[It may be that most war criminals do not talk much about war crimes and international law, for obvious reasons. But this is not true for imperialists, who, along with their dictatorial friends and Zionist allies, carry out the largest crimes against humanity, yet arrogantly claim the mantle of "humanitarian" wars and occupations "to spread democracy and justice." The US and Israel do not submit to the authority of international law, or of the International Criminal Court, which they nevertheless invoke against defiant warlords, bullies, and petty criminals who refuse to serve imperial designs. In fact, the Iraqi regime, however much their roots were as puppets of the US occupation, were unwilling to further extend the immunity of US soldiers from prosecution for war crimes, under Iraqi law. And this was the reason for the withdrawal of US troops--and why the "democratic" claims of the US ring hollow, around the world. So, too, are the claims of Israel to be "the only democracy in the middle east"--far too many know the history of the removal of Palestinians from historic Palestine--ethnic cleansing--and of Israeli's apartheid "double standard" toward Palestinians, to even consider that phony, arrogant, and racist claim. This article by Joe Catron in Ma'an breaks this down. -- Frontlines ed.]
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Palestinians being searched by Israeli troops at one of the countless "check-points" that block the movement of Palestinians across historic Palestine
As Israeli Apartheid Week unfolds around the world, apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people scramble to defend their chosen regime’s system of racism, ethnic cleansing, and occupation, against the charge of apartheid.
“The apartheid analogy is fatally flawed,” the Jerusalem Connection’s Shelley Neese writes. The David Project’s David Bernstein says, “The apartheid analogy is specious and absurd.” The Anti-Defamation League has even circulated an old report: “The Apartheid Analogy: Wrong for Israel.”
These commentators are right, but not for the reasons they claim. An apartheid ‘analogy’ is fatally flawed, specious, absurd, and wrong for Israel because apartheid is not an analogy, but a crime as well-defined in law as embezzlement or kidnapping.
The most relevant statute, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, perhaps muddies the waters by stating that “the term ‘the crime of apartheid’ … shall include similar practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa.”
But it goes on to define exactly what those and other “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them” are.
Most will sound familiar to anyone who follows news from Palestine. The ban on “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups” should bring to mind Hana Shalabi, Khader Adnan, and 307 other administrative detainees held indefinitely without charges, evidence, or trials. This is further to the 4,078 Palestinian political prisoners sentenced by military courts or facing the imminent prospect, all under occupation laws no Jew will ever face.
The prohibition of “measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country” could have been meant to describe discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Read more »
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian activist Mustafa al-Tamimi during his funeral in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on December 11, 2011 (Photographer: ABBAS MOMANI/Source: AFP/Getty Images)
Mostafa Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, Bahjat Zaalan and his son Ramdan from Gaza died on my fiftieth birthday and just a few days after Newt Gingrich declared them an invented people. They were murdered by the Israeli terrorist organization, the IDF, an organization that is supported and funded by the US. One Israeli terrorist shot the invented Tamimi in the head with a tear gas canister, and another Israeli terrorist fired a rocket that murdered the invented Zaalan and his boy Ramadan. Both terrorists were educated and trained by Israel, and armed by the US. The Israeli terrorists are not invented but quite real, and they are safe, protected by the apartheid regime that trained and sent them on their missions, and the Israeli court system will make sure that they are never brought to justice. This is how Israel’s well-oiled ethnic cleansing machine operates.
The Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine is not a thing of the past but an ongoing campaign that is executed by three arms of the State of Israel: The education system, a dedicated bureaucracy and the security forces. The education system is dedicated to indoctrinating and producing soldiers and bureaucrats who will execute and enforce the ethnic cleansing. The bureaucracy is charged with making rules that make life unlivable for Palestinians. Rules that restrict Palestinian access to their lands, and restrict their ability to travel freely to work and school. This same bureaucracy then demands that Palestinians pay for permits to be allowed do these very same basic things that they were denied. The security forces, the most obvious of which is the IDF, are charged with enforcing the restrictions, fighting off the resistance, armed or peaceful, and terrorizing the “invented” people of Palestine.
Since my father was a general and I served as a soldier in the IDF terrorist organization, people often ask me how is it that Israeli children who are raised in a Western style democracy become such monsters once they are in uniform? The detailed answer can be found in my book, The General’s Son due out in February 2012, but the short answer is this: Education – Racism requires a mindset that is fashioned by education. In order to rationalize and justify the ethnic cleansing the Israeli education system portrays Palestinians as culturally inferior, violent and bent on the annihilation of the Jews, and at the same time, void of a true national identity. Palestinian national identity is but a figment of some anti-Semitic imagination.
Israeli children are educated to see the Palestinians as a problem that must be solved and as a threat that must be eliminated. They can go through life, as I did growing up in Jerusalem, without ever meeting a Palestinian child. They know nothing of the life or culture of Palestinians who quite often live only several hundred meters from them. Read more »
Israeli Forces Arrest Eight Citizens from Jenin Camp, Nablus, Gaza
December 20, 2011, PNN – Palestine News Network, occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com
PNN- On Tuesday, Israeli forces arrested three citizens from Jenin refugee camp, Jenin city, and Yamoun village.
Secure sources told Palestinian official news wire Wafa that Israeli forces at the city of Jenin and the refugee camp using tear gas and sound bombs, arrested three Palestinians, Kamal Awaad, Mohammad Mazen Abu al-Sa’di and Yousef Abu al-Sba’, after they raided their houses and rummaged through their belongings.
The Israeli forces also raided the house of As’ad Mohammad Steiti in the camp and searched it. They also raided Yanoun village, west of Jenin, and searched several houses.
Israeli forces also arrested a youth and his sister from Duma village, south of Nablus.
Secure sources told Wafa that the Israeli forces raided the village at dawn and started searching the citizens’ houses, eventually arresting Omar Dwabsheh, 20, and his sister Fatima, 22, who studies at al-Najah University.
In the central Gaza refugee camp of al-Bureij, Israeli soldiers kidnapped three Palestinians during a midnight raid.
[An Israeli jeep raids a West Bank village (Lo Yuk Fai, PNN).]
[Once again, the Jewish-exclusivistsettler-colonialist/apartheid state of Israel reveals its racist character (routinely directed against the indigenous Palestinians, but in this case, against African migrants from Sudan.) -- Frontlines ed.]
December 12, 2011–Rally against Sudanese refugees in Tel Aviv, calling to “restrict their movement” and set up concentration camps.
[Since World War 2, imperialism has cynically promoted itself as the advocate of international human rights law, even while trampling human rights in its wars, interventions, and other pursuits of domination and control and suppression of people's struggles all over the world. But, again and again, the truth of human rights violations has surfaced, and imperialism has created exemption after exemption to human rights law. Several years ago, the blocked prosecutions of Pinochet of Chile and of Henry Kissinger are two examples of such imperialist shielding of its own. Now, the immunity and impunity given imperialism's criminals has been formally extended to Zionist war criminals. The Israel press YNet reported, "The (British) law that allows issuing arrest warrants against foreign nationals (had) not been amended since the Second World War, and has prevented several IDF officers, including former Southern District Commander Major General (res.) Doron Almog and Head of the Intelligence Corps Major General Aviv Kochavi (who was the former commander of the Gaza Division) from entering Britain...Last May, Major-General Yohanan Locker, the military secretary to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had to cancel his trip to Britain due to his role in Operation Cast Lead, where he served as the head of the IAF's Air Division." When even the superficial appearance of justice is discarded by imperialists, the people will, inevitably, take matters into their own hands. -- Frontlines ed.]
Former Israeli minister Tzipi Livni to visit UK after change in arrest law
Critics claim change in law governing arrest warrants for war crimes is motivated by political pressure from Israel
by Ben Quinn, The Guardian (UK), Monday 3 October 2011
Tzipi Livni, now opposition leader in Israel, will meet foreign secretary William Hague in Britain. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images
The former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, will meet the foreign secretary, William Hague, in Britain on Thursday in the first test of a new law governing arrest warrants for war crimes.
Westminster magistrates court issued an unprecedented arrest warrant for Livni in 2009 – a move that led to an review of the issuing of such warrants.
The warrant, which was issued at the request of lawyers acting for Palestinian victims of Israel‘s operations in Gaza, was withdrawn amid embarrassment in the Foreign Office.
Israel’s foreign ministry condemned it at the time, describing it as a “cynical” move.
Livni, who is the current Israeli opposition leader, had been due to attend a conference in London in 2009 but cancelled two weeks before the warrant was issued. Palestinian sources claimed to have seen her at the event and alerted lawyers. Read more »
The protests against neoliberal governmental policies in the State of Israel have
attracted huge numbers of people, enough to rattle the Netanyahu government. The
protestors wanted a restoration of their standard of living they had enjoyed under
“socialist” governments since the creation of the Israeli State in Palestine. While not
all Israeli Jews had been treated equally before the erosion of the standard of living ,
Israeli Jews, for the most part, had been doing well.
Hardly any Israeli Jews across the political spectrum had upheld the national and
human rights of the Palestinian people under occupation. The ethnic cleansing of
750,000 Palestinians in 1948 to establish the Zionist State, is well documented (Ilan
Pappé 2006). So is the internal displacement of Palestinians within the State of
Israel (Nur Masalha 2003; 2005). Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights that Syria had lost in 1967, Israel had been
displacing Palestinian residents of the West Bank (and Gaza until the Israelis
evacuated it in 2005), confiscating their lands and homes to build colonies
(euphemistically called settlements) exclusively for Jews. The separation Wall that
exists and termed by Palestinians and international human rights activists as the
“Apartheid Wall,” is another proof of the racism that has pervaded Israeli society
since 1948.
It is interesting that in their overwhelming majority the Israeli protestors against
their State’s neoliberal policies, have chosen not to say anything about the rights of
the Palestinian citizens of Israel (Israeli citizens, that is) and the third‐class status
that they have been relegated to in the State of Israel. The protestors have
mentioned nothing about the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza,
which constitutes collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians. Those practices
are considered crimes under international law. Nor have they mentioned anything
about the relationship between the occupation of the West Bank and the problems
that they have been facing as a consequence of the neoliberal policies of their own
State. Not one word about the Palestinian Arabs and their national and human
rights. Read more »
[There is a kind of "gallows humor" among the juggling crisis-driven capitalists. It produces lines like, "the company (corporation/financial group/empire) that fails last, wins." In the course of bi-partisan "debt" agreements this week to begin planning massive cuts and privatising of medical, environmental, social, educational, cultural programs, (leaving military and corporate support virtually intact), nary a word was said about the annual gift of $3 billion to Israel, as bi-partisan Congressional and Presidential support for that gift has not yet been challenged in any significant way. But now, the Israel economy is getting into some (relative) trouble, as the following "Voice of America" story describes. Will the US government continue to not only maintain its largesse to the apartheid state of Israel, but multiply it, even as the remnants of New Deal economics in the US are under serious attack? -- Frontlines ed.]
August 07, 2011
Robert Berger | Jerusalem
Photo: Reuters
Brokers look at screens in the trading room of an investment bank in Tel Aviv, August 7, 2011
The debt crisis in the United States, including the downgrading of the U.S. debt rating by a major agency, had a negative impact on the first day of the trading week in the Middle East. Stock markets in Dubai and Egypt dropped about four percent, and the effects were even worse in Israel.
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange delayed its open by 45 minutes to avoid panic but it did not help. The market plunged by seven percent in response to the downgrade of the debt rating in the United States.
“It is a powerful shock,” economist Yaakov Sheinin told Israel Radio. He said U.S. President Barack Obama and the Federal Reserve should do something to calm world markets.
For Israel, the stock market plunge is the second shock in two days. On Saturday, a quarter of a million Israelis took to the streets to protest the high cost of living and low wages. Read more »
Anders Behring Breivik: Norwegian Islamophobe, Zionist, anti-communist, anti-multiculturist (i.e., white supremacist)
[This article on the Norway massacre appeared today in the leading English-language Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post. Many Western media outlets initially spread unfounded claims that the bombings and shootings were by "Islamic terrorists." Later accounts have focused on the perpetrator as a deranged, psychotic personality. More accurately, people world-wide are recognising that the acts have been committed by a deranged, psychotic Zionist, racist, and Islamophic culture and politics. In apparent anticipation of this recognition, and the backlash it will inevitably create, the Jerusalem Post article informs its readers (many of whom are likely adherents of similar Zionist views) about the views of Anders Behring Breivik. -- Frontlines ed.]
By BEN HARTMAN, Jerusalem Post
24/07/2011 — 1,500 page manifesto credited to Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing spree, lays out worldview including extreme screed of Islamophobia, far-right Zionism, and venomous attacks on Marxism and multiculturalism.
Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who killed nearly 100 people in a combined terror attack Friday that included car bombings in Oslo and a shooting rampage at an island summer camp, held fiercely anti-Islamic and pro-Israel views, according to a 1,500 page manifesto he uploaded before his killing spree Friday.
In the 1,500 page tome, which mentions Israel 359 times and “Jews” 324 times, Breivik lays out his worldview, which includes an extreme, bizarre, and rambling screed of Islamophobia, far-right Zionism, and venomous attacks on Marxism and multiculturalism.
In one passage, he lashes out at the western media which he accuses of unfairly focusing on the wrongdoing of Jews, saying “western journalists again and again systematically ignore serious Muslim attacks and rather focus on the Jews.” Read more »
Communist Party of Greece (m-l) Press Release: About the “Free Gaza” Mission
Tuesday June 28, 2011–The Communist Party of Greece (marxist-leninist) condemns the criminal and provocative stance of the government of Israel in its attempt to discourage the international humanitarian mission against the genocidal blockade of the Palestinian people in Gaza. The fascist, Zionist state threatens to repeat last year’s murderous attack, threatens the reporters of the international media and puts pressure on governments and humanitarian organizations. Behind these threats and open state terrorism are as always the US imperialists, European governments and the UN leadership.
The CPG (m-l) condemns the stance of the Greek government which, in its attempt to dissuade the participation of Greek citizens, gives permission for piratical and criminal practices in international and Palestinian waters by the state of Israel. The CPG (m-l) notes that the Papandreou government has in recent years strengthened its relationship with Israel against the wishes of the majority of the Greek people and the neighbor Arab peoples.
The CPG (m-l) has on every opportunity stated that the support and the solidarity for the just, national liberation, and anti-occupation struggle of the Palestinian people is the affair of a mass, independent, and anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples. This struggle is against the selfish aims of bourgeois and imperialist forces which have proven many times that they can easily change sides and policies. We have noted that the solidarity movement must choose actions and initiatives that conform to their own dynamic and power and must rely on their own strength. Anyway we call upon the democratic Greek people to support the Palestinian right for life, freedom and dignity.
African refugees, and the misconceptions that come with them, have become a major issue in the Israeli town of Eilat, inspiring the “red flag” campaign against the newcomers [Mya Guarnieri]
James Anei was a 16-year-old boy when he witnessed a massacre carried out by militias loyal to the government in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. Terrified, he fled his village in South Sudan.
“You see someone dying in front of you and you know this guy and you know his parents and so you run … because you fear that you will be killed too,” Anei said.
“I find myself in another place,” he added, explaining that he was so frightened that he did not know he had been running until he stopped.
Once he realised he had escaped, Anei headed north. That year, 1999, he arrived in Khartoum. There, he managed to scrape together a living and go to school. Anei remembers crying sometimes when he saw his classmates with their mothers and fathers – not knowing whether his own parents had survived the massacre. Read more »
– After his appointment as chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, California’s representative Howard Berman told The Forward: “Even before I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist.” This is the man, one of the Zionist lobby’s most influential stooges in Congress, who introduced House Resolution 1734 which gives President Obama his new orders.
Israel’s instructions to Obama
Thoroughly disingenuous, the resolution, which was drafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and in my view is an indication of panic on its part, was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives on 15 December. It
strongly and unequivocally opposes any attempt to seek recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations or other international forums;
calls upon the administration to continue its opposition to the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state;
calls upon the administration to affirm that the United States would deny any recognition, legitimacy, or support of any kind to any unilaterally declared ‘‘Palestinian state’’ and would urge other responsible nations to follow suit, and to make clear that any such unilateral declaration would constitute a grievous violation of the principles underlying the Oslo Accords and the Middle East peace process;
calls upon the administration to affirm that the United States will oppose any attempt to seek recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations or other international forums and will veto any resolution to that end by the United Nations Security Council (my emphasis added);
calls upon the president and the secretary of state to lead a high-level diplomatic effort to encourage the European Union and other responsible nations to strongly and unequivocally oppose the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state or any attempt to seek recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations or other international forums; and
supports the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the achievement of a true and lasting peace through direct negotiations between the parties. Read more »
Albert Einstein was an outspoken anti-Zionist. He opposed the terrorist actions of the US-armed Zionist militias that massacred the entire populations of Palestinian villagers in order to spread panic and drive hundreds of thousands of people into exile.
[This article describes how the Israeli government suppresses dissenting voices and forces among Israeli Jews, and it refers to a battle between "democracy and fascism" within Israel. This is true as far as it goes. What is lacking is an understanding that Israel was set up as a democratic state--for its Jewish population--based on the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948 by Zionist militias. "Israeli democracy" does not exist for Palestinians living in Israel, who make up 20% of the population. They are treated as third class citizens in employment, housing, schools, and are under increasing assault by rabid Zionists who see them as a "fifth column" who must be driven out of Israel. The 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who live under military occupation (West Bank), a military siege (Gaza) and economic strangulation (both) are victims of the Israeli state. So are the 6 million Palestinians in refugee camps and the worldwide diaspora. Thus, Israel is a European settler state whose "democracy" is based on the occupation of stolen land and the expulsion and oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine. This is no different from the European settler states in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Algeria, and Israel will ultimately meet the same fate.--Frontlines ed]
Western Media Frightened of the “F” Word in its Israeli Context
By Alan Hart , 19 November 2010
There is a debate in Israel about whether the Zionist state is on the slippery slope to fascism or is already fascist. As far as I am aware the mainstream Western media has not drawn any attention to this.
It was Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, who, along with 27 other most influential Jews, first warned of the danger of the rise of fascism in Israel. In a letter to the Editor of The New York Times published on 4 December 1948, when Menachem Begin was soliciting support in America, they said this:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. Read more »
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 9 November 2010
Rabbis provoke riots in Israel’s “most racist” city
The tranquility of Safed, a small city nestled high in the hills of the Upper Galilee close to the Lebanese border, is not usually disturbed except by the occasional pilgrimage by Madonna or other famous devotees of the Jewish mystical teachings of Kabbalah.
But in the past few weeks, Safed — one of Judaism’s four holy cities — has been making headlines of a very different kind. Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, last week declared it “the most racist city in the country.” The unflattering, and hotly contested, epithet follows an edict from Safed’s senior rabbis ordering residents not to sell or rent homes to “non-Jews” — a reference to the country’s Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of Israel’s population.
At an emergency meeting, called last month to discuss the dangers of “assimilation” caused by Palestinian men dating Jewish women, the 18 rabbis warned that Safed was facing an “Arab takeover.” Jewish residents were told to inform on neighbors who try to sell or rent to Arabs. Read more »
Hiding Truth Behind Euphemisms, Omissions, Slanders And Lies: A Reply To Rupert Murdoch
By William A. Cook
29 October, 2010, Countercurrents.org
“I keep reading between the lies” Goodman Ace
Rupert Murdoch’s recent speech before the ADL gathering at their dinner gala opened with this flattering observation, “You have championed equal treatment for all races and creeds.”
What he omitted from that statement is the ADL’s treatment of the Palestinian people under Abraham Foxman, its national director, who “…uses high-mindedness and unfounded anti-Semitism hysteria as cover for backing Jewish supremacy and the right of Israelis over Arabs, including by occupation and belligerently enforced apartheid” (Steven Lendman, Socio-Economic History Blog).
Murdoch omits a needed clause at the end of that statement: “except for the Palestinian people and their beliefs and their rights under international law.” Indeed, Lendman’s article refutes virtually every one of Murdoch’s claims, laying bare the truth behind Murdoch’s talk: see nothing, hear nothing, speak nothing against Israel or suffer the condemnation that comes with the label “Anti-Semite.” Read more »
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