domingo, 27 de maio de 2018

Rogue state of Israel vs Palestine & Human Rights


Noura Erakat is a Palestinian American human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University. She is the author of “Justice for Some: Law as Politics in the Question of Palestine,” which will be published next year by Stanford University Press.
Over the past month and a half, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have taken part in a series of weekly protests called the Great Return March, culminating Tuesday with Nakba Day, when Palestinians mark their mass expulsion during Israel’s establishment in 1948.
Men, women and children have been braving Israeli army sniper fire to demand that they be allowed to exercise their internationally recognized right to return to lands they were expelled from by Israel. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers, and thousands more have been wounded since the protests began.
While much of the media coverage has been casting the protests as a response to the Trump administration’s move of the U.S. Embassy to Israel to Jerusalem, they are in fact part of a century-long legacy of Palestinians protesting for their rights and freedom.Palestinians have been organizing demonstrations, boycotts, strikes and outright........
To set the records straight, I must say as many times as needed that the barrier enclosing the two million Palestinians “living” in the Gaza Strip is not a border between two countries, as the media have insistently called it. It is a wall erected by Israel to make the suffering of those living inside the Gaza ghetto as invisible as possible to those living outside it.
Israel has told Gazans that anyone attempting to breach this wall and escape from Gaza will be shot. Anyone approaching it will be shot. And that is precisely what has happened over the weeks of protests by Palestinian refugees seeking to highlight their seventy-year exile from land they can see just beyond the wall. Scores of Palestinians have been killed, including journalists and children. Thousands more have been injured by live fire, with many losing legs and arms to amputations. Alongside this, there has been a report of one Israeli soldier hurt by a stone.
There are many words for what this is. Palestinians speak of heroism, resistance, dedication, and martyrdom. The Israeli government calls the shoot-to-kill and shoot-to-injure policies “self-defense.” Individual soldiers call it “following orders.” Israeli human rights groups, meanwhile, call the policy ordered by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman “grossly illegal.” My grandmother would have called it a shanda (Yiddish for a “disgrace”). But whether it is heroism or self-defense; whether the orders to shoot are legal or illegal; the mounting Israeli gun violence the world has been forced to witness along the Gaza ghetto wall is, without a doubt, disgusting. For any human being, no matter what their political views or ties to Israel or to Palestinian Arabs, the continuous mass shooting of Palestinian civilians is, or should be, emotionally and spiritually intolerable. 
That it is psychologically and politically possible for Palestinians to continue sacrificing themselves in this way testifies to the desperation of their circumstances; that it is psychologically and politically possible for Israelis to murder and maim so many men, women, and children trying to escape from the ghetto within which they have been concentrated, or just trying to attract the world’s attention to their suffering, is a tragic and humiliating stain on the Jewish state and the Zionist movement that created it. It is also entirely self-defeating for a state struggling against efforts to “delegitimize” its existence.
To be sure, there is always Israeli hasbara, or propaganda, to help those seeking some way to suppress the revulsion and pain that any decent person must feel at the stories coming out of Gaza. This hasbara insists that the protests are nothing more than a cynical Hamas publicity stunt. It tells us that armed Hamas terrorists are hiding themselves among the demonstrators, using the miserable masses to conceal their efforts to kill Israelis. Who could doubt this? When the British ruled Palestine, the underground Jewish army prided itself on hiding arms factories in grammar schools and synagogues. And as we know, in any besieged ghetto there will be ghetto fighters, and they will be treated as heroes by those on the inside, and terrorists by those on the outside. But if there are certainly men of violence among the masses of protestors, let us not forget that alongside the many Israeli soldiers who surely suffer some pangs of conscience, there are some, as we have seen on videotape, who high-five one another for using fancy sniper rifles to put big holes in human bodies hundreds of yards away. 
As for those in charge of the security policies of the current Israeli government, they know all too well what they are doing, what horror they are inflicting. The security hawks that staff leading think tanks and Israeli government ministries regularly speak of the need to “mow the lawn” in Gaza, to keep the population there on a “strict diet,” and to “manage the conflict” by using purposefully inflicted suffering to sear into Palestinian hearts the belief that resistance is futile. When Israel adopted its policy of enforcing a hermetic seal around Gaza in 2007, a political geographer at Haifa University named Arnon Soffer offered his full-throated endorsement, but added that it would eventually mean, not shooting armed men, but “putting a bullet in the head of anyone who tries to climb over the security barrier.” “If we want to remain alive,” he said, by which he meant if Israel wants to remain a “Jewish” state, “we will have to kill and kill and kill.”
The struggle for a two-state solution is not moribund; it is dead. This is true even if the pretense that negotiations could succeed remains a useful excuse—a way for Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the United States, and the peace-process industry to exploit or ignore the deepening oppression of the current one-state reality. As documented by the Israeli military, there are now more Palestinians under the control of the Israeli state than there are Jews. Indeed, for all intents and purposes the Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank are already within the Jewish state. They are citizens of no other country, no other recognized state. As measured by how much impact the State of Israel has over the intimate details of their lives, and indeed over whether they will live at all, they are as much inhabitants of the State of Israel as black slaves were inhabitants of the United States or as Africans in the Bantustans were inhabitants of apartheid South Africa. The five-decade occupation of the West Bank and the dozen-year blockade of Gaza, combined with regularly inflicted violent punishment, just mark differences in the way the Israeli state governs different populations in different régions.
In this sense, there is no longer any reason for Israelis to fear the Palestinian call for return as a “threat” to the ideal of a Jewish democratic state. After all, what did that ideal actually mean? It meant a state that was controlled by Jews, for Jews, but which could front itself as a democracy with equal rights for all. However, no state that uses the kind of mass incarceration, heavy and constant surveillance, collective punishment, and bloody violence against those under its control that Israel does against Palestinian residents can any longer front itself as democratic. Nor can it be reasonably argued that allowing refugees from Gaza to settle in the underpopulated areas surrounding the Gaza Strip would be a greater danger to Israel and its Jewish inhabitants than letting the Gaza time bomb tick until it explodes.
The truth is, no matter how much Israelis try to deny or distance themselves from the suffering their government is inflicting on the people of Gaza, their fates are intimately intertwined. Consider Ashkelon, an Israeli city on the Mediterranean coast thirteen miles from the Gaza Strip. Before the expulsion of its population to Gaza after the 1948 war, it was the Palestinian town of Majdal. Israel (with the complicity of the Palestinian Authority) has reduced the amount of electricity allowed into Gaza so that it is available for not more than four hours. For two million people that means real misery, but it also means that sewage treatment plants cannot operate properly, contributing to the fact that 97 percent of the drinking water in Gaza is contaminated. Experts warn of cholera and other epidemics that are liable to be unleashed in Gaza and spread beyond the wall surrounding it. Meanwhile, Ashkelon’s desalination plant, a facility that provides Israel with 20 percent of the its drinking water, has had to shut down on a number of occasions because of sewage from Gaza flowing into the area’s waters, while the city’s beaches have been closed because of fecal matter washing up on the shore.
The immediate solution to the human catastrophe that is the Gaza Strip is to end the brutal blockade that immiserates it and drains all hope from its inhabitants—a direction of policy advocated by many Israeli military and security experts. Only by doing so can life there be normal enough to convince ordinary Palestinians in Gaza that it is worth more than what happens to them when they try to escape.
Conflict Zone confronts Israeli minister Michael Oren and his hasbara 

Israel occupied and subsequently annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 - a move which was not accepted by the international community - with the exception of US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Israeli control over the occupied city in December 2017.
Palestinians residing in East Jerusalem following Israel's occupation were not granted Israeli or Palestinian citizenship, but were instead issued Jerusalem residency ID cards, which can be revoked by Israel at any time.
Last year, Israel revoked the residency of 35 Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, including 17 women and four minors, according to Israeli rights group Hamoked.
Since 1967, almost 15,000 Palestinians have had their Jerusalem IDs revoked, mostly for failing to prove to Israeli authorities that Jerusalem or Israel was the centre of their life.
For there is a new "breach of loyalty" legislation which applies to numerous cases.
Owing to the ambiguity of what exactly constitutes a breach of loyalty or allegiance to the Israeli state, Palestinians and rights groups fear that the new law will have far-reaching consequences for Palestinians in East Jérusalem.
"If you leave such a draconic law with this much ambiguity surrounding it, then you give the state very strong powers to erode people's basic rights," said a Rights lawyer. "If Israel uses this legislation to fight the [Palestinian] population, then you're looking at a very problematic situation of mass residency revocations. Every Palestinian holds principles against the occupation and against the Israeli state. No one knows how far Israel will go with this law, but it's clearly very dangerous. The legislation gives Israel more control over Palestinian politics and activism, because the possibility of being kicked out of the city scares us. It will give Israel another opportunity to displace more Palestinians from the city."
Actually, even lawyers are at a loss as to how to defend Palestinians who could be targeted with the new law.
"How do you defend someone who is being accused of breaching allegiance to the Israeli state?" 
To live Under occupation and daily bullying should be enough. To kiss your torturer is too much to ask.
By the way, people have been asking me about Jérusalem. So I decided to state the facts, Nothing but the facts below.  
Legal Status of Jerusalem
Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, the United Nations and international community have not recognized the sovereignty of any country to any part of Jerusalem in the absence of a permanent peace agreement in the region.
Under the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine passed in November 1947, Jerusalem was to be governed by a special international regime administered by the UN. Following Israel’s establishment in May 1948, the western part of Jerusalem came under Israeli control.
The eastern portion of Jerusalem, including the Old City and its historic Muslim, Jewish, and Christian holy sites, has been under Israeli military rule since the June 1967 war and is considered occupied Palestinian territory under international law, not legally part of Israel.
After it occupied East Jerusalem, Israel massively expanded the municipal boundaries of the city into the West Bank and annexed it in a move that has been repeatedly rejected as illegal by the UN, including numerous Security Council résolutions.
Prior to the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in November 2017, US policy on the city was in line with the international community’s refusal to recognize any country’s sovereignty over any part of the city until a peace agreement is reached.
Israeli Policy in Occupied East Jerusalem
Since militarily occupying East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, Israel has attempted to restrict and reduce the Palestinian population of the city while increasing the growth of its Jewish population, part of a plan to cement control over the entire city. In the words of the US State Department International Religious Freedom Report from 2009: “Many of the national and municipal policies in Jerusalem were designed to limit or diminish the non-Jewish population of Jerusalem.”
This process, which is called “Judaization,” involves: Severely restricting the ability of Palestinians to build or expand homes in East Jerusalem by making it almost impossible for them to obtain construction permits. Destroying Palestinian homes and other structures that are built without permission. Revoking residency rights and social benefits of Palestinians who stay outside the city for seven years or more to study or work, or who are unable to prove that their “center of life” is in Jerusalem. Systematically discriminating against Palestinian neighborhoods when it comes to municipal planning and in the allocation of services, including education and sanitation. Aggressively encouraging Jewish settlers to move to East Jerusalem in violation of international law, often evicting Palestinians from their homes in the process. Building a wall on occupied Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, which has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice, to sever it geographically from Palestinians in the West Bank.
Messianic Jewish Extremists & the Noble Sanctuary Mosque Complex
In recent years, messianic Jewish extremism has been growing in Israel. Much of it is focused around building a Jewish temple in the Noble Sanctuary mosque complex in East Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam and one of the most sensitive religious sites in the world.
With encouragement and material support from Israel’s government, these dangerous religious fanatics have been developing plans for a new temple and intensifying their provocations in the Noble Sanctuary, threatening to incitement a major religious conflagration in the region and beyond.
Jerusalem: By the Numbers
More than 320,000: Number of Palestinians living in occupied East Jérusalem.
Almost 300,000: Number of Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied Palestinian land in East Jérusalem.
Approximately 14,000: Number of Palestinian Jerusalemites who have had their residency rights revoked by Israel since 1967.
Approximately 5,000: Number of Palestinian homes destroyed by Israel in East Jerusalem since it began its military rule over the city in 1967.
More than 17,000 acres: Amount of Palestinian land in the West Bank illegally annexed to East Jerusalem by Israel after it occupied the city in 1967.
35 per cent: Amount of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem that Israel has confiscated for the use of illegal Jewish settlements.
13 per cent: The amount of East Jerusalem land that Israel has zoned for Palestinian construction, much of which is already built-up.
Approximately 4 million: The number of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza who are not allowed to enter Jerusalem without difficult to obtain permission from Israel’s occupying army.

Palestinian activist mounts legal challenge over Israel prison abuse
Several members of the extended Tamimi family have been detained in the recent past. The most high profile of them is Ahed Tamimi, aged 16, who was sentenced to eight months imprisonment in March.
Ahed was arrested after she confronted Israeli soldiers outside her home in Nabi Saleh last December. The confrontation occurred on the same day that her 15-yeard-old cousin, Muhammad, was shot in the head.
Muhammad has been held in military detention three times now, an experience that many Palestinian children suffer and that has healthcare professionals warning of lifelong trauma.
Muhammad’s latest detention came on the morning of Sunday, 20 May, when he went to the supermarket in Nabi Saleh, his village in the occupied West Bank, to buy groceries. He noticed a white car in front of his uncle’s house from which two young men emerged.
When Muhammad approached, the men grabbed him from behind and pulled him into the car.
“They pointed a gun at me, so I would not scream or call for help,” Muhammad said, recounting the short but frightening drive. When they stopped at the military watchtower near Nabi Saleh, he understood that he had been taken by Israeli undercover forces.
There, the military commander in charge of the area of Nabi Saleh and nearby Beit Rima, told his captors to keep him. “He said I would not be going home,” Muhammad recalled.
He was then transported to an Israeli military base near the town of Aboud. “They beat me everywhere, very hard,” Muhammad said. “They were wearing boots, they hit me on my back, my hands, my head.”
The Israeli army handed him over to Palestinian security forces at night, after Muhammad’s family managed to convey to the army that the boy needed to take his medicine.
Muhammad is still recovering from a head injury he sustained in December last year when an Israeli soldier shot him in the face with a rubber-coated steel bullet in protests following the announcement of the US embassy move to Jérusalem.
In the six-hour operation that followed the injury, the surgeons had to remove a large part of his skull to relieve pressure on the brain.
This was the third time the army has detained Muhammad. He was first taken from his home at the age of 13 and served a three-month prison sentence. The Israelis then arrested him again in a night raid in February, just two months after his injury and still awaiting restorative surgery.
“Even if Muhammad is never arrested again, he will be alert every second of his life. Always ready to be taken again,” Murad Amro from the Palestinian Counseling Center in Ramallah explained. “It is the military’s way of teaching children a lesson, inflicting a sort of psychosocial handicap from a young age.”
Addameer, the prisoners rights group, reports that as of April 2018, Israel is holding more than 300 Palestinian children, of whom 65 are under the age of 16.
Statistics gathered by Defense for Children International Palestine find that in 2017, almost 75 percent of detained children reported physical violence during arrest.
Murad Amro said that the way a child reacts to the trauma of arrest can vary. The reaction is connected to a number of factors, like socioeconomic background, family dynamics and predisposition.
“However, we generally observe that childhood detention has a severe impact on the functioning of a child and family structure,” Amro explained. “A child after detention is not the same child.”
Samah Jabr is a Palestinian psychiatrist and psychotherapist and an author of the book Derrière les fronts (Behind the Fronts), which deals with the military occupation’s impact on mental health in Palestine. 
“Adolescence in itself is a dangerous place,” she says. "Adolescents are more impulsive. They tend to engage in more high risk activities than adults. In Palestine, those activities are likely to involve confrontations with soldiers “especially because soldiers provoke children. Recently, the Israelis reduced the age of responsibility to 12.” 
Meaning that children at a vulnerable and impulsive age are treated as adults in Israeli military courts. During every stage of detention, the child experiences a number of shocks. The first is to be taken from home by soldiers and to see that parents are powerless in front of the Israeli military.
“Your parents are the ones that discipline you, try to control your behavior and claim to protect you,” Jabr said. “It is a shock for the child to see that when there is a real need for protection, the parents are helpless.”
Then children often endure severe abuse on the way to the interrogation center. “The child is beaten, humiliated, sometimes bitten by dogs, sometimes soldiers piss on him or her. Interrogators also attempt to make children believe that society has betrayed them, Jabr said, for instance by saying a child’s name was given to soldiers by friends or classmates. At the same time, interrogators might try to induce guilt by threatening to demolish the home or harass the child’s siblings. Sometimes, they bring belongings from home to the interrogation, just to show the child their ability to reach family members.” 
Such psychological pressure pushes many children to sign confessions in Hebrew they do not understand.
When Muhammad Tamimi was arrested last February, he signed a confession within hours of his arrest, stating that his injury was not caused by a bullet but a bike accident. The statement was patently signed under duress and he later told journalists that the soldiers beat him into confession.
The psychological pain does not end after release. When a child returns home from prison, there are celebrations. But Jabr explained that children themselves can suffer from the ambivalence of the experience.
“There is a tendency to amplify the child’s sacrifice – to glorify him or her as a hero. Meaning there is no space for the child to talk about the pain and shame. Children often feel guilty because they confessed or gave names. The parents themselves also feel guilty, because they could not prevent what happened. The whole family system is disturbed by the experience.”
Jabr also emphasized that every child reacts differently to detention. Not all children display symptoms of trauma, and there are countless psychosocial factors at play.
“Some become submissive. Others will want to identify with the physically stronger group, the soldiers. Others will be very angry and engage in even more high risk activities. It is the last group that is more likely to end up in prison again.”
Jabr explained that children can come out of prison suspicious of others, as they were told by interrogators that society betrayed them.
The children have learned from the experience that the structures around them cannot protect them. Many find it hard to adapt again and obey social norms and many drop out of school after detention.
For his part, Muhammad puts up a brave front. After three arrests, he is not scared anymore, he says.
His mother, Imtithal Tamimi, tells a slightly different story. Sunday night, for instance, he slept in his older brother’s bed.
“He is afraid to sleep alone.”
Who wouldn't?
Inside Story: Israel and the Walls that souround it

PALESTINA
Israel targets journalists in Gaza



OCHA  





OBRIGADA, GIL! Por boicotar Israel.

Palestinians are hailing the decision by Brazilian music legend Gilberto Gil to pull the plug on a performance in Israel this summer.
Following Israel’s massacre in Gaza in which snipers targeted thousands of unarmed Palestinian protestors,  also attacking medics, journalists, photographers and children – a coordinated wave of  bands have publicly endorsed the cultural boycott of Israel in support of Palestinian rights, and for freedom, justice and equality.
Dozens of artists are declaring their support for the cultural boycott of Israel following the latest Israeli mass killings of civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip.
They include bands such as Portishead, Wolf Alice and Slaves.
Artists are endorsing the cultural boycott of Israel en masse after Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. Israel may be drunk with impunity, but like apartheid South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre, Israel is being held accountable for its crimes.
Artists and bands can add their name to the now more than 1,300 who signed the Artists Pledge for Palestine in Great Britain.
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domingo, 20 de maio de 2018

Rogues Israel & USA vs Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine


NAKBA, 70 years! And counting


Among the things that the Iran deal critics demand is a broader, better deal that curbs ballistic missile construction and prevents Iran from supporting “terrorists.” The media never questions the proposition that Iran in fact supports such people. Who are these terrorists? Hizbollah in Lebanon tops the list. (Hamas is usually next, and then the Houthis of Yemen, the Shiite militias in Iraq, the Syrian Arab Army, etc. Even the Revolutionary Guards a division of the Iranian military, is listed by the State Department as a “terrorist organization.”)
The elections in Lebanon on May 6th gave Hizbollah and its allies (mostly Maronite Christians, actually) a majority in Parliament. They won 67 out of 128 seats. Israel politician and leader of the Jewish Home party Naftali Bennett declares that now “Lebanon equals Hizbollah.” (Since Israel has invaded its northern neighbor in 1982 and 2006, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths, including at least 400 in the Shatila-Sabra massacre of Palestinians in West Beirut in two days in September 1982, such talk must worry most Lebanese.)
Hizbollah is little known to people in this country. Maybe some have seen that Anthony Bourdain “Parts Unknown” episode from Lebanon in 2015. Bourdain spent some time with a Maronite Christian family in Beirut who had a Hizbollah poster on the wall; the host praised their role in resisting Israeli attacks. (Bourdain in his typical way was nonjudgmental. It’s unfortunate that some of the best, most objective commentaries on some countries are provided by this professional cook on CNN.) Maybe some question the routine designation, by the State Department echoed by the media, of the organization as “terrorist.” I myself do. But we doubters are surely few. Few organizations have been more systematically vilified.
Why has Hizbollah been designated a “terrorist” organization by Israel and the U.S.,, followed (somewhat reluctantly) by the EU in 2013 under U.S. pressure? Germany continues to refuse to designate Hizbollah “in its entirety” as terrorist; like the EU in general it distinguishes between the “military wing” and the political party. Neither Russia nor China see it as terrorist. They realize that Hizbollah is a large political movement based in the Shiite community but enjoying an alliance with Christian and other minorities. It maintains a robust militia, more powerful than the Lebanese Army. It also maintains radio and TV stations, charities, hospitals. It has a genuine social base in Lebanon; that, rather than Iranian aid, is the key to its success. But instead of examining it in its specificities, successive U.S. administrations have simply condemned it while emphasizing its Iranian ties.
Just like the current administration smears Houthis in Yemen as Iranian proxies. Or the Alawi-led government of Syria as a pawn of an Iran striving for regional dominance. Anyone paying attention knows that while the Houthis practice a form of Shiism it is very different from that of Iran; that a Shiite imamate ruled Yemen for 1000 years; and that there is little evidence for Iranian arms support for the Yemeni rebels. They know too that the Damascus government is led by the secular Baathist Party, which is ideologically at odds with Iran’s Islamic republicanism; the alliance is based on mutual security in the face of ongoing imperialist encroachment. But the Saudi-promoted specter of a “Shiite crescent” extending from Iran through Iraq (the only majority-Shiite Arab nation) into Syria and Lebanon, threatening to absorb Yemen and perhaps Bahrain, ruled by the Iranian ayatollahs, guides the minds of the benighted U.S. policy makers.
Trump apparently demands a new deal with Iran that curbs its ballistic missile program and ends its support for (whatever the boss calls) “terrorism.” The principle recipients of this aid, always mentioned, are Hizbollah and Hamas. Hamas of course is the Palestinian party that governs the vast concentration camp of Gaza. It swept the Palestinian legislative election, the first and only free Palestinian election, in 2006. It has responded to Israeli occupation with violence on occasion; this itself, for the Israelis and U.S., constitutes terrorism. Iran-backed terrorism.
Why would Iran withdraw support from Hizbollah, even as it rises in electoral popularity and strength? Even as it successfully assists the Syrian Arab Army in fighting al-Qaeda and ISIL forces challenging the Assad government in Syria? It is an unreasonable imperialist demand. The demand of the Syrians and Iranians that the 2000 U.S. Special Forces illegally in Syria withdraw is eminently reasonable, but U.S. efforts to remold the Middle East through military intervention are outrageous. The U.S. demand to determine who the world views as terrorist is similarly outrageous.
By demanding that Iran renegotiate the nuclear deal to include the irrelevant question of Tehran’s ties to different political groups in the region, Trump does what the U.S. has done time and time again with those targeted for regime change: he sets the bar too high, and paves the way for war.
In 2002 the French and Germans made clear that they did not accept the U.S. justification for the impending war on Iraq. But the Brits were on board, reliably, and some other NATO allies. U.S. prestige took a blow in the court of world public opinion as the savage attack and occupation produced civil war, half a million died, and the U.S. engaged in the types of torture revealed in the Abu Ghraib torture photos. In 2011 Germany opposed NATO airstrikes on Libya, but France and Britain strongly advocated it, and drew in Hillary Clinton who convinced a hesitant Obama.
This time, however, all the U.S.’s top three European allies (with the 4th, 5th and 7th largest GDPs in the world), join China (2nd) and Russia (12th) in firmly opposing the U.S. action against Iran. (Japan–3rd—is opposed but will not speak up. All major powers think Trump is crazy to try to sabotage a deal that’s good for them, Iran and the world. The only ones applauding are the Israelis (who fantasize that Iran is an “existential threat”) and the Saudis (who see Tehran as the headquarters of Shiite heresy, and in their republicanism threatening to Sunni monarchies throughout the Gulf).
Many must marvel at how the absolutely clueless Trump has been influenced by the snake oil salesman Netanyahu, who tried so hard to dissuade Obama from signing the deal—from a U.S. Senate podium at that, and railed against it at the UN, and lectured Trump in English with a power point presentation a couple days before the announcement. And by the Saudi King Salman and Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who flattered him during his sword-dance visit last year. These are not the most reputable or trusted people in Europe or the world in general. Trump is choosing his friends on the basis who flatters him best.
Meanwhile Hizbollah, a big Iran ally, expands its control and hence Iran’s influence over Lebanon—through peaceful electoral means. And Bashar al-Assad, another big ally, militarily defeats his opponents with Russian, Iranian, Hizbollah and Iraqi Shiite militia assistance. The (Shiite, allegedly ) Houthis of Yemen hold out against the savage (Sunni) Saudi assault. These forces are not mere Iranian proxies but agents acting in their own right, with varying degrees of Iranian support.
Hizbollah was founded in 1982 as a response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The group was inspired by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini. But to see it as a mere proxy is to deny agency to the Lebanese people who support it, for reasons that have nothing to do with Iran but everything to do with resistance to Israeli aggression.
To demand that Iran, in addition to the major concessions it has already made on its nuclear program, withdraw support from the various groups it supports (to some extent; sometimes the extent is exaggerated) in the region, is to demand it concede the field to the U.S., Israelis and Gulf Arabs and their own favored terrorist proxies. It’s a demand that the whole world accept the U.S. State Department’s evolving list of “terrorist organizations” as universally definitive. Enough already.
The Iranian organization Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK), founded in the 1960s to violently oppose the Shah’s regime, was considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. until 2012. Why did the designation change? Hint: It had nothing to do with any change of behavior, but had something to do with ongoing ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence in relation to producing regime change in Iran.
MEK famously sided with Saddam’s Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. It has allegedly killed U.S. citizens. But now it’s cool, while Hizbollah is not. While the U.S. embraces MEK Iran is supposed to abandon Hizbollah, because the U.S. demands it, threatening to destroy a UNSC-approved treaty if Tehran persists in supporting this group which—did I mention?—just with its bloc swept the Lebanese elections. The arbitrary reasoning is obvious, and unjustifiable.
The U.S. under Trump has truly lost reason. Europe should now say, “It was a fun seven decades together. But now, it’s just not working. You’ve become offensive, unreasonable. You may overestimate your power. We will for our part resist your efforts to curb our trade with Iran or any other country where we have the right to operate.” Perhaps I think too optimistically. But the instability of our times and the president’s stubborn stupidity might just finally provoke the necessary Atlantic split.
Norman Finkelstein: We are all Hizbullah

In the West, it’s easy to concentrate on each daily drama about the Middle East and forget the world in which the real people of the region live. The latest ravings of the American president on the Iran nuclear agreement – mercifully, at last, firmly opposed by the EU – obscure the lands of mass graves and tunnels in which the Muslim Middle East now exists. Even inside the area, there has now arisen an almost macabre disinterest in the suffering that has been inflicted here over the past six years. It’s Israel’s air strikes in Syria that now takes away the attention span.
Yet take the discovery of dozens of corpses in a mass grave in Raqqa, Isis’s Syrian “capital”. It garnered scarcely three paragraphs in Arab papers last month, yet the 50 bodies recovered were real enough and there may be another 150 to be recovered. The corpses lay under a football pitch near a hospital which Isis fighters used before they fled the city – under an agreement with Kurdish forces – and could only be identified by markings which gave only their first names (if they were civilians) or their nom de guerre if they were jihadis. Who killed them?
Even less space was given to another gruesome discovery last month in tunnels beneath the Syrian town of Douma, east of Damascus. This vast stone warren of underground streets wide enough for cars and trucks was found to contain 112 bodies, 30 of them Syrian soldiers, the rest probably civilians, many killed long ago, presumably by the Jaish al-Islam group which fought for the town for many years. Were they hostages for whom the Islamists wished to exchange prisoners? And then murdered when no deal was struck?
An elder and highly experienced colleague Patrick Cockburn investigated an even more terrible mass killing outside Mosul which occurred in 2014, most of the victims Shia Iraqi soldiers. We know this because Isis filmed their appalling end, shot in the head and then tossed carelessly into the blood-stained waters of the Tigris, some of them floating far south towards Baghdad. History has not been kind to these lands. In 1915, when the Turks were massacring Armenians, many of the Armenian corpses drifted down the Tigris and reached Mosul – the very execution site which can be seen in the Isis video, taken, of course, 99 years later.
Like the vast mass graves of Europe after the Second World War – especially in the Soviet Union – the memory of this savagery will not be forgotten. Which is why the Iraqi authorities (largely Shia in the case of “judicial” trials which meet no international standards) have been hanging Isis suspects like thrushes on prison gallows, 30 at a time, in the south of the country. The Kurds appear to be behaving much more humanely outside Raqqa where court hearings have a modicum of justice, albeit unrecognised in the West. And so it goes on.
And to whom does one turn for justice? Or peace? The Russians in Syria, interestingly enough, have just started publishing a monthly newspaper for joint Syrian and Russian forces in the country. It has a touch of the old Soviet Union about it. The title is “Together, We Make Peace” – which might not convince the Syrian government’s opponents – and there are photographs of Russian troops feeding refugees (flat, Arab bread), of red-bereted soldiers patrolling front lines and a very large front-page photograph of both Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin and Bashar al-Assad.
Intriguingly, just below, is a colour photograph of perhaps Russia’s top soldier in Syria: General Aleksander Juravlov, much bemedalled and in his dark blue dress uniform, staring unsmilingly at the camera. We may hear more of him as the weeks go by. Because Russia’s presence in Syria is far from over.
Copies of the newspaper in Arabic also attempt to teach Syrian soldiers basic Russian – the Russian version teaches Arabic. And there’s even (in the Arabic print run) a guide to Moscow, maps of Russia and stories about Second World War weapons. In the top left of each front page is another Soviet-style symbol: two hands clasped together. One hand is coloured in the red, white and black banner of Syria, the other in the red, blue and white of Russia. Yes, the Russians are going to be around for quite a while.
So are the Israelis. Their earlier attack on Iranian forces in Syria – of which there appear to be far fewer than the West imagines, although there are many pro-Iranian Hezbollah fighters still in the country – came suspiciously close to the Trump announcement reneging on the US nuclear agreement with Iran. And an Israeli statement that the Iranians had missiles in Syria was surely made in concert with the Trump administration – it came within hours, and coincidences don’t run that close in the Middle East.
The latest overnight Israeli air strikes, supposedly at Iranian forces in Syria after a supposed Iranian rocket attack on Israeli forces in Golan – and it’s important to use the “supposed” and not take all this at face value – must have been known to the Americans in advance. The Russians, too. And it’s clear that any Israeli plans to create a “security zone” (i.e., occupation zone) inside Syria and along the border of Golan – along the lines of the “security zone”, equally occupied and patrolled by local militias, in southern Lebanon until the year 2000 – would meet with American approval.
So it’s a moment when all sides are now staring at each other with increasing concern. Oddly, in all the coverage of Lebanon’s largely peaceful election last weekend, hardly anyone commented upon one of the successful Shia candidates in the Baalbek-Hermel district. He’s a familiar name – Jamil Sayyed – and he used to be Lebanon’s head of general security. He was also a loyal friend of Syria. The West had him locked up for three years after the inquiry into ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri’s murder but he was released without any evidence found against him. After which, General Sayyed has been a frequent visitor to Damascus.
“Robert,” he said to me over coffee there some months ago, “why do you hate me?” That was a bit of a breath-taker, and your correspondent hastened to deny any such emotion. Then came an invitation to the restaurant he owns in Beirut.
The point, of course, is that General Sayyed’s election means that one of Syria’s most trusted friends now has a seat in the Lebanese parliament. His speeches will be listened to with deep interest by his parliamentary colleagues. Odd, though, how we go on missing these developments. Out in the West – or Trump’s Wild West – mass graves, Russian alliances and Lebanese elections just don’t get the coverage they deserve.

PALESTINA

Must read! A suicide in Gaza 

 

The UN human rights chief has slammed Israel's deadly reaction to protests along the Gaza border as "wholly disproportionate" and backed calls for an international investigation.
Addressing a special session of the UN Human Rights Council on Friday, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said there was "little evidence" Israel made an effort to minimise casualties during mass border protests by Palestinians last Monday.
He said Israeli forces had killed 106 Palestinians, including 15 children, since March 30. More than 12,000 were injured, at least 3,500 by live ammunition.
Israel was an occupying power under international law, obliged to protect the people of Gaza and ensure their welfare, he said.
"But they are, in essence, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death; deprived of dignity; dehumanised by the Israeli authorities to such a point it appears officials do not even consider that these men and women have a right, as well as every reason, to protest."
"Nobody has been made safer by the horrific events of the past week," he added. "End the occupation, and the violence and insecurity will largely disappear."
He pointed out though that while at least 60 Palestinians were killed and thousands injured in a single day of protests on Monday, "on the Israeli side, one soldier was reportedly wounded, slightly, by a stone".
Many of the Palestinians injured and killed "were completely unarmed, (and) were shot in the back, in the chest, in the head and limbs with live ammunition," he said.
Some demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, used sling-shots, flew burning kites into Israel, and attempted to use wire-cutters on border fences, but "these actions alone do not appear to constitute the imminent threat to life or deadly injury which could justify the use of lethal force," Zeid added.
"The stark contrast in casualties on both sides is ... suggestive of a wholly disproportionate response," he told the Council.
The killings resulting from "the unlawful use of force by an occupying power may also constitute a grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions, he added.
Such violations are called "war crimes", although Zeid did not explicitly use that word.
The special session comes after six weeks of mass protests along the Gaza border with Palestinian refugees demanding the right to return to their homes inside what is now Israel.
The protests on Monday, organised by various Palestinian factions, were part of Nakba or "Catastrophe", the day Palestinians commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes by Israeli forces.
Israel has defended the killing of protesters with the old hasbara of "acting in self-defence to protect its borders and communities". Both Israel and the United States said Hamas, which rules Gaza, instigated the violence, an allegation the group denies.
In Friday's session in Geneva, the Human Rights Council will consider a resolution put forward by Pakistan and other Muslim countries that includes a call for the council to dispatch an "independent, international commission of inquiry" - UN's highest-level of investigation.
The draft resolution said the investigators should look into "all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law ... in the context of the military assaults on large-scale civilian protests that began on 30 March, 2018".
It said the aim should be to "establish the facts and circumstances" around "alleged violations and abuses including those that may amount to war crimes and to identify those responsible".
Zeid said he supported the call for "an investigation that is international, independent and impartial, in the hope the truth regarding these matters will lead to justice".
His comments came as the Egyptian president, Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, announced he had ordered the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Gaza for the entire Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the longest length of time since 2013.
Sisi wrote on his official Twitter account late on Thursday that the opening would “alleviate the burdens of the brothers in the Gaza Strip”.
The Rafah crossing is Gaza’s main gate to the outside world. Egypt has kept Rafah largely sealed off since 2013, after Egypt’s elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi was ousted.
On Friday, travellers were slowly moving toward the crossing. A bus arrived about every hour with people whose names appeared on lists provided by Hamas officials, who oversee who goes through the border.
Not far from there, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on Muslim leaders to unite and confront Israel, days after scores of Palestinians were killed by Israeli snipers as they marked 70 years of Israeli occupation.
Speaking at an extraordinary summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Friday, Erdogan said Israel should be held accountable over the killings which drew widespread international condemnation and triggered a wave of protests from Asia, through the Middle East, to North Africa.
"To take action for Palestinians massacred by Israeli bandits is to show the whole world that humanity is not dead," Erdogan told the group of Muslim leaders gathered in Turkey's largest city, Istanbul.
The Turkish president described Israel's killing of Palestinians as "thuggery, atrocity and state terror," and said the US' recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital would inevitably haunt it.

US Embassy in Jerusalem is a symbol, mass oppression is the root of the protests
Palestinian protesters are seeking freedom from world largest concentration camp
Palestinians have the right to break free of the unliavable cage that is Gaza
Outrage over Israeli massacre shows power of nonviolent Palestinian resistance
Meet Marek Talik, Canadian doctor shot by IDF soldiers while treating Gaza's wounded


OCHA  




INSIDE STORY
Who can the Palestinians turn to for help?
The Burning frustration of the Palestinians

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Cancelen el juego con el Estado del apartheid!