On 19 March 2017 at midday, a force of more (than) 15 soldiers seized terrified 8-year-old Sufian Abu Hitah, who was out on the street barefoot, looking for a toy he had lost. Two soldiers from the batallion dragged him to the al-Harika neighborhood and took him into several homes to identify children who had thrown stones and a Molotov cocktail at the Kiryat Arba settlement. More than an hour later, several women managed to extricate the boy and return him to his mother. Two area residents, including B’Tselem volunteer May D’ana, captured the incident on video. Many others like this one happen every single day in the occupied West Bank.Um batalhão de "corajosos" soldados da IDF sequestrou Sufian Abu Hitahum, um palestininho de 8 anos que estava na rua procurando um brinquedo. Os soldados levaram o menino aterrorizado a várias casas forçando-o a "identificar" outros garotinhos que haviam se defendido dos ocupantes armados até os dentes jogando-lhes pedras. Não é um fato isolado. Acontece diariamente. Covardia pouca é bobagem.
Na sexta-feira, imagens da violência gratuita e arbitrária da polícia israelense bombaram na internet. Policial agrediu e insultou caminhoneiro gratuitamente, em Jerusalém ocupada. Não que seja um acontecimento raro, não, é até banal. O raro é que a agressão seja documentada.
Images that went viral last week: Israeli officer beat, headbutted and insulted a Palestinian truck driver in Jerusalem, just for fun.
Agora vamos à revelação do Haaretz que surpreendeu e indignou muita gente que não conhece os tentáculos e a perversidade da hasbara.
O jornal liberal de Tel Aviv desmascarou professores universitários que Israel usou para infiltrar a Anistia Internacional e influenciar sua visão da ocupação e os relatórios que esta organização humanitária efetuava.
O Haaretz só fala na AI, mas não há dúvida que foi e continua sendo um procedimento banal em todas as ONGs de Direitos Humanos internacionais, assim como algumas dentro e além da Linha Verde. A mesma coisa acontece no esporte e em todos os segmentos da sociedade israelense.
Daí a necessidade de boicote acadêmico, cultural, esportivo, enfim, total, além de econômico. Pois os agentes do apartheid estão em todos os ramos, em todas as atividades, dentro e fora de Israel.
The Haaretz revealed how, in the mid-1970s - not long after the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights - Israel used university faculty members to infiltrate Amnesty International.The state thus actively intervened in order to shape human rights activism, just as the rights discourse was becoming one of the most popular forms of political struggle against injustice around the globe.
The Haaretz article discloses how Yoram Dinstein, a renowned scholar of international law and currently a professor emeritus at Hebrew University, served as an agent for the Israeli Foreign Ministry during his tenure as the chair of Amnesty International's Israeli branch from 1974-76.
Working with the ministry's Deputy Director Sinai Rome of the international organisations division, Dinstein acted as an informant while manipulating the rights group's activities.
For instance, when an Arab women's association in the United States requested information about Palestinian detainees and prisoners, Dinstein wrote to the ministry, telling them that his inclination was not to reply.
The ministry's deputy director answered and instructed Dinstein to forward all correspondences to Israeli consulates in New York and Los Angeles.
In addition, Dinstein used his position as "chairman of the Israel national section of Amnesty" to criticise cause lawyers, such as Felicia Langer, who were struggling for the human rights of Palestinians in Israeli courts, thus, in effect, utilising the organisation's reputation to undermine human rights.
Dinstein's colleague from Hebrew University, Edward Kaufman, who later became the chairman of the board of the Israeli rights group B'Tselem and continues to this day to be a well-known advocate of human rights, as well as an active member of the peace industry, is also mentioned as someone who was in contact with the foreign ministry's staff.
While he is depicted as a less enthusiastic collaborator than Dinstein, in one of the letters the ministry's deputy director thanks Kaufman for a report he prepared about an Amnesty conference on the subject of torture, which was held towards the end of 1973, following the October War.
The exchange was both ideological and financial. The expose reveals how Dinstein received governmental money for his expenses, disclosing that he was not the only Amnesty staffer to accept governmental remuneration.
These revelations suggest that already during the 1970s, when human rights were still considered by many as a radical weapon for enhancing emancipation and as a tool for the protection of individual freedoms against abusive states, Israel was relatively successful in marshalling the way the human rights discourse was mobilised by the local branch of the most prominent international rights organisation.
Simultaneously, university faculty members continue to take part in the attack against liberal human rights NGOs.
NGO Monitor, for example (founded by professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University) analyses reports, press releases of local and international NGOs and investigates the international donors funding them. NGO Monitor was the first Israeli organisation to couch its criticism of liberal human rights organisations in security parlance.
His line of reasoning was articulated in an article entitled, NGOs Make War on Israel, and, in a different venue, also claimed that human rights are being exploited as a "weapon against Israel".
Steinberg thus tapped into the post-9/11 conservative trend in the US, which began employing the term lawfare - commonly defined as the use of law for realising a military objective - in order to describe the endeavour of individuals and groups who appeal to courts against certain practices of state violations emanating from the so-called global war on terrorism - such as torture, extra-judicial executions, and the bombing of civilian urban infrastructure.
Steinberg and other israeli faculty members' interests are completely aligned with the state. They are concerned about the fact that the evidence of systematic violations gathered by local human rights NGOs is exceeding the boundaries of the domestic debate.
They are threatened because the accusations of abuse are piling into an immense archive of state-orchestrated violence, an archive that can no longer be marshalled within the state's legal, political, and symbolic space. Therefore, they are continuously attacking liberal human rights organisations.
While human rights spies are still out there, the difference between the 1970s and today is that they no longer need to be undercover.
Ghost Hunting, a film by Raed Andoni that you must watch
Em janeiro, Abdallah Moubarak de 29 anos foi libertado da prisão administrativa - detenção sem julgamento e sem acusação formal - em que perdeu 1 ano de sua existência. Três semanas depois, o filme em que trabalhou antes de ser preso - Ghost Hunting - de Raed Andoni, ganhou o prêmio de melhor documentário no festival de Berlin.
Por que Abdallah foi preso? Por que foi solto um ano mais tarde?
Duas perguntas irrelevantes quando se trata da situação dos prisioneiros políticos palestinos em Israel - detenções tão ilegais e arbitrárias quanto a ocupação em si mesma.
É o jeito do ocupante proceder. Destruir o espírito do palestino e intimidar famílias inteiras detendo, injustamente, um de seus membros sem justificativa alguma.
Um quinto da população palestina (750 mil meninos e adultos de sexo masculino ou feminino) da Cisjordânia e Faixa de Gaza indiscriminadamente - já encontrou-se em um momento da vida detida nas masmorras israelenses.
Toda família palestina teve pai, mãe, filho, filha, irmã ou irmão preso.
Os video-depoimentos desta matéria não fazem parte do filme. São parte de uma série de entrevistas feitas com ex-prisioneiros políticos.
On January 29, Abdallah Moubarak was released from a year-long administrative detention. Three weeks later, the film he acted in a short time before his detention — “Ghost Hunting,” directed by Raed Andoni — won best documentary at the Berlin Film Festival. Why was Moubarak arrested? Why was he released a year later?
Those are questions I have learned, over the years, are useless to ask. Not because there isn’t an answer; actually, there is. Rather, because the answer isn’t related to anything specific that Abdallah, or any other Palestinian did.
The mistake is in searching for a reason, rather than a target. Abdallah Moubarak, Raed Andoni, Mohammed Khattab, Ramzi Maqdisi, Aatef Al-Akhras, Adnan Al-Hatab: these men and their friends, who we meet in "Ghost Hunting", were detained so that their spirit would break, so that every bud of resistance to occupation would be erased. Merely insisting on remembering that the human spirit is free is a crime, even while in reality the bodies and spirits of the Palestinians have been subjected to decades of oppression.
This insight isn’t explicitly and clearly expressed in “Ghost Hunting.” We also aren’t told that the movie, which interestingly and originally documents a fraction of the experiences of detained and imprisoned Palestinians in the occupation’s prisons and detentions centers, uses the prisoners as a parable for the Palestinian population as a whole. Don’t let the under-stated, quiet nature of the film fool you — it is a major contribution.
The director, Raed Andoni, 50, born in Ramallah, was stopped, tortured, interrogated and detained for a year when he was 18. Now, in interviews, he returns to the fact that a fifth of the population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip personally knows what it’s like to be detained or imprisoned by Israel. The end credits of the film dedicate it to Moubarak, to the 7.000 "security prisoners" in Israeli prisons today and the 750,000 Palestinians who have passed through Israeli prisons and interrogation centers since 1967.
There isn’t a Palestinian family which doesn’t have a prisoner — and yet this disturbing statistic can be understood in an even larger sense. The Palestinians trapped under the occupation, even those who have never been locked up, are also prisoners.
The plot of the movie is deliberately loose. The entire film takes place inside the walls of a big loft in Ramallah, where Raed asks his cast to create a replica of al-Moskobiya, the notorious detention center inside the Russian Compound in Jerusalem — its cells, guards, and interrogators — in order to shake off the ghosts that have been haunting him since he was detained there.
He recruited his actor-workers with a small newspaper ad. Mostly former detainees and prisoners, some of them were interrogated or tortured in that very same prison; others were held in other prisons and interrogation sites. During the process of re-enactment, we are exposed to restraints, isolation, humiliation, screams, a strange blend of Hebrew and Arabic, and moments of humanity here and there from one of the guards.
Raed Andoni and his friends are instructed in the re-creation process by Mohammed Khattab — Abu-Atta — after the opening scene in which he talks about the days of interrogation that he faced in al-Moskobiya: 19 days, of which seven consecutive days he was not allowed to sleep. The figure of Abu-Atta outlines the unique character of the movie as a whole: unannounced transitions between real and figurative, direct and indirect representations, first-person narration and dramatic re-enactments, actors and cartoon characters, a punch in the gut and a quiet gentleness.
Some of the scenes that hurt the most in the film are those that unite the real Abu-Atta, when he asks for precision in the details of torture and the behavior of torturers and tortured, with the person who plays his character, Ramzi Maqdisi, himself a former prisoner.
Calm, good-natured Abu-Atta suddenly loses his characteristic composure, screams at Maqdasi, hurts him. The re-enactment turns into reality, in an instant. But he says: “After every interrogation, if a prisoner remains strong he feels this trance pass through his entire body. The strength is here, here” — he points to his head, to his steadfast spirit. To emphasize this, he stops the filming for a moment and gives staging directions, creating one of the highlights of the film.
After Maqdasi, bound to a chair, is forced to pee his pants, the urine washes across the floor and the guards use the body of the bound prisoner as a rag. All the while, Maqdasi is laughing ostentatiously, defiantly, and Abu-Atta advises:
at the end of the scene, when you’re soaked in piss, shaken like a rag and curled up on the floor, you must sing. The real Abu-Atta leans fondly over to Abu-Atta the character, and teaches him the song:
We are telling you a story
That reveals your true faces
That reveals your true swords.
Raed Andoni’s previous film, “Headache,” was released in 2009. He tried to trace the origins of a headache that refused to be cured. With the devoted and artful care of his psychotherapist, he succeeded in drawing important boundaries, but also in understanding their fragility: between Andoni and those surrounding him, between the personal and the political, the impetuous and the steady, between stubbornness and fulfillment, and also between what has a reason and what simply cannot be explained.
In “Ghost Hunting,” Andoni returns to this dualistic movement, which revolves entirely around the close connection between the body and mind: when they are tortured, when they are healthy, when they complete one another and when they are in opposition. Ambivalence emerges as a hallmark of the two movies. Andoni asks us to consider a complicated picture of life, a picture that doesn’t point to an easy solution. He aims to draw it in gentle notes, and his success is in the deep distress of this film’s audiences.
The prisoners’ spirits remain steadfast, and they sing, joke and laugh, mocking their guards and dancing to spite them, but they are also incredibly fragile. Throughout the film, several of the actors ask to take a break or leave when they are flooded with tears. In recreating the mechanisms of detention, the padded cell, which is intended for those whose spirits have been broken — those who can no longer stand the torture — is not forgotten. We hear a close and chilling testimony about somebody who has undergone that process. All of a sudden, cheerful fraternity is replaced with a sense of deep isolation that has no cure.
In the end, Raed’s attempt to release himself from the trauma of his detention in Moskovia — like in “Headache” — isn’t a clear success. Yet he also does not fail. The movie ends in an optimistic and joyful tone, at the wedding of one of the actor-prisoners and the visit of the others’ children to the re-created structure. Suddenly, the shackles turn into an amusing game, and their childlike questions sterilize the wounds.
Then Lena Khattab, the daughter of Abu-Atta, joins the visit, describing the cell where she was held in HaSharon Prison. Lena is a dancer and a student at Birzeit University, who was detained in late 2014 during a demonstration in support of the prisoners. She was convicted of throwing stones at soldiers and participating in an illegal demonstration. The only evidence against her was the coordinated testimony of three soldiers. The punishment given to Lena was six months in prison — and in the film she describes her torn clothes and the coldness of her cell.
I remember well the day of her release into the arms of her family, and among them of course was her father, Abu-Atta. And so, her appearance in the film brings everyonee back to the start of things: imprisonment passes from generation to generation, from inside prison to the outside, and Israel designed it simply to break the spirit of the resisters, in order to impose trauma on an entire nation. Occupation is terror.
No doubt about that.
January 2017.
Total Number of Palestinian Political Prisoners : 6500
Administrative Detainees: 536 (4 PLC members)
Child prisoners: 300 (11 under 16)
Female prisoners: 53
1948 Territories prisoners: 70
Gaza prisoners: 350
Prisoners before Oslo: 30
Prisoners serving a sentence above 20 years: 459
Prisoners serving life sentences: 458
Prisoners serving more than 20 years: 40
Prisoners serving more than 25 years:17
Desde 2014 que Israel vem preparando mais uma operação militar criminosa na Faixa de Gaza. E para "justificá-la", impediu a reconstrução de seus estragos, continuou a bombardear a Faixa esporadicamente, e nos últimos meses, cada vez mais amiúde, e para completar, acabou de assassinar Mazeh Faqha, membro proeminente do Hamas, que por sua vez, foi obrigado a manifestar intenção de retaliar. Retaliação que a hasbara, como em 2008, usará certamente para "justificar" junto aos EUA um novo massacre. Tel Aviv dirá que foi provocado, embora seja a IDF que jamais tenha parado de provocar o Hamas e proceder à sua limpeza étnica paulatina dos habitantes da Faixa.
Israel has been preparing another military operation in Gaza, and for that, has been provoking the Hamas daily. The last blow was the murder of a prominent member of this Palestinian party.
As a result, Hamas has vowed retaliation following the death of 35-year-old Mazeh Faqha, who was shot near his home in southern Gaza city on Friday.
Mazeh Faqha suffered four gunshot wounds to his head and was later pronounced dead in Tell al-Hama neighborhood of the Gaza Strip. Hamas announced that Mazeh Faqha, senior leader in the al-Qassam Brigades, was assassinated by unidentified assailants, accusing Israel of carrying out the targeted killing with a gun equipped with a silencer.
In the aftermath of the assassination, Gaza police cordoned off the scene and set up checkpoints hunting for suspects.
Originally from the district of Tubas in the northern occupied West Bank, Faqha was released from serving a life sentence in Israeli prison in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal and exiled to the Gaza Strip.
The Islamic Jihad Movement said Faqha's assassination marked the beginning of "a new offensive" by Israel against the Palestinian resistance, and that the resistance had the right to respond and defend itself.
Thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets on Saturday in the besieged Gaza Strip for the funeral of slain Hamas commander Mazeh Faqha.
Abaixo, médico norueguês Mads Gilbert dá a receita para curar os males da Faixa de Gaza.In the aftermath of the assassination, Gaza police cordoned off the scene and set up checkpoints hunting for suspects.
Originally from the district of Tubas in the northern occupied West Bank, Faqha was released from serving a life sentence in Israeli prison in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal and exiled to the Gaza Strip.
The Islamic Jihad Movement said Faqha's assassination marked the beginning of "a new offensive" by Israel against the Palestinian resistance, and that the resistance had the right to respond and defend itself.
Thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets on Saturday in the besieged Gaza Strip for the funeral of slain Hamas commander Mazeh Faqha.
Little
to no access to water, food, electricity, sanitation, proper healthcare
– these are just some of the things that have resulted from the Israeli
siege of Gaza. And Dr. Mads Gilbert has got something to say about it.
OCHA
PS : Imperdível - Empire Files
Abby Martin exposes Steve Banon
Abby Martin exposes Steve Banon
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