Norman G. Finkelstein

Packed Manhattan banquet honors “extraordinary courage under fire” of IDF soldiers

pilias — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:14:58 +0000

Rights groups express concern at the rising number of juveniles as young as 12 who are held behind bars and ‘treated like terrorists’

With more than 300 Palestinian children being held in Israeli prisons, human rights groups and Palestinian officials are increasingly concerned about the actions of the Israeli military.

The Israeli group B’Tselem said that security forces had “severely violated” the rights of a number of children, aged between 12 and 15, who had been taken into custody in recent months.

The family of one 13-year-old boy from Hebron who was arrested on 27 February by a military patrol and detained for eight days have brought a legal case against the authorities. The teenager, Al-Hasan Muhtaseb, described how he had been interrogated without a lawyer late into the night, forced to confess to throwing stones, made to sign a confession in Hebrew that he couldn’t read, jailed with adults and brought before a military court. He was only released on bail eight days later, after considerable legal effort by several human rights groups. As he had signed a confession, he still faces a possible indictment for throwing stones – a charge that usually brings several months in jail but carries a maximum penalty of 20 years’ jail.

Although most international attention focuses on diplomatic sparring in the Middle East, it is cases such as this teenager’s arrest that are the reality for Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. The surprise about the teenager’s experience is not that it is exceptional, but that it is a common occurrence.

As of the end of February, 343 Palestinian children were being held in Israeli prisons, according to Defence for Children International (DCI), which took up the Muhtaseb case. Israel routinely prosecutes Palestinian children as young as 12 and the Israeli legal system treats Palestinians as adults when they turn 16, but Israelis become adults only at 18. Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children are “widespread, systematic and institutionalised”, DCI said in a report last year.

Al-Hasan Muhtaseb was arrested early in the afternoon as he and his 10-year-old brother Amir were walking home through Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, after visiting their aunt.

“Two soldiers came to us and told us: ‘Come over here.’ We went to them,” said Al-Hasan, a slight boy, neatly dressed, who barely looks his 13 years. “They took my brother and I don’t know where they took him. I was sent inside the station and I never saw him after that.”

They were detained separately. Amir was released later that night, deeply traumatised. “He was in a very, very bad psychological state,” said his father, Fadel Muhtaseb, 45. “He had wet himself. He was terrified.” The boy said he had been held with his eyes covered by a hat in a room where there was also a dog, which he could hear panting.

Al-Hasan was interrogated at an Israeli military post in Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement in Hebron. “I was asked: ‘Did you throw stones? Did you hurt the soldiers or hit their vehicles? How close were you to the soldiers? Why were you throwing stones?’,” he said. Eventually he had admitted throwing stones, although in an interview last week Al-Hasan said it was untrue: on that day he had not thrown stones, although earlier in the week he had.

He had been made to sign a statement in Hebrew, a language he doesn’t speak or read. He was blindfolded and taken to Ofer military prison, where he arrived at 3.30am. “There were no other children,” he said. “I was afraid.” Three days after his arrest he appeared at a military court. But his father, who works as a tiler, could not afford the 2,000 shekels (£350) bail. “My father told them he couldn’t pay this much money,” said Al-Hasan. His father, who sat next to him through the interview, burst into tears.

Last Sunday the boy was freed under a bail arrangement in which his father faces arrest if his son does not appear at the next summons. “Even if he were throwing stones, he is only 13,” said Fadel. “They treated him like a terrorist. They claim they are democratic and human, but they are not.”

The Israeli Defence Force defended the arrest, saying Israeli troops were acting to prevent violence. Both boys are now incontinent and Amir has been hospitalised. “He wakes up in the middle of the night screaming,” said Fadel. “We try to comfort him, but he’s getting worse and worse.”

The Palestinian Authority highlighted the case of the two Muhtaseb brothers, saying Israel was breaching international law and has recently seemed to take a stronger stance against the more routine challenges of the occupation, including the effect of the West Bank barrier. Israeli security forces have warned of a broader crackdown if the protests escalate.

Moving Gaza Mural

pilias — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:11:58 +0000

Love is Blue

pilias — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:09:56 +0000

Norman Finkelstein in Prag

pilias — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:14:37 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/petermfb#p/u

German translation:

http://www.mapc-web.de/archive/pal/100222FklstnPragVortrag.html

There’s something happening here (III)

pilias — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:08:09 +0000

As Israel cracks down harshly on unarmed protesters, Donald Macintyre meets one Palestinian family whose teenage son has paid a heavy price

Residents of Nabi Saleh march with Israeli and international activists in protest at the confiscation of their lands by the adjacent settlement of Halamish

QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM

Ehab Barghouti would not have been at the demonstration at all if his father Asdal had had his way.

Asdal found his son, 14, on the road from their village of Beit Rima and ordered him into the car. “I told him: ‘You shouldn’t go, you’re too young.’ He told me: ‘I want to resist.’ I said: ‘Do you want me to see you on TV?’” But when Asdal stopped at a local garage and went in to talk to the mechanic, Ehab made his escape.

A few hours later he was unconscious in intensive care in Ramallah’s main hospital, a rubber-coated steel bullet having penetrated his skull. He had been standing among a crowd of youths, well inside the nearby village of Nabi Saleh, on a hillside carpeted with the first daisies and wild flowers of spring. Many of the youths were throwing stones at an unfinished house 25 metres away which had been occupied by armed Israeli Border Police some 15 minutes earlier. Shortly after 2.30pm a shot rang out, probably from the window, and Ehab dropped face down on the ground before being carried vomiting and bleeding from the wound above his right eye by four older men to relative safety back up the hill. Related articles

Even if freshly promised “proximity talks” between Israelis and Palestinians get under way, they are unlikely to halt the weekly protests that will take place after noon prayers today in some villages and tomorrow in others. The Palestinian Authority did not start the weekly protests that have now spread to more than half a dozen West Bank villages. And it is not leading them. But a supportive Palestinian cabinet statement appeared to adopt their model last month, applauding that: “Peaceful and popular efforts have regained international recognition of the just Palestinian cause and revealed the void Israeli excuses for the construction of settlements and the wall.”

For something is happening in these villages nestling among the rocky hills and olive groves between Ramallah and Nablus. The Israeli military does not accept the classification of the protests as non-violent; most usually end in confrontations between stone-throwing Palestinian youths and armed police and troops. But for the six years of such protests none of the Palestinians, in contrast to the security forces, have carried weapons. If these are the first tentative stirrings of a new uprising, and it is doubtful they can be described as that yet, then they are closer to the beginnings in 1987 of the first intifada, the so-called “war of stones”, than the second, with its bloody record of suicide bombings between 2000 and around 2005. Some commentators have dubbed the protests – and the apparent endorsement of them by the internationally respected Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad – as the “white” intifada.

Either way the protests, and the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to condemn them, have provoked a strong reaction from Israel’s security establishment. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week that Israel had warned the PA that if it did not “contain” the protests it would lose co-operation with Israel and there would be more arrests within the West Bank. An unnamed Israeli security official was earlier quoted in the same paper as having told diplomats that the protests constituted an “existential” threat to Israel.

Except for the 10 real injuries (eight to demonstrators and two to photographers), Nabi Saleh, where the villagers all belong to one clan, the Tamimis, last Friday had a flavour of Kabuki about it with Palestinians, supporting international and Israeli activists, and security forces all playing their part. The march of perhaps 100 men, children and a few women started in bright sunshine from the middle of the village. They began their descent along the main street chanting slogans like “National Unity: Fatah, Hamas, PFLP”. They followed the road round to the left, past the petrol station and were still a good 800 metres from the main road (Route 465) separating Nabi Saleh from the Israeli settlement of Halamish when the first tear gas canisters – along, say the protesters, with rubber bullets – were fired by the Israeli forces who had long taken up a position on a hilltop to the right. Some marchers scrambled down the hillside to the right, others retreated back towards the village, while others continued to move forward.

There was perhaps an hour of cat-and-mouse between the Tamimi youths and the Israeli forces controlling the exits from Nabi Saleh, the former throwing stones that fell short of any target and the latter firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters (aluminium and rubber) that hit and injured a few protesters before the forces began to advance into the village itself. Three Jeeps advanced slowly up the road behind a white truck carrying a water cannon spraying “skunk”, a foul-smelling substance that leaves its odour for a week in the clothes of anyone who comes into direct contact with it. Taking refuge with perhaps a dozen protesters in the back room of the petrol station you could hear the loud explosion of a stun grenade – and the firing of tear gas and rubber bullets to cover the front Jeep as it was pelted with stones – before it began to move slowly back down the road again.

It seemed all over. But then the forces took over two houses, one the green building from which Ehab Barghouti, still in a coma yesterday, was shot. Pictures taken by The Independent from earlier in the protest show him hanging back from the front lines. But once the forces were inside the house, he was within range and in real danger. According to the Israeli human rights agency B’tselem, the regulation minimum range for firing rubber bullets is 40 metres and such bullets must be fired only at legs and not fired at children. Secondly, it is far from clear why the security forces occupied the house at all. According to Ramzi Tamimi, 33, one of the men who took the inert Ehab back up the hill: “As long as the soldiers stay away from the village and stay at the entrances, nothing happens. They deliberately come to make friction with us.” And beyond this is the fact that the entire protest took place on Palestinian land, land that if the putative peace talks ever had an outcome, would be part of a Palestinian state. For the stated, and of course never reached, destination of the march was a spring a few metres on the other side of Route 465, on what had long been Tamimi land. But the Halamish residents now control the land – and the spring – to the extent that when the villagers tried to cultivate their olive trees last November, they say they were driven away by armed, stone-throwing settlers.

The military says that “rock-throwing is considered a serious offence, placing others at significant risk and endangering both public and regional security.” But in Nabi Saleh the protesters were still marching peacefully, well within the village, and certainly not throwing stones when the military started firing tear gas.

At times the Israeli military has been deploying more lethal ammunition. The more famous and longer-running protests against the separation barrier have been at Nilin and Bil’in (where the IDF has finally decided to modify the route of the barrier so it will swallow up less of the villagers’ land, two-and-a-half years after a court order to do so). At both it has fired .22 live ammunition and high-velocity tear gas projectiles which are intended by their US manufacturers to be used to penetrate walls rather than against open-air crowds. It was one of these that severely wounded the US activist Tristan Anderson in the forehead in Nilin in March 2009 and has left him, after months in an Israeli hospital, with permanent brain damage. Another killed a prominent Bil’in protester Bassem abu Rahmah a month later.

According to the Popular Struggle Co-ordination committee, a loose body linking the local protest organisers, the .22 live bullets – which were proscribed for crowd-control by the military Advocate General in 2001 but reintroduced Operation Cast Lead in Gaza – have killed one demonstrator and injured 28 in Nilin alone since January last year.

Then there are the scores of arrests, frequently at night, including five in Nabi Saleh two days before last Friday’s demo. The arrests – including 112 in Bil’in alone since May 2008 – have worried European diplomats enough for them to form a rota to monitor the military court in Ofer where most of the detainees appear. One day last week – in the additional presence of an official from the US Consulate General – one of the Bil’in protest leaders, Abdullah Abu Rahmah, 39, who has been in military detention since December, was remanded again on a series of charges including a bizarre one of illegal arms possession; the indictment relates to Mr Abu Rahmah’s collection of spent tear gas canisters for an exhibition. As his Israeli lawyer Gaby Lasky told the court, her client was in no different a position from the police in the Negev border town of Sderot who have a collection of exploded Qassam rockets fired from Gaza to show visitors. “Because they are spent, they cannot be addressed as illegal arms,” she patiently explained to the military judge. The case continues.

The military has also sought to move against another notable aspect of the protests, the supportive presence of the left-wing Israeli activists who now regularly join them. The registration numbers of cars entering the West Bank through various checkpoints are checked against those of known Israeli participants. Among the 15 Israelis taking part in Nabi Saleh last week was Jonathan Pollak, a 28-year-old from Anarchists Against the Wall who is media co-ordinator on the joint committee.

For Ayed Morrar, a true Palestinian veteran of unarmed protest in the West Bank, the presence of Israelis is highly positive. “It’s good for our people, and good for them,” he says. Mr Morrar (who was injured by rubber bullets when he took part in the first demonstration in Nabi Saleh in January) is a popular leader in Budrus, where the villagers managed to change the route of the barrier at a time when suicide bombing was at its height and popular unarmed protest much criticised by Palestinian militants. Mr Morrar has spent six years in an Israeli prison as a Fatah activist (even though he never participated in armed violence) but now charges both Fatah and Hamas with being more interested in the sometimes bloody rivalry with each other than the national cause. His credo is to “apply all the sources of pressure on the occupation except killing. It is forbidden to decide to kill, to try to kill or to kill.” Arguing the Palestinians needs the international community on its side, he adds: “We want to show we are not against Jews, not against Israelis. We are against the occupation.”

In new book Harvard prof Alan Dershowitz reveals that he broke off engagement with Marilyn Monroe to “preserve the Jewish race”

pilias — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:58:41 +0000

Jewish extremists have urged supermodel Bar Refaeli not to marry her actor boyfriend, Leonardo DiCaprio, because it would dilute the Jewish race, according to media reports.

In a letter to Refaeli, far-rightist Baruch Marzel wrote on behalf of nationalist group Lehava, which aims to fight assimilation among Jews: “It is not by chance that you were born Jewish.

“Your grandmother and her grandmother did not dream that one of their descendants would one day remove the family’s future generations from the Jewish people,” the letter continued. “Assimilation has forever been one of the enemies of the Jewish people.”

Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” but it is also an acronym for “Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land.” According to the group’s Facebook page, it aims to provde assistance to Jewish girls in relationships with non-Jews, and especially Arabs.

Marzel told Refaeli that he “has nothing against Mr. DiCaprio, who I have no doubt is a talented actor.” Still, he urged Refaeli: “Come to your senses, look forward and back too - and not only the present. Don’t marry Leonardo DiCaprio, don’t harm the future generations.”

Biden inaugurates new Disneyworld in Jerusalem

pilias — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:36:21 +0000

US vice president visits Holocaust history museum, signs guest book saying he took son to visit German death camp, then to Israel to see how human spirit cannot be destroyed

Aviad Glickman
Published: 03.09.10, 20:47 / Israel News

US Vice President Joe Biden visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum on Tuesday and at the end of his visit, signed the site’s guestbook. He wrote that as a young father, he took his children to visit the Dachau death camp in German, to make them understand how brutal mankind can be.

He visited the site with his wife Jill. In a note that he left behind he told his hosts how he took his children to visit Europe at the age of 15, and then took his son to Israel, to show him that the human spirit cannot be destroyed, and that it lives on.

Biden added that Israel is the heart, life and hope of the world’s Jews, and that it saves lives every day. He said that anyone who doubts this, should visit the museum, and that the State of Israel is a central bolt in the world’s existence.

The American vice president added that each day, Israel challenges the words of poet William Butler Yeats who wrote, “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.”

His wife Jill also signed the guest book, and wrote that she will never forget, and will always remember those lost in the Holocaust.

Dr. David Silberklang, a top historian and editor of the Yad Vashem Studies, accompanied the Bidens on their visit, and told Ynet the vice president was very moved by the tour and expressed much interest.

Biden placed a wreath on behalf of the US administration and lit a candle at the museums Yizkor tent.

It’s come to this

pilias — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:32:26 +0000

Chicago – Ma’an – Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said on Monday the Palestinian Authority (PA) urged him to step down after he criticized the PA’s treatment of a UN war crimes report.

Falk confirmed reports that the joint PA-PLO mission to the UN in Geneva also delayed consideration in the UN Human Rights Council of his most recent report alleging Israeli abuses of Palestinians’ rights. Arabic-language news reports of the delay surfaced last week.

Falk said PA officials formally approached him in February asking him to resign, arguing that he is unable to carry out his responsibilities since Israel detained him at Ben Gurion International Airport and deported him in late 2008.

But, he stressed in an interview, “what they [the PA] say formally and what they say informally are quite different.”

“Informally they say different things, things that are essentially untrue, that my health doesn’t me allow to do the job or that I’m a partisan of Hamas,” he added.

Falk’s mandate is narrowly defined to include only the human rights record of the occupying power, Israel, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza – he does not report to the UN on the actions of the PA or the Hamas government in Gaza.

But Falk did raise hackles in Ramallah when he publicly criticized the PA for delaying UN action on judge Richard Goldstone’s report that accused Israel and Palestinian militias of committing war crimes during the 2008-2009 Gaza war. Goldstone’s report dealt with the three-week attack that left some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.

President Mahmoud Abbas’ decision, under US pressure, to delay a vote in the UN Human Rights Council on Goldstone’s report provoked a political crisis, including calls for Abbas to step down, and for the dissolution of the PA. Rights groups slammed Abbas for harming their efforts to bring accused war criminals to justice.

Now, Falk says Abbas’ men have done the same to his own report. He says the PA-appointed ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ibrahim Khreishah, put forward a resolution in a recent plenary session of the Human Rights Council that delayed a discussion of his own report on Israeli rights violations from March until June. The resolution passed unanimously.

Falk, a Princeton international law expert, said he is “not happy” about the PA’s actions, but has no plans to resign. “I feel that it’s very important not to succumb to this pressure…We’re supposed to be independent,” he added.

Although Israel has not allowed him to visit the occupied territories since his deportation, Falk says he follows up with reports by respected human rights NGOs on the ground.

He further said that, as in the case of the Goldstone report, the US and Israel could have pressured the PA into scuttling international action on his own report.

Riyad Mansour, the PLO’s ambassador to the UN in New York, said he was not aware of any official calls for Falk to resign, and was “not involved” with the decision to delay consideration of Falk’s report.

“I would check with Geneva about their reasoning,” he said over the phone from New York. Mansour added that he enjoys good relations with Falk and planned to meet with him on Thursday.

Ma’an’s repeated phone calls to the Palestinian mission at the UN in Geneva were not returned.

The PA’s apparent attempt to isolate Falk has also triggered criticism from civil society.

Commentator Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, wrote that Falk “has been attacked by Israel for years. But now, in a new twist, he is being hung out to dry by the Palestinian Authority in perhaps the unkindest cut of all.”

Writing for Agence Global, Hijab also reported that in February, 11 Palestinian human rights groups wrote to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay expressing dismay at the PA actions toward Falk.

According to Hijab, the rights groups’ letter called Falk’s reports “powerful instruments to advocate for Palestinian people’s rights.”

Hijab also wrote that 19 Palestinian groups further wrote to Abbas, criticizing Falk’s treatment and “pointing out the repercussions for the Palestinians’ internationally recognized human rights.

The delay of Falk’s report also caught the attention of Hamas leaders in Gaza. On Monday, The justice minister in the Hamas-controlled government in Gaza, Muhammad Faraj Al-Ghoul, held a news conference denouncing the delay as an effort to “kill the report and give Israel a cover for its crimes.”

Dutch prostitutes anticipate brisk business on Tuesday

pilias — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:27:36 +0000

By Haaretz Service

Tags: Israel news

Conference organizer’s see Israel’s security as tantamount to achieving regional stability.

An international conference discussing ways to resolve the Israel-Arab conflict commenced in the Netherlands Tuesday, stressing the centrality of attainting Israel’s security as a means to gaining regional peace.

The conference, titled “A Safe Israel in a Peaceful Middle East,” is organized by the Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI), and is “dedicated to John Manheim, who is resigning his chairmanship of CIDI after 11 years,” the CIDI website stated.

According to conference organizers, due to take place at The Hague’s Peace Palace, the session’s core theme will be an analysis of crucial relationship between security and peace, with organizers saying that Israel’s “very existence is still threatened by radical regimes and organizations.”

“How do we put an end to the verbal aggression, terror and war threats and the arms race in the Middle East? Can we prevent the spreading of the Arab-Israeli conflict to Europe and the rest of the Western world? Could Israeli membership of NATO and/or the presence of an international peace force membership boost security in the Middle East? Can the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb be stopped?” the conference mission statement said

‘THIS TIME WE WENT TOO FAR - Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion’

pilias — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:11:05 +0000