar sem autorização de Israel, que intermedeia o negócio, recebe o pagamento que adormece em seus bancos antes de serem repassados e recolhe os impostos, que repassa ou segura ad eternum a fim de perturbar o funcionamento das administrações públicas, desencorajar a produção e o comércio, e derrubar o moral da população ocupada.
Normalmente, a Faixa exportava 45 milhões de flores para a União Europeia. Em 2008, no mesmo período, só conseguiram evacuar (por meios indiretos) uma quantidade irrisória. “This year we managed to export only five million flowers to the Netherlands", disse Mahmoud Khlaiel, presidente da ONG local de Produtores de flores.
O caso de Majed Hadaeid é o mesmo de todos os cultivadores. Ayman Okal, há 14 anos no ramo, disse, enquanto dava cravos vermelhos de comida para um bode, “Every season I produce 8-9 million carnations for Christmas and Mothers Day. But Valentine’s is the biggest.” Except of course, this year. Felizmente ele é dono das terras que cultiva.
Para completar o arbítrio do ocupante, nos postos de fronteira em que suas caixas foram bloqueadas, os palestinos foram obrigados a assinar um documento que dizia que as flores não estavam sendo exportadas não por proibição do ocupante e sim “because Palestinian producers have decided not to continue shipping.”
A mentira era preventiva. Israel imprimiu estes formulários a fim de evitar queixas eventuais aos organismos internacionais. Assim se protegem "legal" e amoralmente.
“This is not true,” disse Khlaiel indignado. “Israel returns the flowers to Gaza after they are destroyed waiting at the crossings. It costs each grower four dollars to send each bouquet’s pots, in addition to the cost of the flowers. Once destroyed through the delays, the grower still must pay the costs.”
(Para informação, as flores provenientes da Faixa de Gaza são comercializadas na Europa com a marca "Coral". Quando for à florista, lembre-se disso e escolha a flor "certa" por solidariedade.)
PS. As entrevistas deste parágrafo foram feitas pelo jornalista palestino Mohamed Omert.
Certainly, free movement was the promise held out in the comprehensive Agreement on Movement and Access, signed more than two years ago by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The first of the six components of this agreement was that there would be a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah, controlled by the PA and Egypt. At the time, this was hailed as an historic step on the road to a Palestinian state — for the first time, it was said, Palestinians would have access to the outside world free from Israeli control.
So, how was Israel still able to impose a suffocating blockade on the Strip, home to almost 1.5 million Palestinians, eighty percent of them refugees? After Palestinian forces opened the border wall on 23 January, breaking the siege, many Palestinians blamed Egypt for not doing the same much earlier to relieve the suffering and deprivation that had brought Gaza to within days of running out of food and medicine. But however complicit Egypt may have been it was not alone.
It was primarily through the good offices of the European Union (EU), which had a formal role in managing the Rafah crossing, that Israel always had a veto on the opening of the crossing. In practice, whenever Israel didn’t want the crossing open, the EU obligingly kept it shut.
The Rafah crossing was open almost every day from 25 November 2005 to 24 June 2006, though not for 24 hours a day as intended. However, after 24 June 2006, when an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinians, the EU, at Israel’s insistence, prevented it from opening regularly and then kept it closed completely since 9 June 2007, after Hamas took control of Gaza.
Quartet midwife
The so-called Middle East Quartet (the US, the EU, Russia and the UN) was the midwife of the agreement, and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Javier Solana (EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy) were in Jerusalem on 15 November 2005 to launch it.
Rice said that the agreement “is intended to give the Palestinian people freedom to move, to trade, to live ordinary lives.” She added that “for the first time since 1967, Palestinians will gain control over entry and exit from their territory. This will be through an international crossing at Rafah.”
Solana also hailed the arrangements: “This is the first time that a border is opened and not controlled by the Israelis. … So as you can imagine, this is a very important step that is the first time that takes place.”
One could be forgiven for thinking that the US and the EU had made arrangements for a border crossing between Gaza and Egypt that was “not controlled by the Israelis” and that from then on Gaza couldn’t be strangled by Israel.
EU third party
But reality fell far short of Rice and Solana’s claims. The agreement did not provide for commercial goods traffic through the Rafah crossing into Gaza, so it did not facilitate trade. And despite the cosmetics, the crossing has always been controlled by the Israelis. Even though Israel has no personnel, military or otherwise, physically present at the crossing, it has been able to close the crossing at will, just as it can close the crossings between Gaza and Israel itself.
This came about because, under the agreement, a third party must have personnel present at the Rafah crossing before it is allowed to open. The third party is the EU — and the EUhas always refused to man the crossing when Israel didn’t want the crossing open. In effect, the EU has acted as a proxy for Israel.
The agreement gives EU personnel at the crossing the authority “to ensure that the PAcomplies with all applicable rules and regulations concerning the Rafah crossing point and the terms of this agreement” and in the event of perceived non-compliance “to order the re-examination and reassessment of any passenger, luggage, vehicle or goods.”
For this purpose, the EU established the grandly titled EU Border Assistance Mission for the Rafah Crossing Point, or EUBAM Rafah. This is a force of less than a hundred, mostly policemen, which is based in Ashkelon in Israel.
In addition to the EU monitors, who are physically present at the crossing, Israeli security forces are able to monitor activity at the crossing remotely, via closed circuit TV and other data links, and can make a record of the individuals crossing. The Israeli monitors are based in Israel at the Kerem Shalom crossing with Gaza, where a liaison office (for liaison between Israel and the PA) is located. One of the duties of the EU, as the third party to the agreement, is to “lead” this office:
“A liaison office, led by the third party, will receive real-time video and data feed of the activities at Rafah and will meet regularly to review implementation of this agreement, resolve any disputes arising from this agreement, and perform other tasks specified in this agreement.”
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| Filas no posto de fronteira |
Ridiculous as it may seem, the EU takes the view that the opening of the crossing is a matter that may be disputed by Israeli representatives in the liaison office. And if they don’t agree to it opening, the EU doesn’t send its monitors to the crossing, as required for its opening under the terms of the agreement. So, Israel has a veto over the opening of the crossing, even though, according to Rice and Solana, it is “not controlled by the Israelis.”
But on the EUBAM website, the answer given to the question “Can EUBAM open the crossing point?” is: “RCP [Rafah Crossing Point] can only be opened by agreement between the Parties.EUBAM cannot itself open the crossing point.”
That is as plain as a pikestaff: in the opinion of the EU, the agreement gives Israel a veto on whether the crossing should open. There is nothing in the agreement to warrant such an interpretation — and it is in flat contradiction to the words of Rice and Solana that the crossing would “not be controlled by Israelis.”
What is more, in the opinion of the EU, the agreement gives Israel the right to close the crossing when it is open. According to a press statement on 14 December 2006, after the crossing opened that day, “the Government of Israel had requested that the crossing be closed due to the expected arrival of Prime Minister Haniyeh, who was reportedly carrying a large sum of money.” After consultations with Brussels, the EU closed the crossing.
Since the Israeli-built Gaza-Egypt border wall was torn down, Israel, the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Egypt and the EU have met to try to restore the arrangements under the agreement. Hamas, excluded from these meetings, has stated that it will not allow a return to the situation of de facto Israeli control through the “third party” proxy and has demanded a role in managing the crossing.
If Gaza is to be immune from strangulation by Israel in future, then the Israeli veto over the opening of the Rafah crossing will have to be ended. In addition, the crossing must cater for commercial traffic into Gaza, which is not provided for under the present agreement."
David Morrison writes for the Labour & Trade Union Review (www.ltureview.com), where a longer version of this article appeared. He lives in Belfast and his website is www.david-morrison.org.uk.
No Comment: Hebronitas sob ataque da IDF no dia 12 de fevereiro
O Centro cuida exclusivamente de menores de 5 anos. Quem transfere estes pacientes infantis para o Centro é a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) que cuida de problemas de refugiados e na Faixa lida com a população nos campos mais desfavorizados.
Mas o Centro recebe muitos mais pacientes. Mães chegam o dia todo carregando seus filhos sub-nutridos. É impressionante ver aqueles menininhos magrinhos, quietos, sem força nem para chorar, carinha triste, olhar apagado nos braços de mães de olhos arregalados de desespero de ver a si e a família à míngua não por não quererem trabalhar ou não terem condições de cultivar, como em outros países, e sim por verem suas lavouras destruídas sistematicamente e serem privados do direito de importar sementes.
O sítio-bloqueio afetava todo mundo, mas como toda tragédia, afetava mais ainda as crianças e os menos favorecidos. A escassa comida contrabandeada até as prateleiras das lojas chegava pelos túneis com custo dobrado ou triplicado e portanto inacessível às famílias de baixa renda ou sem renda alguma por causa do desemprego que avassalava a Faixa.
Fazia semanas que nem os gazauís de classe média viam carne ou comida fresca. Mais de cinquenta por cento da população, ou seja, então 750 mil pessoas, penavam com os longos cortes de energia e mais de dois terços careciam de alimentação.
Nesse dia órgãos oficiais comunicaram à imprensa que quase 11 por cento das crianças da Faixa de menos de cinco anos padeciam de deficiências inerentes à subnutrição, inclusive atrofia de crescimento.
O Dr. al-Wahaidi informou que "The major problem in the Gaza Strip is that we do not have sufficient natural food resources. We cannot grow the variety of fruit and vegetables that we need in order to provide ourselves, and our children, a well-balanced diet. We are dependent on food imports, but the food table in the Gaza Strip is now severely deficient because of the siege and closure. We have tens of thousands of families who now have no options or alternatives to humanitarian assistance. But if this siege is maintained, then current child malnutrition interventions and preventions will not be sufficient. Child morbidity and mortality will both increase. We will not be able to cope.”
Uma das perversidades da ocupação da Palestina é que Israel interdita totalmente a interação da Cisjordânia com a Faixa de Gaza. Por questões estratégicas e por crueldade, simplesmente.
A razão política é evidente, considerando a distância que Israel estabeleceu (contra as diretivas da ONU) entre os dois territórios. Israel, após ter retirado do mapa da ONU em 1948 a faixa de terra que ligava o futuro Estado palestino de terras descontínuas, negou a ligação rodoviária prevista nos Acordos de Oslo com o propósito de isolar a população gazauí e separá-la, aos olhos do mundo desinformado, da Palestina.
A segunda razão política é de afastar dos olhos e do coração compatriotas e privar os gazauís de manifestações concretas de solidariedade entre familiares e amigos que vivem na Cisjordânia com restrições de movimentos e com terras sendo roubadas todos os dias, mas que pelo menos não passam fome, por enquanto (no rítmo que vai a ocupação e a desapropriação de lavouras, daqui a pouco eles também estão famintos, além de sedentos).
A terceira razão é desumana. É a mais perversa de todas. Visa aniquilar a população aos poucos, matando-a de sub-nutrição e com água semi-potável que a enfraqueça a médio prazo até que os gazauís desapareçam do mapa. Um genocídio lento programado nos mínimos detalhes. Que começou em 2006 e estava se agravando.
Além deste novo tipo de genocídio velado, havia os bombardeios intermitentes que não cesssavam.
Protestos em Londres contra os diamantes sangrentos de Lev Leviev
Na noite dessse mesmo dia 15 de fevereiro em que os jornalistas receberam a informação sobre a situação des/humana na Faixa, Israel prosseguiu sua campanha de assassinatos de líderes palestinos iniciada no ano 2000 durante o governo do general Ehud Barak. (O general Ariel Sharon continuou a campanha, desvairado, e o civil Ehud Olmert não a mudou em nada.)
No início os alvos eram calculados e os efeitos colaterais, ou seja, o número de mulheres, idosos e crianças mortos chocavam a população israelense. Com o passar dos anos havia cada vez menos preocupação do governo em visar exatamente o alvo para evitar mortes colaterais porque seus eleitores deixaram de ver os gazauís como gente. Exatamente como os soldados da IDF são treinados para ver os palestinos de maneira geral. Exatamente como os imigrantes judeus que se instalam nas colônias/invasões civis na Cisjordânia veem os nativos cuja terra desapropriam inescrupulosamente.
Desta vez o alvo da campanha de assassinatos foi Ayman al-Fayed, de 42 anos. Ayman, conhecido como Abu Abdallah, era o chefe das Brigadas al-Quds, ala militar do Jihad Islâmico, na Faixa de Gaza. No início os alvos eram calculados e os efeitos colaterais, ou seja, o número de mulheres, idosos e crianças mortos chocavam a população israelense. Com o passar dos anos havia cada vez menos preocupação do governo em visar exatamente o alvo para evitar mortes colaterais porque seus eleitores deixaram de ver os gazauís como gente. Exatamente como os soldados da IDF são treinados para ver os palestinos de maneira geral. Exatamente como os imigrantes judeus que se instalam nas colônias/invasões civis na Cisjordânia veem os nativos cuja terra desapropriam inescrupulosamente.
A casa de Ayman no campo de refugiados de Bureij foi bombardeada durante a noite, como sempre, para pegar a família desprevenida e causar o máximo de perdas. Com ele morreram seus dois filhos pequenos e mais cinco pessoas. Mais de cinquenta foram feridas com a explosão do prédio.
Ao contrário da Cisjordânia (onde os soldados da IDF bloqueiam as ambulâncias nos checkpoints durante horas para que os doentes graves e os feridos por um soldado ou um colono judeu não sejam socorridos a tempo de terem a vida ou um membro salvo) os para-médicos do hospital de Bureij chegaram depressa. Porém, esta diligência não facilitou o salvamento.
It’s very hard for us to rescue, or even locate bodies beneath the building,” disse um para-médico. O Dr. Hassan Khalaf do hospital al-Shifa foi mais claro: "This is a barbaric crime. They bombed residential areas where people were sleeping in their houses.” O médico do hospital infantil de Gaza estava indignado porque muitos dos feridos eram meninos de menos de 12 anos, inclusive um bebê.Bombeiros e voluntários passaram horas cavando, buscando sobreviventes nos escombros e tentando apagar o fogo que se propagava pela vizinhança.
O último assassinato desse gênero em Gaza fora o do médico Nabil Abu Salmiya em julho de 2006, junto com a mulher e oito familiares, com "efeito colateral" de outros parentes e muitos vizinhos feridos.
O porta-voz do Jihad, Abu Ahmed, fez sua delcaração pública emocionado: “The Israeli occupation have lost their compasses. Shelling a house in the middle of a residential district, inevitably killing and injuring children and women … this is evidence of their failings. ” E prometeu que Israel pagaria pelo crime.
No auge da emoção, um gazauí disse: “This is an Israeli-made earthquake. Palestinian resistance fighters should fire homemade rockets, so Israelis suffer and feel what we are suffering as a result of their bombs.”
Uma multidão foi se aglomerando fora do hospital pedindo justiça. Um deles disse: “It is a war crime to bomb an entire neighborhood to kill just one person.”
John Holmes, ao deixar a Faixa, declarara à imprensa que o bloqueio interminável “makes for a grim human and humanitarian situation here in Gaza, which means that people are not able to live with the basic dignity to which they are entitled. I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things I have seen and heard about during the day.”
Quem vai à Cisjordânia e à Faixa de Gaza e não se choca? Só quem é cego ou desalmado.
A ONU recebeu a notícia do atentado como uma bofetada. Porém, a subserviência de Ban Ki Moon a Washington fez as línguas calarem. On the record. Off, reclamações não faltavam, pois os funcionários já não aguentavam mais.
John Holmes passara quatro dias entre Israel e os territórios palestinos ocupados. O ponto final foi Gaza e o hospital al-Shifa. Lá, ele desabafou aos jornalistas: "I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things I have seen and heard about during the day. They are the result of the current restrictions on the crossings into Gaza, and teh very limited amounts of foods and other materials being allowed in... all this makes for a grim human and humanitarian situation here in Gaza, which means that people are not able to live with the basic dignity to which they are entitled. So what is essenctially needed is an opening of the crossings, a lot more goods coming in."
John Holmes ignorava que sua presença e sua conclusão óbvia só serviriam para irritar ainda mais os causadores desta crise humanitária.
Os jornalistas ouviram as palavras de John Holmes e uns engoliram em seco. Estes se lembravam da declaração que vasara do Ministério do Interior de Israel, quando o ministro Meir Sheetrit, em reunião restrita, dissera sem papas na língua que a IDF podia escolher um bairro de Gaza, dar 24 horas para que os habitantes evacuassem, e “wipe it out” riscá-lo do mapa, como informara a BBC sem que o Ministro sofresse nenhuma reprimenda por sua franqueza. Afinal de contas, ele só disse o que muitos nos govenor diziam semi-abertamente.
Sheetrit foi até modesto em sua idéia de holocausto. "Bonzinho", ele falou em dar prazo de 24 horas para as famílias se salvarem, embora desabrigadas. Ora, neste ataque, como nos precedentes e nos que o sucederiam, não houve nenhum aviso preliminar. A "limpeza" foi humana e material.
Israel não temia a ONU, não temia críticas, não temia nem Deus e o Juízo Final. Só pensava no presente e só investia no genocídio que estava realizando paulatinamente.
Além disso, a IDF bombardeava a Faixa sem parar. Como no dia 23 em Beit Hanoun, onde matou três civis que faziam piquenique em Nazaz.
O ataque aconteceu pouco depois das 15:30 do sábado. O míssil visava os três amigos que estavam na cabana de um deles, a mais de um quilômetro da fronteira. O foguete atingiu os três rapazes em cheio. O universitário de Beit Hanoun Mohammad Talal al-Za’anin (20 anos), o motorista Ibrahim Ahmad Abu Jarad (20), e Mohammad Hasan Hussein (22) de Jabalia, morreram logo, aos pedaços.
Depois do assassinato, o porta-voz da IDF desfiou as mentiras de sempre ao jornal isralense Yediot Ahronot, disse que o alvo era um lançador de foguetes do Hamas.
Nem fazendo esforço dava para acreditar. Os rapazes foram atingidos em campo aberto, grelhando carne para os amigos que esperavam para jantar. Felizmente foram bombardeados antes de seus convidados chegarem porque senão teria havido muitos mais mortos.
O PCHR, Centro Palestino de Direitos Humanos, condenou o crime: "1. Affirms that this crime is part of a continuous series of Israeli war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, reflecting IOF disregard for civilian life. 2. Calls upon the High Contracting Parties (HCP) of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) to fulfill their legal obligation under Article 1 of the Convention and ensure that it is respected by all parties under any circumstances," e pediu que o HCP fulfill their obligations under Article 146 of the Convention to pursue persons suspected of perpetrating grave violations of the Convention, which are defined as war crimes under Article 147 of the Convention.
Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are “non-Jews.” It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Israel is continuing the construction of its colonies and massive Wall in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of July 2004. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.
We urge you to reject the invitation from a man who has nothing to do with the lofty ideals of progress in science, medicine and the environment. His decades-long political career includes war crimes committed against the Lebanese and Palestinian people.
In 1996, when Israel still occupied southern Lebanon, Shimon Peres as Prime Minister launched “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” causing 400,000 Lebanese to flee their homes, with almost 800 of them fleeing to a UN base in Qana, South Lebanon. On 18 APRIL the Israeli army shelled the UN shelter in Qana, killing 102 civilians, mainly women, children and the elderly. Many more were injured. Human Rights Watch, the UN and Amnesty International subsequently disproved the myth that the Israeli army did not deliberately intend to shell the UN base. Shimon Peres said at the time, “In my opinion, everything was done according to clear logic and in a responsible way. I am at peace.”
Peres is on record for being responsible for other war crimes, from building colonies on occupied Arab land to endorsing a policy of extra-judicial killings, by which Palestinians and other Arabs are murdered without the benefit of a trial or, in fact, any evidence other than that provided by Israeli intelligence. Peres also supports the siege of Gaza and the elaborate system of checkpoints all across the West Bank. He defends the demolition of Palestinian homes, and he justified the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in its recent war on Lebanon in 2006.
We, like all other Palestinians and international supporters of human rights and international law, expect you to uphold the highest standard of respect for the human rights of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, which has been under a hermetic siege imposed by Israel for almost two years. Poverty is rampant, and the lives of the ill, children, and the elderly are in danger. Difficult and brave decisions need to be taken in support of Palestinians exactly like South Africa was supported long before it became fashionable to do so. Instead of legitimizing Israeli war criminals by accepting their invitations, people of conscience who respect international law and justice should shun them.
In 2005, inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it fully complies with international law and recognizes the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine.A specific call for cultural boycott of Israel was issued a year later, garnering wide support. Among the many groups and institutions that have heeded the Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel are Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; the Irish Congress of Trade Unions; the British University and College Union; the two largest trade unions in the UK; the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); prominent British architects; the British National Union of Journalists; the Congress of South African Trade Unions; the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario; celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger; and Palme d’Or winner director Ken Loach.
We strongly urge you to uphold the values of freedom, equality and just peace for all by rejecting the invitation to attend a conference in Israel celebrating that country’s contribution to science and scholarship. Israel is not a member in good standing of the global community of scientists and scholars, and cannot be honored as such. After all, “it’s not about charity, it’s about justice.”
O lobby sionista conseguiu que o Ministro "revisasse" o manual. O que não exonerava o país da notória prática de tortura que as ONGs de Direitos Humanos israelenses são as primeiras a denunciar.
Aí cedo a palavra ao Public Committee Against torture in Israel (PCATI). Este comitê documenta e protesta regularmente contra a tortura e o tratamento desumano dos prisioneiros políticos palestinos: We seek to compel the state to stop using torture and at the very least, to honor the 1999 Israeli high court precedent handed down following a petition filed by PCATI and other organizations. Many people, including, apparently, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, claim that following the judgment torture has been abolished in Israel. This claim is mistaken.
The state continues to use torture. The judgment, as important as it was, did not categorically outlaw torture and ill treatment and one can argue that it even facilitated its continued use by institutionalizing the “ticking bomb/necessity defense” loophole.
Detainees continue to be illegally abused during arrest and later in interrogation. They are regularly held incommunicado, denied access to attorneys for extended periods. They are too often injured and then examined by physician, who may fail to properly document the injury and its cause and subsequently return the victim to an abusive interrogation.
Hundreds of complaints by torture victims have been served since the court’s judgment only to be “investigated” by an active General Security Service/Shin Bet security agent and systematically dismissed by the State Attorney’s office. One may choose to believe that torture has been “abolished in Israel” but it continues with impunity.
We seek to prevent torture where it exists and, by doing so, protect the most basic principles of democracy, human dignity and human rights. Torture is best prevented by the actions of civil society organizations: litigation; public education; holding torturers accountable; supporting monitoring mechanisms; and demanding an end to impunity. But as long as states, democratic or otherwise, continue to torture and deny it the scourge will remain," explicou Louis Frankenthaler, diretor do PCATI. PCATI’s new report, “Ticking Bombs: Testimonies of Torture Victims in Israel.”
O mês de fevereiro na Cisjordânia continuou com as mesmas caractérísticas de sempre. Expansão das colônias + repressão da IDF + Resistência.
E em Gaza, fevereiro terminaria com uma nova ofensiva bélica israelense da pesada. A Operação Warm Winter. Warm, para os gazauís bombardeados; Ehud Olmert e seu cupinchas estavam gelados como a temperatura invernal. As mães palestinas estavam suando frio e rezando pela proteção de Allah.
PS. Esse mês de fevereiro foi palco também do assassinato, no dia 13, de um alto dirigente do Hizbollah, Imad Mughniyeh, também conhecido como al-Hajj Radwan. Dedico-lhe um Post Scriptum por ter sido grande aliado da causa de libertação da Palestina.
Imad era o maior e mais fiel aliado que os palestinos tinham no Hizbollah. E por isso Israel e os EUA o detestavam mais do que os demais.
"The history of Hizballah, founded in 1982 soon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is mainly a history of resistance (Hizballah also has a network of social services catering to the needs of a large segment of society traditionally ignored by the Lebanese state) to the Israeli military occupation of Lebanon, and contrary to prevailing propaganda, was conducted ethically. We also know that since its inception not a shred of evidence that Hizballah was involved in any act of terrorism outside the borders of Lebanon has ever been offered. The self-righteous rhetoric of the US and Israeli governments — both of which have killed many more innocent people in the last couple of years alone than the combined total of victims in all the alleged attacks of Moughniya and Hizballah — is not evidence. All of the allegations against Moughniya dating back to the second half of the 1970’s when he became a member of Force 17, the Special Forces unit of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, and into the 1980’s when he joined the emerging Hizballah in the wake of the Israeli invasion fall into one of two categories. They are either, by definition, not acts of terror, such as legitimate acts of armed resistance against a foreign occupying power, or they are acts of terror that have never been linked to him. Any objective observer familiar with the lawlessness and chaos that prevailed in Lebanon and the proliferation of armed groups during this period would readily admit it’s probably not even possible to determine who was doing what at the time. Hizballah has always denied any involvement in the terrorist acts and usually other smaller groups actually did claim responsibility for many of the attacks attributed to Hizballah.
"Every people elevate the profession in which they excel... The profession in which Israel is not only one of the biggest, but the unchallenged Numero Uno is: liquidations.
E em Gaza, fevereiro terminaria com uma nova ofensiva bélica israelense da pesada. A Operação Warm Winter. Warm, para os gazauís bombardeados; Ehud Olmert e seu cupinchas estavam gelados como a temperatura invernal. As mães palestinas estavam suando frio e rezando pela proteção de Allah.
Assassinato de Imad Mughniyeh em fevereiro de 2008
Imad foi um dos primeiros integrantes do partido em meados da década de 80. Sua vida foi em si uma história da resistência libanesa.
Foi um dos primeiro integrantes do Hizbollah, movimento de resistência que criou uma rede de serviços sociais paralelos no Líbano para servir a população carente negligenciada pelo governo central. Com a ameaça israelense, criou também uma ala militar que obstaculasse o avanço dos vizinhos e o Líbano virasse uma grande Palestina desapropriada e com sua população oprimida.
Falo em Imad na história do conflito Israel vs Palestina porque, embora fosse libanês e bem nacionalista, sua militância pela causa palestina começou cedo, em meados da década de 70, em seus primeiros anos de Engenharia. Ele e o primo, Mustafa Badr al-Din, entraram na Força 17, do Fatah quando estavam na Universidade de Beirute. O Fatah nessa época tinha uma aliança com o Movimento Nacionalista Libanês, grupo de esquerda do qual os jovens idealistas faziam parte.
(A Organização de Libertação da Palestina - OLP - criou a Força 17 para garantir a segurança de Yasser Arafat e para profissionalizar um serviço palestino de inteligência. Esta unidade militar seria absorvida quase integralmente pelo Fatah em 1995 após os Acordos de Oslo, quando Yasser Arafat a incorporou à Autoridade Nacional Palestina como uma unidade laica de sua confiança que contrabalançasse as brigadas de conotação religiosa emergentes em seu aparelho de segurança. Mahmoud Abbas tentou desmantelá-la e incorporá-la à guarda presidencial em 2007, 2008, 2009...
Foi fundada por Ali Hassan Salameh, ou seja, Abu Hassan, que o serviço de inteligência israelense Mossad assassinou em Beirute em 1979 junto com seus guarda-costas. À sua morte, seu vice, Mahmud Awad Damra assumiu o comando até 2006 quando foi sequestrado na Cijsjordânia e preso em Israel durante 15 anos até ser libertado em 2011 na troca de prisioneiros em que Israel recuperaria o cabo Gilad Shalit capturado pelo Hamas em 2006. O Shin Bet (serviço israelense de inteligência interna) combateu a Força 17 incansavelmente. Durante a Segunda Intifada, a IDF sequestrou no dia 28 de janeiro de 2001 seis membros dessa unidade, acusados da morte de sete colonos israelenses na área de Ramallah. A última ação militar direta da IDF contra a Força 17 foi em 2001, quando um Apache da IDF assassinou Massud Ayyad, um de seus chefes.)
Quando Israel invadiu o Líbano em 1982, Imad integrou a resistência na defesa de Beirute, onde foi ferido em combate no setor Oeste da cidade. Após os massacres de Sabra e Shatila (blog de 15/01/12) e a debandada da OLP de Beirute em setembro, ele já desfrutava de proeminência na hierarquia da resistência libanesa. Sobretudo por causa de sua experiência de guerrilha junto à OLP e da facilidade de manuseio do estoque de armas que Yasser Arafat e seus homens deixaram para trás.
Integrou o Hizbollah desde sua criação em 1984, mas continuou fiel à Força 17 e sobretudo a Khalil al-Wasir, vulgo Abu Jihad, um dos braços direitos de Yasser Arafat no Fatah. Até o Shin Bet assassiná-lo em 1988. Imad tinha tanta estima por seu mentor palestino que deu a um de seus filhos o nome de Jihad. A morte de Abu Jihad foi o segundo grande baque em sua vida e na do primo. Ambos já figuras proeminentes no movimento de resistência nacional, o Hizbollah.
Quando Israel invadiu o Líbano em 1982, Imad integrou a resistência na defesa de Beirute, onde foi ferido em combate no setor Oeste da cidade. Após os massacres de Sabra e Shatila (blog de 15/01/12) e a debandada da OLP de Beirute em setembro, ele já desfrutava de proeminência na hierarquia da resistência libanesa. Sobretudo por causa de sua experiência de guerrilha junto à OLP e da facilidade de manuseio do estoque de armas que Yasser Arafat e seus homens deixaram para trás.Integrou o Hizbollah desde sua criação em 1984, mas continuou fiel à Força 17 e sobretudo a Khalil al-Wasir, vulgo Abu Jihad, um dos braços direitos de Yasser Arafat no Fatah. Até o Shin Bet assassiná-lo em 1988. Imad tinha tanta estima por seu mentor palestino que deu a um de seus filhos o nome de Jihad. A morte de Abu Jihad foi o segundo grande baque em sua vida e na do primo. Ambos já figuras proeminentes no movimento de resistência nacional, o Hizbollah.
Ele sofreu o primeiro grande baque que definiu definitivamente seu destino bélico em 1985. Até o dia 8 de março desse ano, Imad ainda era um idealista de inteligência super-elevada que militava pelas causas justas nas quais acreditava. Nesse dia fatídico sua vida deu uma guinada. A CIA, em operação de represália pela morte dos marines em 1983, bombardeou o carro do sheikh Fadlallah (considerado mentor espiritual do Hizbollah), que escapou da explosão, mas a bomba era tão potente que matou 62 pessoas, inclusive um dos dois irmãos de Imad, e feriu 200 civis no bairro.
A carnificina estadunidense atingiu Imad no coração e na carne. Foi a gota d'água que faltava para que o idealismo se transformasse em beligerância e virasse a figura de proa da ala militar do Hizbollah. Assumiu de corpo e alma a chefia do serviço de segurança e inteligência do movimento libanês de resistência e dedicou toda sua inteligência a operações militares. E inteligência ele tinha, muita. Nas palavras do escritor gringo Roger Morris, Imad "joined one of history's more vicious chain reactions." Seu nome encabeçava a lista negra do "terrorismo" em Israel e nos EUA. (Até então estes dois países confundiam movimentos nacionalistas de resistência com terrorismo. O Al-Qaeda lhes ensinaria o verdadeiro significado da palavra, porém, eles continuariam a etiquetar o Hizbollah e o Hamas errado. Até quando?)
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| Nasrallah e Imad com Jihad Mughniyeh |
Estes dois governos o acusam, sem provas concretas, de vários males. De ter participado direta ou indiretamente de vários atentados contra eles. Como por exemplo:
. Da explosão da embaixada dos EUA em Beirute no dia 18 de abril de 1983 (63 mortos, dentre estes, 17 estadunidenes), embora o próprio Secretary of Defense da época, Caspar Weinberger, ter declarado à PBS em 2001: "We still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn't then."
. Da explosão de caminhões e acampamentos que abrigavam soldados franceses e estadunidenses no dia 23 de outubro de 1983 (58 franceses mortos e 241 estadunidenses que ocupavam o Líbano).
. Do sequestro do voo 847 da TWA no dia 14 de junho de 1985 e de tortura e morte do mergulhador US Robert Stethem.
. Do sequestro de vários ocidentais em Beirute na década de 80. Dentre eles, o chefe da CIA na capital libanesa, William Francis Buckley, assassinado após ser interrogado aos moldes que era acostumado; Terry Anderson, solto em 1991, e Terry Waite.
. Do sesquestro de quatro diplomatas soviéticos em Beirute no dia 30 de setembro de 1985. Um deles assassinado para que Moscou obrigasse Afez al-Assad a parar suas operações militares no norte do Líbano. Favor que valeu a libertação dos três outros diplomatas.
. Da explosão da embaixada de Israel em Buenos Aires e do planejamento do assassinato do comandante da IDF no Líbano, Micha Tamir e de dois soldados israelenses, em 1992; da explosão das Torres Khobar em Ryad, Arábia Saudita, em 1996 (onde morreram 19 estadunidenses); de orquestrar a captura de três soldados israelenses e do sequestro do empresário Elchanan Tenenbaum, em 2000; de fornecer armas às alas militares do Fatah em 2002, durante a Segunda Intifada; de orquestrar a operação militar no sul do Líbano em que oito soldados israelenses foram mortos e dois capturados, operação que Israel usou para justificar a chamada "Guerra do Líbano" durante a Copa do Mundo da Alemanha em 2006 (blogs de 18-25/05/14).
Enfim, Imad Mughniyeh era um dos homens mais procurados por Israel/EUAe o mais difícil de encontrar. Escapou de várias tentativas de sequestro e assassinato por parte da CIA e do Mossad. Era famoso entre os agentes destes dois serviços secretos "for his ability to simply disappear into hiding", ou seja, por sua habilidade de desaparecer debaixo de seus narizes sem que eles encontrassem o rastro.
A CIA tentou sequestrá-lo na França em 1986, mas o governo francês não permitiu a contravenção estrangeira em seu solo. Voltou à carga de novo em 1995, quando foi informada que ele embarcara em um voo para Ryad, mas esta tentativa também fracassou porque os ditadores sauditas não deixaram o avião aterizar, Imad ser capturado e eles terem de administrar uma revolta nacional. No ano seguinte a CIA fez outra tentativa do mesmo gênero ao saber que Imad estava embarcando para Doha, Qatar; também um fracasso.
Foi em uma operação conjunta CIA/Mossad que "lavando a honra" dos fracassos cometeram o crime que as duas agências de "inteligência" disputavam. O jornal libanês Al-Akhabar, em 2013, publicaria um artigo revelando detalhes da execução de Imad ainda sem citar o envolvimento da CIA.
Segundo o jornal, o Mossad fora responsável pelo homicídio de A a Z. Conta que Imad estava a caminho de uma reunião com líderes palestinos em Damasco [Khaled Meshaal, presidente do Hamas em exílio, vivia lá nessa época] a fim de discutirem "ways to develop the capacities of the Palestinian resistance inside Palestine, and Gaza in particular." No relato, a porta do bagageiro do carro de Imad - um pajero Mitsubitshi 4x4 prateado de 2006 - foi recheada de explosivos detonados por uma equipe local do Mossad localizada em um prédio em construção com vista para o estacionamento.
Segundo o jornal libanês, os agentes involvidos no assassinato não eram cidadãos sírios e fizeram várias viagens de ida e volta durante as seis semanas de preparação do assassinato.
Tinham um carro esperando para a fuga, mas tiveram de abandoná-lo por falha nos planos.
É paradoxal, mas o Mossad conseguiu matá-lo justamente porque "like many operatives in the Resistance [Imad] treated Syria as one of the safest places." Pois consideravam que nem Israel nem a os EUA, ou seja, nem a CIA nem o Mossad, ousariam um ataque direto à Síria. (Hoje os palestinos consideram Doha o lugar mais seguro do planeta para proteger-se das más-ções desses dois serviços de inteligência. É por isso que Khaled Meshaal, líder do Hamas, mudou-se para lá).
O relatório do Al-Akhabar conclui que a locomoção dos resistentes em Damasco, tanto libaneses quanto palestinos, era "more flexible and less complicated on the level of implemented security precautions... Ultimately, the 'implicit laxity' became an opening that allowed the Israeli eneymy to assassinate Mughiyeh."
Termino este parágrafo sobre Imad Mughnieh cedendo a palavra primeiro ao líder do Hizbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Em entrevista sobre o papel que seu companheiro representou nos atentados do qual o acusavam, disse que sem provas nada podia ser afirmado, e concluiu: "Hajj Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of southern Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hizbollah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names."
O relatório do Al-Akhabar conclui que a locomoção dos resistentes em Damasco, tanto libaneses quanto palestinos, era "more flexible and less complicated on the level of implemented security precautions... Ultimately, the 'implicit laxity' became an opening that allowed the Israeli eneymy to assassinate Mughiyeh."
Termino este parágrafo sobre Imad Mughnieh cedendo a palavra primeiro ao líder do Hizbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Em entrevista sobre o papel que seu companheiro representou nos atentados do qual o acusavam, disse que sem provas nada podia ser afirmado, e concluiu: "Hajj Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of southern Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hizbollah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names."
Um ex-agente da CIA, Robert Baer, que perseguiu Imad durante anos, descreveu assim seu inimigo: "Mughniyeh is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else. He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn’t just recruit people." E fisicamente, Imad era descrito como "tall, slender, well-dressed and handsome ... penetrating eyes, speaking some English but better French."
Imad Mughniyeh era um idealista que a opressão e a iniquidade empurraram à luta armada. Se a Palestina fosse um Estado livre e soberano, se Israel nunca tivesse invadido e roubado terras do Líbano, ele seria certamente um engenheiro competentíssimo e gozaria de dias felizes em Beirute com a família. Era sim um homem brilhante. Como o filho Jihad que quando o pai foi assassinado tinha 20 anos e já demonstrava acuidade intelectual extraordinária, além de um grande sorriso. Dizem que o pai também tinha esse sorriso aberto quando era jovem, bonito e seus olhos brilhavam de idealismo.
A cobiça expansionista de Israel fez de Imad um homem de talentos desperdiçados com violência, em defesa da pátria.
E como por acaso, em um momento de crise nas relações entre Tel Aviv e Washington, Israel deixou vasar , em fevereiro de 2015, a informação da participação da CIA no assassinato de Imad Mughniyeh. Chantagem, pressão, enfim, os golpes baixos que Israel está acostumado a dar nos inimigos e nos "amigos". Desta vez queria mostrar à Casa Branca que estão no mesmo barco e que se afundarem puxarão o padrinho para baixo revelando os podres de ambos os lados. Se Barack Obama tivesse punho, mandaria Netanyahu plantar batata e administraria os segredos obscuros como os Estados Unidos costumam fazer: negando, desinformando, jogando a lama debaixo do tapete e continuando como se nada estivesse acontecido e nada os atingisse, de qualquer jeito. Mas como Obama é fraco, engoliu em seco; mas ficou a raiva, e esta pode dar em algo. Em um pouco de justiça, quem sabe?
E como por acaso, em um momento de crise nas relações entre Tel Aviv e Washington, Israel deixou vasar , em fevereiro de 2015, a informação da participação da CIA no assassinato de Imad Mughniyeh. Chantagem, pressão, enfim, os golpes baixos que Israel está acostumado a dar nos inimigos e nos "amigos". Desta vez queria mostrar à Casa Branca que estão no mesmo barco e que se afundarem puxarão o padrinho para baixo revelando os podres de ambos os lados. Se Barack Obama tivesse punho, mandaria Netanyahu plantar batata e administraria os segredos obscuros como os Estados Unidos costumam fazer: negando, desinformando, jogando a lama debaixo do tapete e continuando como se nada estivesse acontecido e nada os atingisse, de qualquer jeito. Mas como Obama é fraco, engoliu em seco; mas ficou a raiva, e esta pode dar em algo. Em um pouco de justiça, quem sabe?
CIA envolvida no assassinato de Imad Mughniyeh?
What we do know with certainty about Hizballah is that it is a highly organized, well-disciplined, civilian militia made up of five to ten thousand Lebanese living on their own land which waged a successful resistance campaign against the Israeli occupation army and won, twice. In the year 2000, after years of guerilla warfare, the Israeli occupation forces suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Hizballah fighters under the command of Moughniya, and were sent scurrying back across the border with their tails between their legs. In Israel’s 2006 onslaught on Lebanon it again failed to win, and according to most analysts (including Israelis), suffered its worst strategic defeat ever. Facing off, once again, against Hizballah fighters under the command of Moughniya Israel this time was not capable of gaining even a foothold in Lebanon. In 2006 the myth of Israel’s “invincible” army was shattered completely, and whatever deterrent power it may have claimed in the past evaporated bringing the Zionist-Apartheid state’s long-term prospects for survival into question even by Israelis themselves.
The 2006 war on Lebanon also reinforced the image of Israel as a garrison state and proxy for Western imperialism. It was a war fought on behalf of the US (and its neoconservative agenda), the enabler of all of Israel’s actions, and which blocked all efforts to bring it to an earlier end, encouraging Israel to continue even after it was prepared to cut its losses and quit. And this is the real crime of Hizballah that Israel cannot forget and the West cannot accept. During the war over one thousand Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed including hundreds of children. On the Israeli side around 160 were killed of which the overwhelming majority were soldiers. It was in the midst of this war, while the Lebanese were pulling the lifeless, mangled bodies of their children out of the rubble of deliberately-bombed homes that Condoleezza Rice made her infamously, tasteless remark about the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
The reality of Hizballah’s conduct over the years belies the image of the ruthless, terrorist organization portrayed in the US media. Getting back to Moughniya, it is within this history of Israeli occupation and continuous war on Lebanon, and the non-stop, Lebanese resistance (which predated the forming of Hizballah) that the personal story of this man unfolded. We will never know if Moughniya committed any acts of terror. We should not accept Israeli and US government assertions, neither one of which has any moral authority, as a substitute for proof. We are also unlikely to learn with any certainty who killed him or the exact circumstances surrounding his death. Israel, as the only country in the region with an official policy of extra-judicial assassinations (currently on almost daily display in Gaza), and with its long history of organized state terrorism, for which we have an abundance of evidence, is naturally on the top of the list of suspects. It’s also possible the commonly overrated and often bumbling Mossad had nothing to do with it. In either case, it is clearly a crime under international law. This did not prevent a US State Department spokesperson, too arrogant to recognize the hypocrisy of his own words, from interrupting his usual drivel about human rights and rule of law to welcome the news saying “the world is a better place without this man in it.”
What we know for sure is the pro-Israel, mainstream US media which accepts the Israeli narrative as the basis for all its coverage of the Middle East cannot be relied upon for an accurate and reliable portrayal of Moughniya or Hizballah. We also know Moughniya was an effective commander of a lightly-armed civilian militia that waged a successful guerilla campaign against a much stronger and brutal enemy army and won. It’s also safe to assume that his role and importance has been greatly exaggerated by all sides for different reasons. The killing of Moughniya and its surrounding circumstances is obviously a serious security blow to Hizballah, but while it has provided Hizballah’s enemies some momentary satisfaction, it is unlikely to diminish its operational capability in the future.
The most unrealistic and misleading aspects of news coverage of Lebanon, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict in general is the focus on single individuals or groups as the root cause of conflict, and the characterization of all of Israel’s enemies as terrorists. The same approach has been applied in covering Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions in occupied Palestine. All these organizations were products of the Israeli occupation and they were created to resist and thus enjoy widespread popular support. To continue to reduce such groups and their leaders to nothing more than crazed terrorists is not only false and counterproductive, but, in its dismissal of the vast majority of Lebanese and Palestinians as murderers and supporters of terrorism, is also racist.
The Arab-Israeli conflict will continue for the foreseeable future. According to reports, Imad Moughniya has already been replaced, and in short time, the media will find another shadowy, intriguing figure to focus its attention on while continuing to ignore the prevailing conditions that inevitably gives rise to both legitimate acts of resistance, and terrorism. Israel continues to occupy Palestine, the Syrian Golan Heights, and parts of Lebanon. It is holding over 11,000 kidnapped Palestinians, and several Lebanese in jail. It is arguably committing a form genocide in Gaza, and it recently launched an attack on Syria. It continues to deny the Palestinians their inalienable right of return and may be preparing for its next military adventure. It is only within this context of ongoing warfare that people like Moughniya will come to be known, and can be understood."
Raid Khoury holds a masters degree in Pin Political Science and is an Arab-American activist in Los Angeles California.
Gravação rara de fala de Imad Mughniyeh
This week this was proven once again. The Hebrew verb "lekhassel" - liquidate - in all its grammatical forms, currently dominates our public discourse. Respected professors debate with academic solemnity when to "liquidate" and whom. Used generals discuss with professional zeal the technicalities of "liquidation", its rules and methods. Shrewd politicians compete with each other about the number and status of the candidates for "liquidation".
Indeed, for a long time now there has not been such an orgy of jubilation and self-congratulation in the Israeli media as there was this week. Every reporter, every commentator, every political hack, every transient celeb interviewed on TV, on the radio and in the newspapers, was radiant with pride. We have done it! We have succeeded! We have "liquidated" Imad Mughniyeh!
He was a "terrorist". And not just a terrorist, a master terrorist! An arch-terrorist! The very king of terrorists! From hour to hour his stature grew, reaching gigantic proportions. Compared to him, Osama Bin-Laden is a mere beginner. The list of his exploits grew from news report to news report, from headline to headline.
There is and never has been anyone like him. For years he has kept out of sight. But our good boys - many, many good boys - have not neglected him for a moment. They worked day and night, weeks and months, years and decades, in order to trace him. They "knew him better than his friends, better than he knew himself" (verbatim quote from a respected Haaretz commentator, gloating like all his colleagues)...
As chance would have it, the "liquidation" was carried out only a few days after I wrote an article about the inability of occupying powers to understand the inner logic of resistance organizations. Mughniyeh's "liquidation" is an outstanding example of this. (Of course, Israel gave up its occupation of South Lebanon some years ago, but the relationship between the parties has remained as it was.)
In the eyes of the Israeli leadership, the "liquidation" was a huge success. We have "cut off the head of the serpent" (another headline from Haaretz). We have inflicted on Hizbullah immense damage, so much that it cannot be repaired. "This is not revenge but prevention", as another of the guided reporters (Haaretz again) declared. This is such an important achievement, that it outweighs the inevitable revenge, whatever the number of victims-to-be.
In the eyes of Hizbullah, thing look quite different. The organization has acquired another precious asset: a national hero, whose name fills the air from Iran to Morocco. The "liquidated" Mughniyeh is worth more than the live Mughniyeh, irrespective of what his real status may have been at the end of his life...
If Hizbullah has lately been far from the all-Arab spotlight, it is now back with a bang. Almost every Arab station devoted hours to "the brother the martyr the commander Imad Mughniyeh al-Hajj Raduan".
In the struggle for Lebanon - the main battle that occupies Nasrallah - the organization has scored a great advantage. Multitudes joined the funeral, overshadowing the almost simultaneous memorial parade for his adversary, Rafiq al-Hariri. In his speech, Nasrallah described his opponents contemptuously as accomplices to the murder of the hero, despicable collaborators of Israel and the United States, and called upon them to leave the house and move to Tel Aviv or New York. He has gone up another notch in his struggle for domination of the Land of the Cedars.
And the main thing: the anger about the murder and the pride in the martyr will inspire another generation of youngsters, who will be ready to die for Allah and Nasrallah. The more Israeli propaganda enlarges the proportions of Mughniyeh, the more young Shiites will be inspired to follow his example...
Everybody knows that there will be revenge. Nasrallah has promised this, adding that it could take place anywhere in the world. For a long time already, people in Israel believe Nasrallah much more than Olmert.
Israeli security organs are issuing dire warnings for people going abroad - to be on guard at every moment, not to be conspicuous, not to congregate with other Israelis, not to accept unusual invitations, etc. The media have magnified these warnings to the point of hysteria. In the Israeli embassies, security has been tightened. On the Northern border, too, an alert has been sounded - just a few days after Olmert boasted in the Knesset that, as a result of the war, the Northern border is now quieter than ever before.
Such worries are far from baseless. All the past "liquidations" of this kind have brought with them dire consequences:
. The classic example is, of course, the "liquidation" of Nasrallah's predecessor, Abbas Mussawi. He was killed in South Lebanon in 1992 by Apache gunships. All of Israel rejoiced. Then, too, the Champagne was flowing. In revenge, Hizbullah blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, as well as the Jewish community center there. The planner was, it is now alleged, Imad Mughniyeh. More than a hundred people perished. The main result: instead of the rather grey Mussawi, the sophisticated, masterly Nasrallah took over.
. Before that, Golda Meir ordered a series of "liquidations" to revenge the tragedy of the Israeli athletes in Munich (most of whom were actually killed by the inept German police trying to prevent their being flown to Algeria as hostages). Not one of the "liquidated" had anything to do with the outrage itself. They were PLO diplomatic representatives, sitting ducks in their offices. The matter is described at length in Stephen Spielberg's kitschy film "Munich". The result: the PLO became stronger and turned into a state-in-the-making, Yasser Arafat eventually returned to Palestine.
. The "liquidation" of Yahyah Ayyash in Gaza in 1996 resembles the Mughniyeh affair. It was carried out by means of a booby-trapped cellular telephone. Ayyash's dimensions, too, were blown up to giant proportions, so that he had become a legend already in his own lifetime. The nickname "the engineer" was attached to him because he prepared the explosive devices used by Hamas. Shimon Peres, who had succeeded to the Prime Ministership after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, believed that the "liquidation" would lend him huge popularity and get him re-elected. The opposite happened: Hamas reacted with a series of sensational suicide-bombings and brought Binyamin Netanyahu to power.
. Fathi Shikaki, head of Islamic Jihad, was "liquidated" in 1995 by a bicyclist who shot him down in a Malta street. The small organization was not eradicated, but on the contrary grew through its revenge actions. Today it is the group which is launching the Qassams at Sderot.
. Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al was actually being "liquidated" in a street in Amman by the injection of poison. The act was exposed and its perpetrators identified and a furious King Hussein compelled Israel to provide the antidote that saved his life. The "liquidators" were allowed to go home in return for the release of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmad Yassin from Israeli prison. As a result, Mash'al was promoted and is now the senior political leader of Hamas.
. Sheik Yassin himself, a paraplegic, was "liquidated" by attack helicopters while leaving a mosque after prayer. A previous attempt by bombing his home had failed. The sheik became a martyr in the eyes of the entire Arab world, and has served since as an inspiration for hundreds of Hamas attacks.
The common denominator of all these and many other actions is that they did not harm the organizations of the "liquidatees", but boomeranged. And all of them brought in their wake grievous revenge attacks.
The decision to carry out a "liquidation" resembles the decision that was taken to start the Second Lebanon War: not one of the deciders gives a damn for the suffering of the civilian population that inevitably falls victim to the revenge.
The decision to carry out a "liquidation" resembles the decision that was taken to start the Second Lebanon War: not one of the deciders gives a damn for the suffering of the civilian population that inevitably falls victim to the revenge.
Why, then, are the "liquidations" carried out?
The response of one of the generals who was asked this question: "There is no unequivocal answer to this."
These words are dripping with Chutzpa: how can one decide on such an action when there is no unequivocal answer to the question of its being worth the price?
I suspect that the real reason is both political and psychological. Political, because it is always popular. After every "liquidation", there is much jubilation. When the revenge arrives, the public (and the media) do not see the connection between the"liquidation" and the response. Each is seen separately. Few people have the time and the inclination to think about it, when everybody is burning with fury about the latest murderous attack.
In the present situation, there is an additional political motivation: the army has no answer to the Qassams, nor has it any desire to get enmeshed in the re-occupation of the Gaza Strip, with all the expected casualties. A sensational "liquidation" is a simple alternative.
The psychological reason is also clear: it is satisfying. True, the "liquidation" - as the word shows - is more appropriate for the underworld than for the security organs of a state. But it is a challenging and complex task, as in a Mafia film, which gives much satisfaction to the "liquidators". Ehud Barak, for example, was a liquidator from the start of his military career. When the "liquidation" ends in success, the executioners can raise glasses of champagne.
A mixture of blood, champagne and folly is an intoxicating but toxic cocktail."
Uri Avnery, 16/02/08.
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Shovrim Shtika - Breaking the Silence
"Inside the Abu Sneina Casbah there's this one alley, just before the Pharmacy junction, an alley going in… When you come from Mitkanim, there's this junction, one road going to the left and out.
"Fainting Spell"road?
No, before "Fainting Spell" road, there's an alley, right in between these two walls.
A kind of large gate?
Yes, stone gate.
That leads nowhere.
No, an alley more to the side. Opposite the schoolhouse, opposite the playground.
But it's blocked with some barbed wire coil or something?
No, back then when we were there it wasn't, or I'm not getting the description right. Every time we would go in there we'd cock our weapons so of course anyone out in the street at the time would go "AAA!" and run indoors. Beyond that fact, it's something that usually scares the Palestinians. We entered that alley once, we were walking and got to one of the alleys and there was something that always used to happen right there: Every time we passed by there a bottle was thrown at us from one of the windows. Now we knew which kids did it, and we knew exactly why they were doing it, and I think for them it was just a game, for if they had wanted to really throw something serious at us they would have. These are alleys where you really can't watch yourself. There was nowhere we could run to. Once we really saw one of the kids, we saw him with the bottle and we actually saw him throwing. I don't recall who that was, one of the guys called out to him, we took him to his parents and said, "He's throwing bottles at us. Could you stop this?" And right there and then, before we even finished talking, this kid's mother started beating him up, and you saw the pain in her eyes. You saw her hitting him to please the soldiers. Hitting him really hard. When she was through with this show, she promised us, "Don't worry, when his father comes home he'll see to him". So besides feeling ashamed and leaving followed by the look of that kid as he watched us go out – besides that, there was nothing we could do. This was already the catastrophe we had triggered in the family which for me is simply terrible, and for them, unfortunately, it's a routine matter. That look, I mean it followed me for several nights.
Why that in particular?
Why that? Because it wasn't me doing the hitting, but I have no doubt it was because of me. I mean, when we arrived in Hebron we knew exactly how charged that place is that we are getting into, not like the national-religious soldiers at the disengagement from Gaza. Whoever refused to go in would be jailed, so no one did. Some guys said: I can't do patrols, so he took it upon himself to do more static guard shifts than others who would replace him on patrols. I mean, he actually took on a crazy number of guard shifts so as not to go on patrols. Because he simply said: I cannot deal with this population. I'll guard the post, I'll stand inside the position, and if anything happens, so be it, but I'll be standing here. And we accepted that. We did and we knew that somehow we all wanted to do exactly the same, or at least I knew I wanted to do just that, but somehow I thought: If I don't do it, who will? And I promised myself that just as *** took it upon himself to do extra guard duty shifts and deal with the mental stress of that, I'll take upon myself the responsibility so that on my shift this stuff won't happen. I'll look to it that while I'm on patrol there won't be such incidents. And here I found myself exactly in the sort of situation, perhaps not specifically, but still very similar. It's just a very bad feeling. I mean, beyond feeling bad, not just with Hebron but other places as well, I mean I've been out of the army for nearly a year now, and until about half a year ago I was still waking up at night occasionally, I had this recurring dream, this kind of nightmare from which I'd wake up all in a sweat, where I was on one of the missions I'd have as a soldier, on patrol for example.
In Hebron?
I had a dream like that keep repeating itself. I'm on patrol and this situation develops and I keep doing the wrong things. I keep doing exactly the opposite of what I now think should be done. Some misunderstanding takes place with a Palestinian, and without thinking twice I pick up a club and beat him to a pulp. Then you get up and say to yourself: wait a minute, that brain of mine is playing tricks. It very often feels turned upside down. "
Why that in particular?
Why that? Because it wasn't me doing the hitting, but I have no doubt it was because of me. I mean, when we arrived in Hebron we knew exactly how charged that place is that we are getting into, not like the national-religious soldiers at the disengagement from Gaza. Whoever refused to go in would be jailed, so no one did. Some guys said: I can't do patrols, so he took it upon himself to do more static guard shifts than others who would replace him on patrols. I mean, he actually took on a crazy number of guard shifts so as not to go on patrols. Because he simply said: I cannot deal with this population. I'll guard the post, I'll stand inside the position, and if anything happens, so be it, but I'll be standing here. And we accepted that. We did and we knew that somehow we all wanted to do exactly the same, or at least I knew I wanted to do just that, but somehow I thought: If I don't do it, who will? And I promised myself that just as *** took it upon himself to do extra guard duty shifts and deal with the mental stress of that, I'll take upon myself the responsibility so that on my shift this stuff won't happen. I'll look to it that while I'm on patrol there won't be such incidents. And here I found myself exactly in the sort of situation, perhaps not specifically, but still very similar. It's just a very bad feeling. I mean, beyond feeling bad, not just with Hebron but other places as well, I mean I've been out of the army for nearly a year now, and until about half a year ago I was still waking up at night occasionally, I had this recurring dream, this kind of nightmare from which I'd wake up all in a sweat, where I was on one of the missions I'd have as a soldier, on patrol for example.
In Hebron?
I had a dream like that keep repeating itself. I'm on patrol and this situation develops and I keep doing the wrong things. I keep doing exactly the opposite of what I now think should be done. Some misunderstanding takes place with a Palestinian, and without thinking twice I pick up a club and beat him to a pulp. Then you get up and say to yourself: wait a minute, that brain of mine is playing tricks. It very often feels turned upside down. "
Reservista da Brigada Nahal, Hebron, 2004
"There was something that happened with a retarded kid, really retarded, who threw stones from some hill near Kvasim Junction. In the end they arrested him, with that same deputy company commander, and he said to one of my soldiers, “Okay, take him to the jeep.” The soldier, who was relatively small, grabbed him by the shoulder. He was okay, that soldier, and the guy started struggling with him, and it was really hard for him, that little soldier, to control this, like, sixteen-year-old boy. So I threw him to the ground. During this scrap my weapon hit him in the mouth and it broke his tooth or something. He started bleeding and going crazy. I finally got control of him. All his cousins and uncles and his parents, I don’t know what, they came, his whole clan, like four adults, grown men, and the deputy company commander threatened them, the next time he sees the kid there, he says: “I don’t care whether he throws a stone or not, I’m going to kill him.” And this kid, there’s blood all over his face. And they say, “What, can’t you see he’s retarded, and his hand doesn’t work”—his right hand, which was very, very strong, was okay, but the left hand was just, there was a kind of delay, it didn’t function—“he’s not able to throw stones,” and on and on. The deputy company commander threatened the parents. Then we released the kid and he just grabbed a huge stone, like this, and almost hit the deputy company commander. The deputy company commander and the kid started fighting a bit and the kid got a pounding, and the whole time he’s bleeding from his mouth from the cut he got from me. But the thing with the violence, I think, wasn’t how harsh it was, it’s how often it happened. It got to the point where there pretty much wasn’t a day that went by without someone getting hit or a threat to hurt someone. Most of the time there was slapping, shoving, all kinds of stuff like that. And that was every day." Sargento da Brigada Kfir, Hebron, 2002-2003
(Daniel III)
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