Israel Bombs Syria

First, from Democracy Now!:

Syria Calls Apparent Israeli Strikes “An Act of War”

Israel appears to be escalating military attacks on Syria after two bombings over a three-day span. A series of large explosions were seen around the Syrian capital of Damascus on Sunday, by all accounts the result of Israeli missiles. The Syrian government says dozens of elite military forces were killed in strikes on several critical army facilities. Anonymous Israeli officials have reportedly confirmed the attack, which marked the third on Syria by Israel this year. An earlier bombing on Friday hit what was alleged to be a site holding Iranian missiles meant for Hezbollah. Syria has called the strikes an “an act of war” that’s “opened the door to all possibilities.” In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged all sides to exercise “maximum restraint … and respect [the] national sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.”

Report: U.S., Allies Discussed Syria Strikes

The New York Times reports the United States had already been discussing the launch of strikes on Syria in the days before the Israeli attack. The talks were held with Britain and France, with a proposed bombing modeled on the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Speaking during a visit to Costa Rica, President Obama appeared to offer tacit support by saying Israel has the right to stop weapons shipments to Hezbollah. Obama also left open the possibility of U.S. military intervention but ruled out deploying troops on the ground.

President Obama: “I’m not going to comment on what happened in Syria yesterday. I’ll let the Israeli government confirm or deny whatever strikes that they’ve taken. What I have said in the past, and I continue to believe is, is that the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. With respect to the larger issue of Syria, as I said yesterday, I don’t take any options off the table as commander in chief. Circumstances can change, you never know what contingencies you have to deal with. But what I do know is that I cannot see a scenario right now in which American boots on the ground would make any sense.”

The Obama administration is reportedly set to decide in the coming weeks on options ranging from supplying weapons to Syria’s rebels to carrying out air strikes.

–Monday, 6 May, 2013

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/6/headlines#561

 

And From Znet:

Israel Bombs Syria Becomes Israel Is Only Defending Itself

An Israeli plane bombs a target in Syria. The news is passed along first to Fox News, (huh?) by someone in the Administration.

It happened on a Thursday, but we only find out about it late on Friday. The New York Times assigns three reporters to cover the story that goes up on their website in the middle of the morning on Saturday.

Earlier that day, President Obama, speaking in Costa Rica, said there will be no US ground troops on the ground in Syria. Now, the Administration says it is considering “military options.”

Saturday’s New York Times chooses this story for its first page: “ISRAEL TIGHTENS BORDER DEFENSE AS SYRIA ERUPTS.”

And so, the story is reframed with Israel pictured as the defender, not the aggressor. The bombing makes it into the third paragraph of that story on page 1 but refers only to the bombing of “a target.”

Their earlier story has now been moved by the Times deeper into the paper, to the bottom of page 10. That headline reads:  “ISRAEL BOMBS SYRIA as the US Considers Its Own Military Options.”

The report: “American officials did not provide details on the target but, instead, referenced an earlier attack attacking a Syrian military supply effort to Hezbollah.” Unmentioned is that the original report understated the extent of the damage in Syria caused by Israeli bombing.

Reuters was better informed, “Israel has carried out an air strike targeting a shipment of missiles in Syria bound for Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.”

The New York Times does not mention the reaction by Lebanon which issued a statement carried by BBC denouncing the attack as illegal and a violation of their air space. We had to wait until Sunday for Syria’s response reported by AP:

“Syria has condemned the Israeli airstrikes against targets around Damascus, saying the attacks aim “to give direct military support to terrorist groups” fighting the government.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry also said Sunday in a letter sent to the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council that the “Israeli aggression” killed and wounded several people and “caused widespread destruction.”

Syria’s government refers to rebels trying to topple President Bashar Assad’s regime as “terrorists.” Apparently no one has told the AP that many of the “rebels” are actually aligned with Al Qaeda.

CNN reported, “U.S. and Western intelligence agencies are reviewing classified data showing Israel most likely conducted (emphasis mine) a strike in the Thursday-Friday time frame, according to both officials. This is the same time frame that the U.S. collected additional data showing Israel was flying a high number of warplanes over Lebanon.

“One official said the United States had limited information so far and could not yet confirm those are the specific warplanes that conducted a strike. Based on initial indications, the U.S. does not believe Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace to conduct the strikes.

“…The Lebanese army website listed 16 flights by Israeli warplanes penetrating Lebanon’s airspace from Thursday evening through Friday afternoon local time.”

The Times of Israel later confirmed the air strike, adding, “The officials said the shipment was not of chemical arms, but of “game changing” weapons bound for the terror group Hezbollah. One official said the target was a shipment of advanced, long-range ground-to-ground missiles.

A day later, on Saturday, Iran suddenly was dragged into this with the New York Times reporting: “?Israeli aircraft bombed a target in Syria on Thursday to disrupt the pipeline of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.”

On Sunday, a new raid was reported: A Syrian news agency says the missiles targeted a site near Damascus. Other sources reported many attacks.

The Obama Administration may have encouraged the Israeli attacks when President Obama in what is now said to have been an unexpected “off-the cuff” remark supporting the idea that Syria may have crossed a certain “red-line” despite an admitted lack of evidence.

This “mistake”—a blatant acceptance of the Israeli line — is now being blamed on the front page of the New York Times for “putting the US in a bind,” limiting our options.

Translation: The President “misspoke.” Further unstated translation: it was a fuck-up!

After the last Israeli bombing of Syria on January 31, Iran warned: “Israel will regret its attack against Syria. The Telegraph reported, “Iran’s deputy foreign minister warned of grave consequences for Tel Aviv.”

Already, American right-wing politicians began cheering on the story.

Politico reported, “South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told a crowd here Friday night that Israel has bombed Syria.”

Graham, a Republican who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was addressing the South Carolina Republican Party’s annual Silver Elephant fundraising dinner. He mentioned the attack in passing, amid a longer discourse on U.S. national security policy.

“Israel bombed Syria tonight,” Graham said flatly, before moving on to a longer, dire discourse on the threat of a nuclear Iran.”

You can just smell the aroma of more escalations and of a wider war to come. US news organizations are waffling but accepting Israel’s version even as Israel seems to be leaking it, rather than fully disclosing it.

There are two important aspects of this: what the real endgame is—and why it seems to be more about preparing for war on Iran rather than on Syria?

In 2007, Seymour Hersh wrote about what he called a “redirection” of Israeli strategy:

“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Adds Tony Cartalucci on ICH: “Indeed, Israel’s explanation as to why it struck neighboring Syria is tenuous at best considering its long, documented relationship with actually funding and arming the very “terrorist groups” it fears weapons may fall into the hands of.”

The second concern is the question of the reliability of news reporting, including accounts by human rights groups who may be under pressure from funders to go easier on Israel than Syria. Scott Long, a former manager at Human Rights Watch explains the nature of the bias in a recent report.

Notes the Electronic Intifada: “Long’s account indicates that HRW observes a sort of fake balance in which it must artificially generate criticism of Palestinians just in order to offset criticism of Israel’s much greater and more frequent human rights abuses and crimes.”

Writes Long: ”Human Rights Watch, where I worked for many years, strains all its muscles to be completely objective on Israel/Palestine — an effort that has never gotten it a scintilla of credit from the militant pro-Israel side. Its releases on Israel and Palestine are the only ones in the entire organization that are routinely edited by the executive director himself. An informal arithmetic dictates that every presser or report criticizing Israel has to be accompanied by another criticizing the Palestine Authority or Hamas — or, if that isn’t possible (the PA barely retains enough authority to violate anybody’s rights) at least one of the surrounding Arab states.

A mathematical approach to objectivity may help accountants detect embezzlement or captains keep ships afloat, but that kind of balance looks ridiculous in the political world, where the incessant fluidity of action disrupts the illusions of double-entry bookkeeping. (The call for an “embargo on arms” to “all sides” is an excellent example of “objectivity” that benefits one side much more than the other.”)

So there you have it: a breaking story, confused stories partial to Israel, and news that is filtered to keep the outrage focused on alleged human rights abuses by countries Washington dislikes.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He blogs for Newsdissector.net. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

 

–Znet!, 6 May, 2013

 

http://www.zcommunications.org/israel-bombs-syria-becomes-israel-is-only-defending-itself-by-danny-schechter

“As Jews we say ‘Birthright’ trips must end”

As the summer months approach, thousands of young Jews from more than 60 countries prepare to participate in the Taglit-Birthright program. Since 1999, Birthright has brought 340,000 young Jews to Israel on free ten-day trips. In the midst of the fervor to sign up for this bi-annual program, we have launched the website Renounce Birthright (renouncebirthright.org) with the aim of providing a space for potential participants to engage with critiques of Birthright and of Zionism.

We are non-Israeli Jews who oppose the program because it promotes and supports Israel’s ongoing colonialism and apartheid policies, and marginalizes Jewish experiences in the diaspora. We are calling for the end of the Birthright program, and encourage individuals to boycott the trips.

Birthright was created in response to concerns over increasing rates of intermarriage, the perceived “crisis of continuity” and the weakening of Jewish communal ties. Over the course of the last decade, the program has worked to create and maintain commitment to Zionism and Israel on the part of non-Israeli Jews.

Exclusive ideology

Birthright’s mission, according to the organization, is to “diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people.”

The idea of strengthening “solidarity among world Jewry,” “personal Jewish identity,” and Israel’s “connection to the Jewish people” through trips to Israel is based on a conflation of Judaism with Zionism. Judaism is a religion. Political Zionism is a movement based on the belief that Jews have a right to settle in modern-day Israel, to the exclusion of the indigenous Palestinians.

The term “Birthright” itself is telling. Like its American counterpart, the ideology of manifest destiny, it operates under the premise that all Jewish people have an exclusive “right” to Palestinian land. In both the American and Israeli contexts, the only way to secure that “right” is through violence, land theft and displacement.

Settler-colonialism must be opposed, no matter where it takes place. For non-Israeli Jews living in other settler-colonial countries, we must also be accountable to other processes of de-colonization. No group of people have the right to live anywhere that mandates the explicit exclusion of anyone else.

The establishment of the Israeli state, and the alleged Jewish “birthright,” involved the violent displacement of several hundred thousand indigenous Palestinians, and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages. A Palestinian refugee population of nearly 7 million people is to this day excluded from returning to their lands by Israeli state discrimination.

In contemporary Israel — where approximately one-fifth of the population is Palestinian — the rights of citizenship (ezrahut) and nationality (le’um) are intentionally distinct. Palestinians born within the 1949 armistice line are considered citizens (and not nationals). Meanwhile a Jew born and raised in New York has a “birthright” to the Israeli state in Palestine, is considered a national, and can almost immediately become a citizen upon emigrating.

Maintaining a myth

Birthright in particular — as a part of the Zionist project — relies on the belief that non-Israeli Jews are national-citizens-in-waiting, a reality from which Palestinian refugees are forever excluded.

We would have no “Birthright” without Israeli occupation and apartheid — it is how Zionism sustains the myth of “a land without a people, for a people without a land.”

Birthright has spent more than $600 million since its inception in 1999. The organization has three major sources of funding: the Israeli government (which committed another $100 million to Birthright in 2011), wealthy donors such as Charles Bronfman, and Jewish federations across North America (“The romance of Birthright Israel,” The Nation, 15 June 2011).

In a 2012 speech delivered to Birthright participants, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “So when you go out and people tell you things about Israel, tell them about what you saw. Make sure when you go back home, tell them about the real Israel” (“PM Netanyahu’s speech at Taglit-Birthright Israel mega-event”).

Convincing non-Israeli Jews to defend Netanyahu’s “real Israel” is an integral part of Birthright, and helps explain the government’s investment in the program.

The program’s largest financial supporter, billionaire Sheldon Adelson — who has provided $140 million to the program — was described in The New York Times last year as having “disgust for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (“What Sheldon Adelson wants,” 23 June 2012).

Beyond individual donors, non-Israeli Jewish community organizations and institutions — such as the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Agency for Israel — support Birthright economically and politically.

Apolitical?

In the name of diasporic Jewish communities, these organizations invest millions of dollars into the promotion of Birthright’s political Zionism, rather than in local projects.

Despite all this, Birthright claims to be apolitical. In 2006, Birthright Director of Marketing Gidi Mark said: “I don’t think it’s political for Jews to support Israel” (“Come, see Palestine!” Salon.com, 5 June 2006).

However, the establishment and maintenance of an exclusively Jewish Israel — through forcible displacement, land theft, occupation, segregation, institutionalized racism and systemic discrimination — is political at its core, and is both supported and reinforced by the Birthright program.

For instance, during the trip, approximately 10,000 Birthright participants visit the Ahava cosmetics factory each year; Ahava is located in the illegally-occupied West Bank settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. Ahava directly profits from the exploitation of Palestinian Dead Sea resources.

Moreover, disturbing accounts of explicit racism have arisen in recent years; former participants often recount how the language used by Birthright personnel demonizes Palestinians. One past attendee said her Birthright tour guide told her group that “Arabs have wanted to kill Jews forever, that they are ‘like mosquitoes’ we must swat away” (“So you’re thinking of Birthright,” Mondoweiss, 20 December 2012).

Zionism is a political project, and Birthright is perhaps the most tangible manifestation of that political project outside Israel. As such, we must recognize our engagements with Birthright as a question of politics, and not just “a free vacation.”

Narrow confines

In reinforcing the belief that what it means to be Jewish is to be Zionist (particularly for non-Israeli Jewish youth), Birthright perpetuates a single narrative about what it means to be Jewish outside of Israel, and who can be a Jew.

Jewish people speak and have spoken an array of languages, live and have lived across the world, and possess different histories that extend beyond the narrow confines of political Zionism and the nation-state of Israel.

It is contemporary political Zionism that has “othered” Mizrahi/Arab-Jews, as New York University professor Ella Shohat explains, by urging Arab Jews “to see their only real identity as Jewish,” such that their “Arabness, the product of millennial cohabitation, is merely a diasporic stain to be ‘cleansed’ through assimilation” (“The invention of the Mizhahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Volume 29, No. 1, Autumn 1999).

Further, Israel’s policy towards Ethiopian Jews in recent years demonstrates how the limits of Jewishness are often defined through Zionism. There is a clear tension between Birthright’s claim to promote diasporic life, and the fact that it the program is so deeply rooted in Zionism, an ideology that homogenizes the experiences and identities of Jews.

Our alleged Birthright can only exist through the suppression and erasure of many Jewish identities, histories and experiences.

Liberation in Palestine is a question of land, colonialism and apartheid — not religion. The work of Jewish and Israeli organizations and collectives such as Zochrot, Boycott from Within, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, and Israeli Queers Against Apartheid attests to this fact.

As scholar Judith Butler has explained: “there have always been Jewish traditions that oppose state violence, that affirm multi-cultural co-habitation, and defend principles of equality, and this vital ethical tradition is forgotten or sidelined when any of us accept Israel as the basis of Jewish identification or values” (“Judith Butler responds to attack,” Mondoweiss, 27 August 2012).

No right to apartheid

We have founded Renounce Birthright because Birthright demands our complicity in two intersecting (but distinct) forms of violence: first, the occupation of Palestine and the Israeli government’s brutal regime of apartheid and second, the erasure and suppression of diverse Jewish experiences and communities across the world.

In organizing for Palestinian liberation, we are deeply committed to the belief that Jewish experiences and narratives — particularly North American Jewish experiences, including our own — should not be centered.

As Mezna Qato and Kareem Rabie explained in their recent article for Jacobin magazine: “the left often neglects these anti-colonial principles and seeks out Jewish voices to validate Palestinian claims. In turn, it privileges Jewish discourse, anxieties, and histories in ways that marginalize Palestinians in their own struggle” (“Against the Law,” Spring 2013).

We recognize that our struggles are greatly distinct yet related, and are engaged in this project first and foremost from a position of solidarity.

We call on non-Israeli Jews across the diaspora to join us in renouncing Birthright— and our privileged legal relationship to the Israeli state — because we have no right to apartheid and colonialism.

Aviva Stahl grew up in New Jersey and now lives in London; she is the US researcher for CagePrisoners and a collective member of Bent Bars. She can be followed on Twitter @stahlidarity.

Sarah Woolf is an editorial intern at The Nation magazine. Hailing from Montréal, she currently lives in New York City.

Sam Elliott Bick is from Montreal, Québec. He is a member of the Tadamon! collective, and organizes at the Immigrant Workers Center. He can be followed on Twitter @sam_Bick.

The authors can be contacted by email: renouncebirthright@gmail.com.

 

–The Electronic Intifada, 29 April, 2013

 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/jews-we-say-birthright-trips-must-end/12413

” We must never forget the massacre in Deir Yassin”

All the flags, banners and stars in the world, all the inconvenient truths, dehumanizing myths of exceptionalism and litany of crimes, will never succeed in drowning out the truth or erasing the memories.

Transcribing the vivid details of the account engraved into the fabric of her memory, I am transfixed by all that she’s held onto for 65 years. From paper to pulse, I write the story buried deep in her consciousness to affirm her truth. Without her, it never would be written at all.

I study the lines on my grandmother’s face knowing behind every one there is a timeless story of unmitigated pain, survival and hope. This story, where the continued dispossession, suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people began, is one that refuses to be silenced or forgotten. It is the story of Deir Yassin.

Remember the date: Friday, 9 April 1948, a day of infamy in Palestinian history. My grandmother was nine years old at the time of the Deir Yassin massacre and every day since she has lived with a steadfast commitment to never forget.

Premonition

Thursday, 8 April, ended like any other in the small, quiet village. My grandmother and her younger sister returned home from school to complete their composition assignment entitled Asri’ (meaning “to hurry” in Arabic). She recounts that detail animatedly. Like other children their age, she wanted to complete the assignment in order to enjoy the next day off.

The excitement, however, was short-lived. I can’t help but think of the irony in the assignment’s title. Asri’ — it’s almost as though it were a premonition of sorts.

The following day, entire families ran hurriedly in sheer terror, fleeing the only homes they had ever known to escape a bloodbath. By dawn on that Friday morning, life as they had known it would never be the same again. Deir Yassin would never be the same again.

Fathers, grandfathers, brothers and sons were lined up against a wall and sprayed with bullets, execution style. Beloved teachers were savagely mutilated with knives. Mothers and sisters were taken hostage and those who survived returned to find pools of blood filling the streets of the village and children stripped of their childhoods overnight.

The walls of homes, which once stood witness to warmth, laughter and joy, were splattered with the blood and imprints of traumatic memories. My grandmother lost 37 members of her family that day. These are not stories you will read about in most history books.

Bitter symbol

The Deir Yassin massacre was not the largest-scale massacre, nor was it the most gruesome. The atrocities committed, the scale of violence and the complexity of the methods and insidious weaponry used by Israel against civilians in the recent decade have been far more sadistic and pernicious. But Deir Yassin marks one of the most critical turning points in Palestinian history.

A bitter symbol carved in the fiber of the Palestinian being and narrative, it resonates sharply as the event that catalyzed our ongoing Nakba (catastrophe), marked by the forced exile of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, creating the largest refugee population worldwide with more than half living in the diaspora.

Deir Yassin is a caustic reminder of the ongoing suffering, struggle and systematic genocide of the Palestinian people, 65 years and counting. When the village was terrorized into fleeing, tumultuous shockwaves of terror ran through Palestine, laying the blueprint for the architecture of today’s apartheid Israel.

Sacred ground

The authors great-uncle, Muhammad Radwan, outside of the family home in Deir Yassin.

I have been fortunate enough to see Deir Yassin and step foot on its sacred ground. Deir Yassin remains a permanently cemented and rigorous reminder of the spirit that has never permitted defeat. Despite the illegal settlements, pillaging, plundering and human suffering that took place, my grandmother’s home stands with resolve just as she does today.

The silence of her home and the original stones laid by my great-grandfather’s hands remain haunting reminders of life that once existed behind the cold facade. Standing outside her home I studied the horizon intently and found solace, irrespective of the large wooden Star of David hanging on the window. This scathing and unholy reminder of the ethnic cleansing that took place there could never conceal the insult, injury and history it attempts to erase.

In fact, it is a reminder of the inflicted wounds that remain open and the memory that remains very much alive. All the flags, banners and stars in the world, all the inconvenient truths, dehumanizing myths of exceptionalism and litany of crimes, will never succeed in drowning out the truth or erasing the memories.

My grandmother is an intrepid survivor and living proof that neither the old nor the young will forget. She and survivors like her endure with a steadfastness that will live long after they’re gone. Their narratives may not be recorded in our history books but they have left indelible impressions that will remain inscribed in our hearts and minds.

The narratives of these survivors will continue to run through the veins of every Palestinian child who carries them in their blood. And so long as our hearts beat, the eloquent symbols of Palestinian life — resistance, resilience and hope — will continue to run strong. No amount of fear-mongering, lip service or pontificating will ever keep these narratives of resistance from circulating, because becoming comfortable with our own silence and anesthetizing our minds to all that has passed will never be options.

After all, we are the children of generations of strength. Our grandparents and parents are refugees and survivors, and the blood of Deir Yassin courses through our veins. We are like the olive tree with its tenacious roots in the ground, remaining unshakable and determined to stand its ground with patience and a deeply-rooted desire to remain.

We will see a free and just Palestine because we will have a hand in making it so. Deir Yassin may have catalyzed our catastrophe but 65 years later it also continues to catalyze our devotion and enduring love for a people, a cause and a home that will never be relinquished or forgotten.

All images courtesy of Dina Elmuti.

Dina Elmuti is a social worker researching the impacts of chronic traumatic stress and violence on the physical, mental and pyschosocial health of children in Chicago and Palestine.

–The Electronic Intifada, 8 April, 2013

 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/we-must-never-forget-massacre-deir-yassin/12341

Guerrilla research exposes sponsors of Israeli apartheid

For the last three and a half years the UK-based research cooperative Corporate Watch has been running a project tracking corporate complicity in the occupation of Palestine.

After a research visit to Palestine in 2010, we wrote a handbook for activists who want to take action in line with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In January and February this year, we returned to Palestine to find out what was new on the ground.

Much of Corporate Watch’s research has focused on entering Israeli settlements, seeing how they are financially sustaining themselves, what companies are operating or providing services there and how they are facilitating apartheid and colonization.

Surprisingly easy

A lot of people have asked us how we accomplish this. Although we do have a few simple tricks up our sleeves which have helped us in our research, basically it just requires a cover story and a lot of luck. We have explained our presence in the settlements by pretending to be confused tourists, curious students or enthusiastic Zionists, but, more often than not, our investigations have proved surprisingly easy and all of them could be replicated by other BDS activists.

For example we successfully established that one company, EDOM UK, was working with the settlements by turning up at export packing houses posing as travelers in search of organic fruit and vegetables to buy. We have often had to travel for hours to remote places, not knowing if we will find anything useful when we get there and have accepted the relatively small risk of running into problems with the authorities or encountering violence from settlers.

We have been detained a few times and have had a few threats from angry settlers. However, the net results of our research — a wealth of new information for the BDS movement — has definitely outweighed any difficulties we have faced.

We have also concentrated on providing contextual information for BDS campaigns on the effects of corporate activities on Palestinian communities living under occupation. By documenting settlement expansion and by interviewing people in communities threatened with ethnic cleansing, we endeavor to provide the context needed for BDS campaigners to win the arguments which inevitably arise when targeting the profits of complicit firms.

During the last five or so years, a huge amount of work has been done by Who Profits? (a project run by Palestinian and Israeli women), Corporate Watch and local BDS groups to document and catalogue as many of the companies profiteering from the occupation as possible. As a result, the movement now has a lot of resources to build campaigns from.

Although most major international corporations working in the area may be known by now, there is still a lot of work to be done around less obvious organizations, and often these are only found by going out there and looking for them.

Criminal “charity”

One example is Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, a relatively small “charity” with offices in Israel, the US, Germany and the Netherlands. Set up in opposition to the Oslo accords in 1995, Christian Friends is ideologically motivated and supports the settlements though fundraising for projects in the West Bank and encouraging Christian tourists to visit the settlements.

The first time we came across this charity was in 2010 when we spotted a “planted with the assistance of CFOIC” sign by a new olive grove in the Jordan Valley settlement of Maskiot. Maskiot is home to many of the Gush Katif settlers, who used to live in Gaza, and was recognized by the Israeli government as the first new settlement in the Jordan Valley for a decade in 2009.

Al-Maleh, the Bedouin community next to Maskiot, faces increased settler harassment and frequent house demolitions as its existence on the land is threatened by settlement expansion.

Christian Friends currently has 13 projects planned in settlements in the Jordan Valley, as well as in settlements such as Kfar Adumim and Susiya, which are strategically close to the vulnerable Palestinian communities Khan al-Ahmar and Susiya. On our most recent trip we came across a Christian Friends-sponsored playground in the Maale Efrayim settlement.

There is no doubt that any group supporting illegal settlements is complicit in the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land. In the UK, Christian Friends has recently been dropped by World Action Ministries, a charity which used to handle its UK donations, after it had received calls from the public about Christian Friends’ support for the settlements.

World Action Ministries told Corporate Watch that “this made us immediately feel very uncomfortable bearing in mind the advice being given by the United Nations and other bodies at the time [about involvement in the settlements].” Christian Friends has confirmed that donations to it from the UK are now handled by a Christian group called Stewardship Services (UKET).

If BDS activists in Israel, the US, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK collectively challenged Christian Friends’ “charitable” donations to settlements we might be surprisingly effective, and educate the public on the way.

“Occupation is everywhere”

Of course, Christian friends represent only one kind of involvement in the occupation. The fact is that the occupation is everywhere in Palestine and any situation you find yourself in can present an opportunity for information gathering of some description. We often discover companies to add to the boycott list by pure chance.

On our recent research trip we attended a demonstration against Israel’s wall in the West Bank and were arrested. As the police entered our details into a database, we were taking mental notes of the Sagem finger-print scanners, Canon camera system and Garrett metal detectors installed in the police station in the settlement of Shah Binyamin.

Finding new BDS targets and updated information on company activity are not the only reasons why research on the ground is important. It is also essential that existing international campaigns work closely with, and listen to, the people in Palestine who are directly affected by the companies targeted by BDS campaigns.

There is a growing BDS campaign against the British-Danish company G4S targeting its provision of equipment and services to the apartheid wall, the Israeli Prison Service and the settlements. As well as conducting research into G4S’ activities in the settlements, we carried out a series of interviews with Palestinians who had been in the jails where G4S provides equipment and services. Many of them gave us messages to send to the international BDS movement. Corporate Watch will be publishing these interviews in the coming weeks.

Soft drink spin

Companies which are at the receiving end of boycott campaigns are becoming increasingly public relations-savvy, and are putting a lot of effort into spreading disinformation regarding their activities. The most obvious example of this is SodaStream, a maker of fizzy drink machines, which has gone so far as to release a short video, Building Bridges – Not Walls, to show how “beneficial” its business in the West Bank is for the region.

On this visit we wanted to get the story from the communities around Mishor Adumim, the Israeli-controlled industrial zone where SodaStream is located. SodaStream’s main argument in favor of its investment in Mishor Adumim is that it provides essential employment for Palestinians in the area. However, you only have to take the example of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin community next to Mishor Adumim, to debunk this myth.

Khan al-Ahmar is located in Area C, a zone covering more than 60 percent of the West Bank, where Palestinians are not allowed to build anything. The community is fighting a plan by the Israeli government to forcibly relocate it. If the plan is implemented, the Bedouins would be removed from the area where they have lived since the 1950s.

Far from providing jobs for the people there, the factories in Mishor Adumim are the reason their livelihood has been taken from them, built as they are on land previously used as grazing areas.

According to five interviewees in the wider Khan al-Ahmar area (Abu al-Helweh, Abu al-Mihtawish, Abu Fellah and Kurshan), people from these communities no longer get permission to work in Mishor Adumim at all. This rule was introduced as a collective punishment by the “regional council” for the settlement after the communities started building a school for their children in Khan al-Ahmar in defiance of the building restrictions imposed by Israel in Area C.

By complying with this order denying work permits to Palestinians from the area most affected by the expansion of the settlements Maale Adumim and Kafr Adumim, SodaStream and the other factories operating from within the industrial zone are directly encouraging the ethnic cleansing of the area.

“They destroyed our lives”

As one man who now lives near the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis after being displaced from the area in 1998 put it: “We are not allowed to go near them [the factories]. They took our livelihood to build them and we got evacuated for them to build their factories. After they built them there were no resources to live from for us. The gains are nothing compared to what was lost. They destroyed our lives and then gave a few people a job. It is nothing.”

SodaStream’s PR strategy relies on putting across an impression of openness. The company has paid for journalists to visit its Mishor Adumim factory and is planning to fly over Member of Parliament and the UK Conservative Party’s Mike Weatherley, whose constituency is close to the Sodastream shop in Brighton. We decided to call the firm’s bluff and offered to visit the factory on our own expense. SodaStream, clearly not keen to answer difficult questions, replied saying that, regrettably, it did not have capacity to facilitate our visit.

Excuses

Many companies take a very different approach to SodaStream and attempt to minimize or hide their role in working with the settlements. When corporate complicity in the occupation is exposed, PR executives respond by giving the same excuses — either that the companies were not aware that this was going on or that it was a temporary arrangement which came about through some novel circumstance that will not happen again.

When we were leaked evidence that the own-brand agricultural produce stocked by the British supermarket chain Morrisons was being packaged in an illegal settlement, we were told that this was a short-term arrangement necessitated by the lack of a suitable packing house inside Israel.

The lesson to be learned from this is that companies are very unlikely to consider justice and freedom for Palestinians of their own accord and that it is up to all of us to continue to find ways of obtaining and exposing this information. If we don’t, companies will continue to take advantage of the captive workforce provided by the occupation to make a fast buck.

The power of BDS is that everyone can contribute. If you are traveling to Palestine, consider spending time investigating those making money out of the occupation. If campaigning at home, use evidence gained by others and your own research to challenge companies locally. Remember: the fact that so many corporations now go out of their way to try to disassociate themselves from what we find means that we have come a long way already.

Therezia Cooper and Tom Anderson are pen names for two boycott, divestment and sanctions activists and researchers. They have volunteered with various solidarity groups in Palestine and are the authors of Targeting Israeli Apartheid: A Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Handbook published by Corporate Watch. Corporate Watch’s Palestine project can be followed at corporateoccupation.org or via twitter @corpoccupation

 

–The Electronic Intifada, 20 March, 2013

 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/guerrilla-research-exposes-sponsors-israeli-apartheid/12291

“United by Loss, Israeli & Palestinian Dads Call for a Joint Nonviolent Intifada Against Occupation”

AARON MATÉ: The death of a Palestinian prisoner in Israeli custody has sparked new protests in the occupied West Bank and even talk of a third intifada. The Israeli government claims the prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, died of a heart attack, but Palestinians say he succumbed to wounds sustained during a brutal torture. At a news conference in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority minister for prisoner affairs said Israel is responsible for Jaradat’s death.

ISSA QARAQEA: [translated] There were visible marks in the autopsy that made it clear that the detainee Arafat Jaradat was badly tortured, which caused his immediate death. Israel bears responsibility for killing him during the interrogation.

AARON MATÉ: Arafat Jaradat had been arrested for throwing rocks at Israeli settlers.

Well, on Monday, thousands turned out as he was laid to rest in his home village of Sair. More than a dozen Palestinians were reportedly wounded in the ensuing clashes with Israeli soldiers across the West Bank.

Jaradat’s death comes amidst a sustained campaign over the plight of more than 4,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Around 3,000 Palestinian prisoners recently refused to eat meals in solidarity with five hunger-striking detainees. Protests in support of the prisoners have led to several clashes with Israeli troops over the past week. In the face of the growing outrage and with President Obama set to visit the region next month, Israel has asked the Palestinian Authority to contain the protests.

The conditions on the ground recall those that sparked the First Intifada in 1987, reviving speculation that we are potentially witnessing the dawn of a third uprising against Israeli occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to turn now to a new documentary about a Palestinian and an Israeli who were once dedicated fighters for their respective causes but have since renounced violence and become leading voices for peace. Both of the men, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, came face-to-face with the price of war when their young daughters were killed, one by Israeli border police and the other by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The film is called Within the Eye of the Storm. It chronicles these two men’s personal stories and their unlikely friendship. This is a clip from the film.

RAMI ELHANAN: [translated] On the 4th of September, 1997, two Palestinian terrorists blew themselves up. They killed five people that day. One of them was my daughter, Smadar.

BASSAM ARAMIN: [translated] I got a call from my eldest daughter, Arin. She was yelling, “Abir, Abir, Daddy! She was shot in the head by soldiers, and she is wounded.” I was in an Israeli prison for seven years when I was 17. I believed in eliminating the other side, which I didn’t even know.

RAMI ELHANAN: [translated] I never gave a thought to the other side. I didn’t consider that another side existed. I went through a process.

AMY GOODMAN: A clip from the trailer of the new documentary, Within the Eye of the Storm.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. Bassam, a former Fatah fighter, now a peace activist with Combatants for Peace, spent seven years in an Israeli prison. His 10-year-old daughter Abir was killed January 16, 2007, when an Israeli border police chief fired rubber bullets in a school zone. And Rami is a former Israeli reserve soldier turned peace activist, leading member of Parents Circle-Families Forum, an organization for those who lost children in conflict but nevertheless want peace. His 14-year-old daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in September of ’97.

Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, welcome to Democracy Now! You come at a very difficult time, if there is any time that isn’t difficult in the Occupied Territories. Bassam, what message do you have for President Obama as he is about to leave for Israel?

BASSAM ARAMIN: Yes, we have actually a hope that Mr. Obama will make a difference this time, not to wait for another four years. I ask him to stop the unconditional support for one side against the other, because it doesn’t help us. We will continue fight each other because of this policy, so please be objective, and be pro-Palestine-and-Israel, and be pro-peace.

AARON MATÉ: Bassam, we said at the top that there’s talk of this starting a third intifada. Do you think that’s accurate?

BASSAM ARAMIN: You know, actually, since like many months, the situation in Palestine is very bad. The behavior of the Israeli occupation became more aggressive. The killing of Arafat Jaradat, who is from my village, it’s too much. It’s too much, actually. The Palestinian people have no hope. They cannot continue living under this brutal occupation, by this way, without any hope. And we always actually call for the third intifada, which must be a different one. We call for a Palestinian-Israeli intifada against our common enemy: the Israeli occupation. We must join forces, Israelis and Palestinians, to end this occupation by nonviolent intifada, which must be started.

AMY GOODMAN: Rami Elhanan, you lost your daughter, as did Bassam. Do you share Bassam’s view on this? What would an Israeli-Palestinian intifada look like?

RAMI ELHANAN: Well, certainly I do, with all my heart. I think we both paid the highest price as an outcome of this outrageous occupation, the last occupation that exists on earth. And I think we need to do everything in our power to prevent more losses from more innocent people. And the only way to do it is by joint forces, Israeli and Palestinians, peace seekers, who will fight this horrible occupation with nonviolent resistance.

AARON MATÉ: Rami, if you could tell us your story, what you’ve done in Israel since your daughter was killed?

RAMI ELHANAN: Well, for the last 15 years, I devoted my life to go everywhere possible, to talk to anyone possible, to convey the message that we are not doomed. This is not our destiny to keep on killing each other forever, and we can change this endless cycle of violence and revenge and retaliation. The only way to do it is simply by talking to each other.

AMY GOODMAN: How did your daughter die? You, yourself, are a former Israeli soldier. Talk about what happened. It was 1997?

RAMI ELHANAN: It was the 4th of September, 1997, Thursday afternoon. Two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, killing five people, including three little girls. One of them was my 14-years-old Smadar. It was the first day of school. And it changed my life and blew up the bubble that I was living in.

AARON MATÉ: And talk about what you’ve done. You’ve gone and you’ve spoken to many people. And actually, in this film there’s clips of people confronting you with hostility about your activism.

RAMI ELHANAN: Well, that’s part of the game. I mean, this is the price you have to pay if you are willing to talk to your society, which turns you a cold soldier and try to ignore their reality. And your role in this equation is to put cracks in the wall of hatred and fear that divide our two nations, and sometimes it can be very difficult. I’m doing it for the last 14 years, and it gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Bassam Aramin, tell us about your daughter. When was she killed, and how did she die?

BASSAM ARAMIN: She was killed in the 16th of January, 2007, in front of her school 9:30 in the morning by an Israeli border police in Israel who shot and killed her in her head from the back from a distance of 15 to 20 meters, without anything. Just it was one bullet, and Abir fell down and died. She was only 10 years old. She wasn’t Fatah member or Hamas member. There were no demonstrations or violence or intifada. And she passed away after two days in Hadassah Hospital.

Again, this was like easy to go to the easy way, but we decide not to revenge, because we need to break this circle of violence and blood. And I have another five kids, and I have Israeli friends who have kids. We need to protect them. And I always said that they are all our kids, and they are all our children. I didn’t find the answer to kill an Israeli daughter or even to kill the Israeli killer, because he’s a teenager, and I consider him a victim to the past or to the memory or to the education or to the situation. We are normal people living in unnormal situations, so unfortunately sometimes our behavior became very brutal.

AARON MATÉ: Bassam, you won a judgment from an Israeli court over the killing of your daughter, which is quite rare. Can you talk about the case? And are you satisfied with how it was resolved?

BASSAM ARAMIN: Yeah, actually, after four years after they denied that the Israeli soldiers was there at all in the town, then after four-and-a-half years I need to prove that my daughter had been killed with a rubber bullet. And it was the first time that I win the case, the civil case. But my goal was to bring this hero, victim or whatever, this soldier, to the trial, and the Supreme Court decided that after four-and-a-half years, which is a long time, there’s no evidence, so they closed the file for the fourth time. Unfortunately, they have not—I have nothing to do in Israel, but I always said I have the world, and I believe in justice. And all the justice lovers around the world must support me, including many, many hundreds of my Israeli brothers and Jewish brothers around the world. And all the human beings around the world must support me because I ask to bring this man to justice, because he killing a daughter, a 10-years-old daughter, not because he’s an Israeli and I’m a Palestinian, because my child wasn’t a fighter, and she had nothing to do with this conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there, and I want to thank you both for being with us, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan—Bassam, a former Fatah fighter; Rami, a former Israeli soldier. Both lost their daughters. This is Democracy Now! We will link to your website. Within the Eye of the Storm is their new film.

 

–Democracy Now!, 26 February, 2013

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/26/united_by_loss_israeli_palestinian_dads
 

Zunes: “Only the People of the US Can End Israel’s Occupation”

Only the People of the US Can End Israel’s Occupation

Last month’s elections in Israel demonstrated that the Israeli electorate’s shift to the right is not inexorable. But they are unlikely to bring peace any closer by themselves.

Centrist parties—particularly a new secular group known as Yesh Atid, which won a surprising second place—did better than expected, while the right-wing Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu lost seats. However, Netanyahu—who has made clear his unwillingness to allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel, and who has escalated the illegal colonization of occupied East Jerusalem and other places in the West Bank—will likely remain prime minister.

The good news is that Netanyahu will need to put together a coalition government with more centrist parties, instead of with far-right and fundamentalist parties, as observers had expected. This makes war with Iran and other provocative actions by the Israeli government less likely.

Exit polls indicate that Israelis were primarily interested in domestic issues, especially the declining fortunes of the country’s middle class, which is struggling with stagnant wages, rising housing costs, and reckless privatization that has made a handful of Israelis very wealthy at the expense of the majority. In the decades since the government of the social-democratic Labor Party, Israel has gone from being one of the most egalitarian countries in the world to one of the most unequal, at least among advanced industrialized countries. A series of right-wing governments have shredded the country’s once-vaunted social welfare system, and exciting socialist initiatives like the kibbutz movement have faded. However, the Israeli people have engaged in massive protests against the growing economic injustice, including the first general strike in more than a generation, as well as demonstrations and occupations involving tens of thousands, easily eclipsing Occupy Wall Street in their numbers.

However, left-wing parties did not seem able to harness the energy of this movement, and progressives had to settle for the prospect that the new governing coalition will likely emerge from the center-right rather than extreme right and fundamentalist parties. Indeed, as an indication of how far to the right Israeli politics have gone, the Kadima Party, founded in 2005 by former right-wing prime minister and war criminal Ariel Sharon, is now considered part of the “center-left” bloc.

While Israeli politics has shifted to a more hardline position, the Palestine Liberation Organization has become more moderate. The PLO-led Palestine Authority, now recognized as a state by the United Nations, is solidly under moderate and pragmatic leadership, and has agreed to a peace settlement along the lines of the one proposed by President Bill Clinton in December 2000—a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including Arab-populated parts of East Jerusalem, with some limited territorial swaps to allow Israel to keep most of its settlements.

This would leave Israel with 78 percent of historical Palestine and the Palestinians with 22 percent. Netanyahu, however, insists this is too much and instead supports only limited Palestinian autonomy over a series of tiny non-contiguous cantons in parts of the West Bank, with Israel effectively annexing the rest of the occupied territory. President Barack Obama has called for mutual compromise between these two positions.

Like citizens of other countries, Israelis are divided between left, right, and center. Those on the left—for either principled or pragmatic reasons—recognize the need for their government to make the necessary territorial compromises for peace. Those on the right—for either religious or nationalist reasons—are unwilling to do so.

The majority of Israelis remain in the middle. They are willing to accept these necessary compromises, but only if they know there will be negative consequences for doing otherwise, such as losing the more than $3 billion in annual U.S. aid or the assurance that the U.S. will veto U.N. Security Council resolutions that challenge the Israeli occupation. A threatened suspension of the U.S. economic largesse might finally force more Israelis to make the connection between the heavily-subsidized settlement housing in the West Bank and the lack of affordable housing within Israel itself, or the huge financial burden of the continued occupation with the cutbacks in domestic spending.

Conversely, if Israelis know that U.S. support will be forthcoming regardless, this key swing constituency is likely to continue backing parties that support the occupation and colonization of the West Bank.

As a result, the best hope for peace will have to come from the United States pressuring Israel to end its unjust, illegal, and ultimately self-destructive policies toward the Palestinians. And that will only happen if the American people are willing to pressure the Obama administration to do so.

Stephen Zunes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Stephen is a professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

 

–Stephen Zunes,  Nation of Change, 9 February, 2013

http://www.nationofchange.org/only-people-us-can-end-israel-s-occupation-1360420441.

The Gatekeepers: In New Film, Ex-Shin Bet Chiefs Denounce Occupation, Compare Israel to Nazi Germany

AARON MATÉ: For our first segment, we turn to Israel and the Occupied Territories, where Israeli forces have begun the year with a spate of killings of unarmed Palestinian civilians. So far this month, at least five unarmed Palestinians have been shot to death by Israeli troops. The latest we know about was a 21-year-old Palestinian woman named Lubna Hanash, who was killed when Israeli forces opened fire at a West Bank school. A witness said Hanash was standing with a group of companions when they came under fire.

AHMED ABU KHERAN: [translated] Two Israeli solders traveling in a white car pointed their weapons, shooting indiscriminately at a college, where the women were standing at the entrance, and there was another man inside. They shot three people, and then a large number of soldiers arrived.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on Monday, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem put out a report saying Israeli forces have been “extensively and systematically” violating their own rules of engagement when suppressing protests in the West Bank, in many cases leading to Palestinian deaths. According to B’Tselem, since 2005 at least 48 Palestinians have been killed by live ammunition fired at people throwing stones. Six more were killed by rubber-coated bullets fired at dangerously close range, and two were killed by tear-gas canisters directly fired at protesters. This is B’Tselem spokesperson Sarit Michaeli.

SARIT MICHAELI: This report exposes for the first time the full list of crowd-control weapons used by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank regarding Palestinian demonstrations, weapons like tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, the skunk stun grenades—different weapons that are meant to be non-lethal if used properly and according to regulations. We actually also provide the relevant military regulations that restrict the use of these different elements, and we show how these regulations are often very widely flouted by soldiers.

AARON MATÉ: That was Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Well, we turn now to an explosive new documentary film that features some unlikely and unprecedented criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. One subject of the film says, quote, “We are making the lives of millions unbearable, into prolonged human suffering, [and] it kills me.” A different subject of the film says, We’ve become, quote, “a brutal occupation force similar to the Germans in World War II.”

AMY GOODMAN: Now, these aren’t the words of Israeli peace activists or even of soldiers who have refused to serve in the Occupied Territories; they’re the words of the former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service and the agency responsible for the country’s internal security. And in The Gatekeepers, by Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh, these five—these six former Shin Bet chiefs are brought together to speak out for the first time ever.

In separate interviews, they they detail their methods against Palestinian militants and civilians in the Occupied Territories, including targeted killings, torture, recruiting informants, and the suppression of mass protests during the two intifadas. But in doing so, they also criticize the occupation they were assigned with defending and warn successive Israeli governments have endangered their country’s future by refusing to make peace.

In this clip, Yuval Diskin, who headed the Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011, shares the doubts he’s carried with him about the targeted killings of Palestinian militants.

YUVAL DISKIN: [translated] People expect a decision. And by “decision,” they usually mean “to act.” That’s a decision. “Don’t do it” seems easier, but it’s often harder. Sometimes it’s a super-clean operation: No one was hurt except the terrorists. Even then, later, life stops, at night, in the day, when you’re shaving—we all have our moments—on vacation. You say, “OK, I made a decision, and x number of people were killed. They were definitely about to launch a big attack.” No one near them was hurt. It was as sterile as possible. Yet you still say, “There’s something unnatural about it.” What’s unnatural is the power you have to take three people, terrorists, and take their lives in an instant.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Yuval Diskin, one of six former Shin Bet chiefs interviewed in the new documentary The Gatekeepers. It has just been nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary, joining a list of nominees that also includes another film about the Israeli occupation, Five Broken Cameras. The Gatekeepers opens in limited release in New York and Los Angeles Friday. Its director, Dror Moreh, joins us here in New York.

We welcome you, Dror, to New York to the studios of Democracy Now! You have interviewed all six surviving former Shin Bet heads, equivalent to the heads of the FBI.

DROR MOREH: FBI—well, a combination of FBI, CIA. They do all the things together.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you pull this off? Why did they talk to you?

DROR MOREH: I think they were ready to do that. I think that when I came to speak to them—as you know, timing is the most important thing, and I think that when I came to them with the idea of doing the movie, they felt that it’s already long due, needed, and that they had to speak, because they were worried about the state of Israel. They were worried about where Israel is headed if it will continue to maintain this occupation. So it was, for them, a kind of non-issue to come and speak in the movie.

AMY GOODMAN: In this clip, former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter discusses an Israeli bombing of a home in Gaza in July 2002. The attack killed Salah Shehadeh, the head of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, but also 14 innocent civilians, including Shehadeh’s wife and daughter and a family of seven living next door. Dozens were also wounded. The attack occurred just as Shehadeh was reportedly preparing to sign onto a ceasefire halting attacks on Israelis not in the Occupied Territories. Here, Dror Moreh, the director, confronts Dichter about the civilian deaths.

AVI DICHTER: [translated] The Air Force dropped a one-ton bomb on the house. Unfortunately, because of inaccurate intelligence, innocents were killed. No one knows the final number: nine to 14.

DROR MOREH: [translated] When you drop a one-ton bomb on a densely populated area, like in the Shehadeh incident, obviously bystanders will be hurt.

AVI DICHTER: [translated] No, it’s not obvious, no. You gather intelligence: Where do people live? How many? Who? What are the chances? Where do you shoot from?

AMY GOODMAN: Former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter. Talk about his response.

DROR MOREH: Well, look, I—I have to say that I a little bit feel uncomfortable in the way that you present the things here, because you portray the things as if Israel is the brutal, aggressive all the time, with the Palestinians, that they are like doves. There is reason why the Shin Bet is doing what it’s doing there. And the fact of the matter is that you cannot say—in a way, portray Israel as the aggressive and the Palestinians are the innocent bystander who are always being killed by those aggressive forces. It’s not the case at all, and I think that this is misleading the people that are watching that.

And I think that there is—if there is something that I failed while doing this film, it’s that the whole situation is different shades of gray. There is no really total aggressive person there or aggressive entity towards a very innocent and not violent entity on the other side. It’s both. Both are doing the worst that they can. I think that I can relate to what Abba Eban said once, our former foreign minister. He said that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I can say that on both sides. Both sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

And this is the whole goal of The Gatekeepers. The Gatekeepers portrays Israeli occupation in the last 45 years and basically says, “Enough of that. It’s not going anywhere. It’s only tactic without strategy. Where do you want to go with this conflict ahead?” and to show that in a way that will only benefits both sides. If you portray only one side as the brutal, aggressive force and the other one as the innocent naive, you are doing wrong to the truth or to the facts on the ground. And I have to say that this is something which my movie tried to do very, very strongly: to portray the situation as it is. The Palestinians are doing terrorist attack. They have right to do, in a way, something which they want to create their own country, their own homeland, and they oppose the aggressive occupation.

AARON MATÉ: Well, we certainly aren’t here to debate the history with you, but we are trying to portray your film, and your movie has some very powerful statements that should be highlighted. You know, you have Avraham Shalom saying something like—a line like: “[We’ve become] a brutal occupation force similar to the Germans in World War II.”

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AARON MATÉ: “We have become cruel, to ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population, using the excuse of the war against terror.”

DROR MOREH: Yes.

AARON MATÉ: That’s in your movie, and it’s very powerful.

DROR MOREH: Absolutely, I’m not—yeah, I’m not saying that it’s not in the movie. Well, I did that movie; believe me, I know every sentence that is inside that movie. What I felt is that when you portray that as the Palestinians are people that are sitting there, you know, and not doing anything, it’s not the reality on the ground. And by that, you have to show both sides, because I think that when you do that, you portray only one side. And I said that before. It’s—you have to be balanced. And this is something that I felt that is not so much here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, could you respond to both of these points? One is this powerful statement that Avraham Shalom says, the former head of Shin Bet—

DROR MOREH: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —comparing themselves to the Nazis.

DROR MOREH: He’s—well, look, I have to say that this sentence that Avraham Shalom said, I—when I was doing the interview, it felt like a physical blow to my stomach when he said that. And I have to say that Avraham Shalom—well, when you see the film, you’ll know what happened in the 300 line when he ordered the execution of two terrorists that were captured alive. I think—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about that after break. You’re talking about the execution of the—

DROR MOREH: Of the two terrorists who—

AMY GOODMAN: —of those who blew up the bus.

DROR MOREH: Yeah—no, didn’t blow up the bus; they were trying to kidnap the bus. They were captured alive after the storm on the bus. And he ordered them to be executed without a trial.

Look, I think that the occupation is bad for Israel, and I think that those people who came to speak in the movie, the six heads of the security defense establishment, the Shin Bet, came because they feel that the occupation of the Palestinians in the last 45 years is something that is not good for the state of Israel and should be stopped. And I think that when Avraham Shalom spoke about what you just mentioned, he spoke about the ramification of the occupation on the Israeli population, about what is becoming inside, internally, in the Israeli civilian people. And I totally agree with him.

And, by the way, Avraham Shalom was a young kid in Vienna in the 1930s. He didn’t know that he’s a Jew. He was forced to go to school after the Kristallnacht. He was almost beaten to death by his classmates. He felt firsthand what it means to be a Jew under a racist regime. And when he compares that, he compares the Israeli occupation to the Germans, that—like how the Germans treated the Poles, the Czechs, the Dutch, he knows what he speaks about. And I think that his worry is something that had resonance in me, as well, about what—where will it lead, the occupation—I mean, if it will continue like that.

AMY GOODMAN: And Avi Dichter’s point when he’s talking about the killing of the Hamas leader who was going for a ceasefire, killing his wife—

DROR MOREH: Look, this is something that happens in America, as well. Avi Dichter just mentioned after that, in that clip, he said that the Americans have drone attacks in Afghanistan. They killed 70 people in a wedding, which nobody knows if the suspect person was killed, as well. I think that now, in—the war of the 21st century is a war where you need intelligence to get to a needle in a haystack—that means in the form of a terrorist, that you are looking for him. And the intelligence people want to get into that specific person in a certain date at a certain time at a certain place. And this is a very difficult war to maintain. America is doing it now. You—just now you heard in your news that they are going to do drones surveillance over North Africa. I don’t—I think that you have to think strategically: Where do you want to lead with this conflict?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue this discussion. Dror Moreh is our guest. He is the Iraeli filmmaker, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Gatekeepers. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AARON MATÉ: Well, we were just talking about the hijacking of the 300 bus, so let’s go to a clip of that. This excerpt deals with the Shin Bet’s killing of two Palestinian hijackers of an Israeli bus in 1984. They were brutally beaten to death by Israeli forces after they were captured. Avraham Shalom, the former Shin Bet director, who’s ordered the killing—who ordered the pair’s killing in person, is among those interviewed. He was later forced to resign over the incident.

AMI AYALON: [translated] We killed a terrorist, whose hands were tied, who no longer threatened us. By what right? But in the Shin Bet back then, there was no such concept as an illegal order. Not only did the Shin Bet fail, the Cabinet and the prime minister failed. And to some degree, they oversee the Shin Bet.

YAAKOV PERI: [translated] It’s a tough question. Did the prime minister know about the premeditated murder, the plan to kill the terrorist caught on the 300 bus? Did the head of the Shin Bet have the authority to do that, to make those decisions?

DROR MOREH: [translated] Under what circumstances did Shamir give you permission to kill?

AVRAHAM SHALOM: [translated] There were one or two cases, when I couldn’t find him, and it had to be done.

DROR MOREH: [translated] What had to be done?

AVRAHAM SHALOM: [translated] We had to deal with Arabs who were about to launch an attack, or that launched an attack. He said, “If you can’t find me, decide on your own.”

AARON MATÉ: That’s Avraham Shalom, a former Shin Bet director, who actually was forced to resign over this incident of the 300 bus. And before him speaking were two other directors of the Shin Bet, interviewed in this film that we’re talking about, The Gatekeepers. So, Dror, if you could talk about this incident?

DROR MOREH: This incident basically shook the corridors of power in Israel. It was the first time that the Shin Bet has come to the light of the cameras or the light of the—because before that, Shin Bet was almost—no one knew about, that Shin Bet existed, only few people around Israel, and basically the Shin Bet could do whatever he wanted. And that resulted in that horrible incident where the head of Shin Bet ordered the killing of two captured terrorists, which is horrible morality, any way that you can look at that.

But the main issue here for me was the fact that the politicians who gave those permissions to Avraham Shalom as head of Shin Bet were not convicted. You know, they always—those people who are in the field pay the price, and the politicians—namely, Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister, and Shimon Peres—the after-that prime minister—fought in every way that they could in order to prevent that incident to go into the court. And at the end of the day, Avraham Shalom got clemency from the president, before trial even. It was unprecedented that someone get clemency before he was even convicted or tried. And they knew why, because they knew that if it will get into trial, it will reach the highest level of the political people in Israel, the prime minister. And basically, Avraham Shalom said, “I would say in a court that he gave me the permission to do that,” which is horrible.

AMY GOODMAN: In this clip of The Gatekeepers, the Shin Bet security chiefs discuss how they also confronted Israeli militants—in this case, the extremist right-wing group the Jewish Underground, which planned to blow up the Islamic holy site, the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem.

YAAKOV PERI: [translated] Then we investigated and found out that since 1978 to 1979 they were planning an attack on the Temple Mount to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

CARMI GILLON: [translated] At first, the idea was based on the belief that as long as the “abomination” stood over the site of the Jewish temple, there will be no Redemption; and therefore, they have to get rid of that dome. They prepared the bombs. They used a very sensitive type of explosive, Semtex. It was planned by Menachem Livni, who was a demolitions genius. The charges would be placed so that the entire force of the explosion would be directed at the support structure. This would result in the collapse of the dome. The consequence of blowing up the Dome of the Rock, even today, is that it could lead to total war by all the Islamic states, not just the Arab states, not just Iran, Indonesia too, against the state of Israel.

AARON MATÉ: That clip, from The Gatekeepers. Dror Moreh, this plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock?

DROR MOREH: You want me to have to tell you what happened there?

AARON MATÉ: Please, yes.

DROR MOREH: Well, I think that people should go to the movie and see that. It’s important. But look, the far-right extremism in Israel is the biggest danger to anything that moves towards peace. Those religious fanatics are willing to sacrifice everything in the name of God, in the name of their beliefs. And this is one of the most horrible incident in Israel’s history, the fact that people were willing to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to stop the—it was when the peace process with Egypt, by the way. This was the aim of that. They wanted to blow up the Dome of the Rock as a preemptive that Israel will not withdraw from Sinai and create the peace with Egypt.

By the way, the head of Shin Bet, Dichter—this is not in the movie—said to me that in 2005, prior to the disengagement plan, which uprooted the settlements in Gaza, the fanatics, the extreme right-wing fanatics in Israel, were willing to blow up again the Dome of the Rock, and the threat over the dome was much more extensive than during the time of the Jewish Underground. And another plan was to assassinate the prime minister, the Prime Minister Sharon. And they know that if something will move towards peace, if there is something that can prevent that from happening, there is two things: Either they assassinate the prime minister, or either they will blow up one of the holy places to the Islam.

AARON MATÉ: Well, on this issue of fanatics, I want to ask you about the recent elections. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now working on putting together a coalition.

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AARON MATÉ: And he’s going to have to include some pretty far-right groups.

DROR MOREH: Well, I would say—

AARON MATÉ: What’s your reaction to the election and—

DROR MOREH: I think that the last elections have proven that the Israeli public is much more smarter than the leaders. I think that—the way that I look at it, Netanyahu wanted to do that. Netanyahu wanted, before the elections, to move towards the extreme right, but the Israeli public said to him very, very clearly, “You cannot do that. You have to go to the center.” And by voting 19 members of the Knesset to the new—there is a future group. They told him very clearly, “You are the only candidate now in Israel. There is nobody who—there’s nobody who opposes you. So—but you cannot do that with the far extreme right; you have to go to the center.”

And this is what seems to be the case now. He’s negotiating with this center parties, and I hope that this was what happen. I don’t have any trust in Netanyahu. Netanyahu, for me, is something that is the most dangerous person in terms of the peace and in terms of Israel. But I think that the Israeli public have sent him a very clear message in that election.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2006, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami—

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —said that the former prime minister, the man who was assassinated, Yitzhak Rabin, never expected that Oslo would result in a creation of a Palestinian state.

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Arafat in Oslo reached an agreement that didn’t even mention the right of self-determination for the Palestinians, doesn’t even mention the need of the Israelis to put an end to settlements. If the Israelis, after Oslo, continued expansion of settlements, they were violating the spirit of Oslo, not the letter of Oslo. There is nothing in the Oslo agreement that says that Israelis cannot build settlements. …

It was an exercise in make-believe. The Palestinians didn’t even mention self-determination so a leader like Rabin could have thought that, OK, we will have an agreement that will create something which is a state-minus. This was Rabin’s expression. He never thought this will end in a full-fledged Palestinian state.

AARON MATÉ: That was former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami speaking on Democracy Now! in 2006. Now, of course, Rabin was assassinated by Israeli extremists.

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AARON MATÉ: And I want to ask about that in a second, but the reason that we played this clip is because there’s a concern amongst many people that even within—that within the confines of mainstream Israeli politics, that there’s not the will to meet the minimal demands of Palestinians.

DROR MOREH: Absolutely.

AARON MATÉ: So, in your film, like there’s some great reverence for Rabin, and I understand that, but here you have the former foreign minister of Israel saying that even Rabin, who was at the—who was known as this man of peace, even he, himself, was not prepared to allow for a Palestinian state through the peace process.

DROR MOREH: I don’t know. I cannot speak in the name of Shlomo Ben-Ami, and I cannot speak in the name of Rabin. What I know is that the settlements are the biggest obstacle to peace. If there is something that will prevent peace, it’s the settlement and the settlers. They are the biggest obstacle to the peace process, to maintain or to continue. And I think this is the most largest and most influential and most powerful group in Israeli politics. They’re basically dictating the policy of Israel in the last years. I think that definitely for the Palestinians, the settlements are the worst enemy in the way—in their way to the homeland. When they see everywhere, in Judea and Samaria now, the settlements that are built like mushroom after rain, they see how their country is shrinking.

And for me, I am much more bleaker than those—the heads of the Shin Bet: I think that we have reached the point of no return. I don’t see a leader in Israel, definitely not the current one, who can weigh on his back the weight that—of the thing that needs to be done in order to reach peace: basically, to dismantle those settlements. And it’s tragic.

AARON MATÉ: What if—so, what will make the difference? If there’s no one in Israeli—in the Israeli mainstream who can do it, would a change in U.S. policy influence things?

DROR MOREH: Absolutely. I think that at the end of the day, unless Barack Obama—and I hope that in his last term, for the last four years—you know, he doesn’t have to be re-elected now—if he doesn’t force it, if he doesn’t come to both sides, by the way—the Palestinian are as weak as the Israelis, the leadership, although in the Palestinian Authority, the people, Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad, are really pro-peace—this is what I feel. They say that they are renouncing terror. In the last—two days ago, there was an article in Israel that the last year was the cleanest year in terms of terrorist attacks in Israel. No Israeli died from terror attack coming from the West Bank. So, unless Barack Obama will come up, I would say, with an iron fist of 20 megaton in one hand and with a carrot on the other hand, and would say to them, “This is the deal. Take it or leave it. If you will take it, you will get this carrot. If you will not take it, you will get this iron fist,” nothing will happen on the ground. On the contrary, the thing will continue to deteriorate, and violence will prevail again.

AARON MATÉ: Have you tried to show this film to President Obama?

DROR MOREH: I wish that he will see that. I think that he can learn—I don’t know, how can I try to do that? Maybe if you can help me, I will be more than happy. I think that it shows for him a description of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, from the people who were most responsible to maintain that conflict, from people—from the security chiefs of the Israeli defense establishment, something that has not been done up until now together.

AMY GOODMAN: Dror Moreh, you have all six surviving former heads of Shin Bet.

DROR MOREH: Absolutely, all of them.

AMY GOODMAN: All critical—

DROR MOREH: All of them, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —ultimately, of the occupation.

DROR MOREH: All of them. All of things—

AMY GOODMAN: One of them you interviewed in the office when he was head of Shin Bet.

DROR MOREH: Of Shin Bet, yeah, in the Shin Bet headquarter.

AMY GOODMAN: What most surprised you in these interviews?

DROR MOREH: Well, I was shocked, believe me, 17 times, each interview, from what they told me. But the main thing I—what I felt was most surprising is how sober they are, how pragmatic they are, and how they see the fact that the leadership is not able to sustain the conflict, is not able to create a way out of that. This is something that they felt very strongly that they have to come against that. The fact that they served 45 years, more than that, in the service of the security of Israel, and they feel today that their work was in vain, in a way, because it didn’t lead Israel towards a better political solution. And this is the—

AMY GOODMAN: What was the quote that most surprised you?

DROR MOREH: A lot of them, a lot of the quotes. But basically, I would turn to what Ami Ayalon said when he came—when he was a young boy, he thought that there is a house in Jerusalem, and in that house there is a smart man—namely, Ben-Gurion. And he fix. He take care of us, of the Israelis. And when he grew up, he came to that house, he walked that corridor, he went beyond the door, and he saw that beyond that door there is no one who is thinking for us. And this is something that, you know, as a person who lives in a state like that, you think that the prime minister knows everything and takes the right decisions. After that movie, I’m much more desperate from—because I heard what they think about the leaders of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s Ayalon who said—

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —the former Shin Bet head who said he realized there’s no one there—

DROR MOREH: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: —talking about Netanyahu.

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, there is a fascinating thing that is going on right now, which is of the five Oscar-nominated films, two are made by Israelis.

DROR MOREH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Joining The Gatekeepers in the nominees for best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards is another film also critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; it’s called 5 Broken Cameras. It tells the story of Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who got a video camera to record his son’s childhood but ended up documenting the growth of a resistance movement to the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in. The film shows the nonviolent tactics used by residents of Bil’in as they join with international and Israeli activists to protest the wall’s construction and confront Israeli soldiers. Here, the co-director of 5 Broken Cameras, Emad Burnat, is arrested at night by Israeli forces who declare his home to be a “Closed Military Zone.”

ISRAELI POLICE: [translated] Open up!

EMAD BURNAT: [translated] Now it’s my turn. I take the camera to protect myself.

ISRAELI POLICE: [translated] I ask you to stop filming.

EMAD BURNAT: [translated] I can film in my own house.

ISRAELI POLICE: [translated] Show me your ID.

EMAD BURNAT: [translated] Get my ID. What’s the matter?

ISRAELI POLICE: [translated] This is a Closed Military Zone. “The military has declared this area a Closed Military Zone. Anyone found in a Closed Military Zone must evacuate the area at once. No one can enter or remain on the premises.” You are now in violation of that order. I ask you to stop filming.

EMAD BURNAT: [translated] I am a journalist. I can film.

ISRAELI POLICE: [translated] This is a Closed Military Zone. Stop filming. Put down the camera.

EMAD BURNAT: [translated] I am a journalist, and I’m in my own home.

ISRAELI POLICE: [translated] Put down the camera. That is an order. Turn the lens to the wall. Give it to your son. He can put it down.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of 5 Broken Cameras, another of the five Oscar-nominated films, both made by Israeli filmmakers. This 5 Broken Cameras named for the fact that Emad Burnat, the Palestinian who’s trying to—started by filming his kid’s childhood, all five cameras were broken by the Israeli military occupation of his town in Bil’in. This is fascinating, Dror, that both of you, coming with different perspectives, but ultimately critical of the occupation, are going to be in the Oscars. What has been the reception to yours, and both these films?

DROR MOREH: First of all, I think that it’s an amazing fact that a country which is small like Israel, only seven million people, have produced two documentaries that have been nominated for the—in the last five nomination for the Oscars. I think it shows that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is alive. I think, of course, it’s a big interest all around the world and that there’s really amazing Israeli filmmakers who are coming and portraying that, although in Israel the people are not—well, they don’t deal with that as much as I think they should in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We are a nation that become living in denial.

I think that it shows that—Emad’s film is an amazing film. It shows that the Israeli—the Israeli documentary scene is really, really vibrant. It thinks about the problems that deal—that the Israelis are dealing with and want to change that. And the best way to change that is by creating documentaries, by creating those films that are accessible to the public.

My film opened three weeks ago in Israel. You know, in Israel, there’s not a lot of audience for documentaries. We opened in two art houses in Israel, the Cinematheque in Tel Aviv, Cinematheque in Jerusalem. A week after that, we moved to seven cinemas. Now we are in 15 cinemas. Even the big multiplexes have acquired the rights to show the film. It is sold out. And a lot of Israelis are coming to see that film. And I’m very, very happy for that, because I think that this is the way to show the Israeli people how the mirror effect of their life looks like in the reality, not in what they have been told in the government television.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much, Dror Moreh—

DROR MOREH: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: —for joining us, Israeli filmmaker, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Gatekeepers.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we go to Seattle, where a major protest is going on among teachers against standardized tests. Stay with us.

 

–Democracy Now!, 29 January, 2013

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/29/the_gatekeepers_in_new_film_ex#transcript

EI: “Why did a rogue group of Occupy activists smear me with ‘terror’ claim?”

On 26 February 2012, a small group of Occupy Oakland activists claimed that I was potentially a “suspected” terrorist in an article they posted on an Occupy Oakland-branded website that they controlled. The resulting spectacle revealed an entrenched and unexamined prejudice against Arabs and Muslims, and a weakness many mainstream, predominantly white activist groups have in openly discussing issues of race and ethnicity.

The article, titled “Occupational Awareness” (see the screengrab at the bottom of this article), is based on several glaring errors in reasoning — the central one being that my “name had been found in Google search results in connection with allegations of terrorist activity.” The premise was fatally misleading, because it was not my name found, but that of another person, with a different surname.

Nevertheless, this acrobatic logic became the basis for their claim of my potential identity as a Palestinian “terror” suspect. Additionally, the article claimed that the person in question “visually and biographically” resembled me. This claim was based on the low-resolution photo of a bearded man with glasses featured in the article, and, apparently, the fact he was arrested in Paraguay.

Other suspected connections were added: connections to “South American drug trafficking”; to “Israeli intelligence”; and to the FBI. The group suggested I may have “entered the movement in order to harm it” and tacked that on to a disclaimer that Occupy did not support “terrorism.” This gave the impression that some kind of “terror” attack might also be imminent.

The “breakaway” group responsible for the article was a faction that had splintered from the main media committee. They later acquiesced to pressure from Occupy Oakland activists and removed the post.

Because of the potential for abusing the messaging power of the media committee revealed by the affair, the entire media committee was dissolved and reconstituted with new guidelines via a general assembly resolution that passed by a 90 percent margin. The splinter group formed the “Occupy Oakland Media Collective,” taking their website, hellaoccupyoakland.org, with them.

I chose not to write about all of this at the time for the safety of myself, family and fellow activists. During the short period the post was up, it had caught the attention of a few right-wing blogs, which soon began circulating the rumor that Occupy was sheltering a “Hamas terrorist,” and I felt I would be putting others in danger by drawing more attention to it.

The core of the issue was effectively swept under the rug, but the narrative that’s emerged among some groups often dismisses the potentially disastrous effects of the group’s actions. I believe its now critical to draw attention to the pernicious reasoning that lay behind the accusation and its potentially disastrous effects.

No evidence

The man I was accused of being — Salah Abdul Karim Yassine — was, ironically, also a victim of a “terror” smear, twice: once by the US State Department, and then again by the media group. Yassine’s name first appears in a State Department report published in 2001 as one of two slim reeds of “evidence” that the borders of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina had become a porous hotbed of “Islamic terrorism.”

Yassine is alleged to have made terror threats, though there is no evidence of them. Ali Khali Meri, a Lebanese immigrant, with so-called “Hizballah ties” is also named in the report. The State Department’s publication of this report — and subsequent references to it in a Library of Congress document alluded to by the media group — are the only reason that the group learned of the existence of Yassine (“Patterns of Global Terrorism,” 30 April 2001 [PDF]).

Indeed, it was not Yassine, but the State Department’s construct of him that the group discovered. In the words of journalist Kenneth Rapoza — writing on the website Counterpunch — the goal of the report was to facilitate turning “the region into a terrorist and druglord hunting ground” for the US military (“New fakers at the New Yorker,” 14 May 2003).

To achieve this goal, these manufactured cases relied on entrenched bigotry against Arabs to elevate petty crimes to the level of life-threatening concerns — copyright infringement in the case of Meri, illegal entry and use of false documents in the case of Yassine.

The media group’s recycling of the original smear against Yassine — and addition of “drug trafficking” from their own repository of Latino stereotypes — is an ironic testament to how easily such accusations are taken at face value when made by the powerful against marginalized groups. But the group’s article also recasts in microcosm the dangerous climate created by the US both here and abroad, where minor offenses — or the mere suspicion of them — become frightening conspiracies when the accused have a Muslim name and/or Arab ethnicity.

Indeed countless innocent people have been imprisoned following the same logic, based on innuendo or a “suspicion” which reaches steroidal levels when an Arab surname is added. Of these, Khaled el-Masri may be the most easily recognizable today. A German citizen with a name similar to that of an accused member of al-Qaeda, el-Masri was detained solely on suspicion of forged documents. Those documents were suspected of forgery only because of the similarity in names.

El-Masri was “rendered” by US officials, and tortured. The fact that this same reasoning was emulated by a group interested in social justice makes it an all the more disturbing commentary on the pervasive logic of prejudice against Arabs and Muslims.

Ignorant fear

I was accused during a particularly high-profile period of Palestinian advocacy. The article was published less than a week after I gave a short talk on behalf of a prisoner’s rights group about Khader Adnan, then on hunger strike in an Israeli jail, at a rally at San Quentin state prison on 20 February.

A day earlier, I had published a blog post on The Electronic Intifada addressing the double standards applied in the West to questions of nonviolent resistance.

It seems likely that the fear that such views would make Occupy seem “too radical” was partly responsible for the media group’s paranoia. Based on the irrational urgency embedded in the group’s excuse for not double-checking their research, it also seems clear that this was coupled with a basic ignorant fear of the Palestinian struggle. A member of the original media committee — who later joined the media collective and is the former director of the American-Israeli Friendship Committee in California — in fact tweeted complaints about the support Adnan received as a “nonviolent” activist.

It’s obvious that my speech, combined with nearly a decade of pro-Palestinian advocacy on my own blog, and my recent writing for The Electronic Intifada, fed the hysteria that led to the accusation. Even in the most uncharitable and biased view, my interactions with the group did not rise to the level of life or death concern. The concern is reflexively preposterous if stripped of the anti-Palestinian bigotry that has been tacitly accepted by the mainstream.

Despite the advances of the Palestinian solidarity movement and the greater mainstream acceptance of pro-Palestinian positions, this kind of fearful auto-purging exists at every level of the public sphere. The examples range from the tragic destruction of the career of veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas to the prosecution of students at the University of California at Irvine, who exercised their free speech rights at an on-campus pro-Israel forum.

Participating in a mass movement in the US shouldn’t also mean that Palestinians, Palestinian solidarity activists and those advocating similarly uphill positions must check their views at the door or be suspected of posing a threat towards the group. Though there are many pitfalls to the discourse on Israeli apartheid, marginalizing it this way all but ensures that mainstream movements will undermine their ability to address those issues most central to social justice — an end to the costly, ongoing military occupations and invasions throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

Bizarre interpretation of FBI schemes

There’s little doubt that the group applied a narrative of FBI infiltration cobbled from popular media accounts of government infiltration. But their peculiar needs required a bizarre interpretation of the FBI’s modus operandi.

Over the past several years, the FBI has sent Arab and Muslim infiltrators into Muslim and Arab American institutions and mosques. Their role has been to persuade and/or trick Muslims with poor judgment into saying questionable things or participating in certain acts (“Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI ‘entrapment’ questioned,” Guardian, 16 November 2011).

But the hair-on-fire concerns of the group obscured that methodology. In almost every case, infiltrators are petty criminals who have never been accused of terrorism — for example, Muslims and/or Arabs who have been recruited while serving sentences for fraud and the like. There is no known example of the FBI sending an Arab or Muslim infiltrator to subvert a mainstream organization. That may be for the very reasons I noted earlier, that such voices suffer from sanctions for advocating even mild pro-Arab or Muslim views — and even just from having backgrounds associated with Islam and the Arab world.

In every instance, the “aspirational terror” plots orchestrated by the FBI are not meant to undermine any single movement or group. Rather, they are meant to manufacture “results” in the “domestic anti-terror” crusade. The goal is all the more unlikely because “terror” itself is a construct manufactured for US establishment aims. The FBI’s activities instead create the illusion of endless, but easily characterized, threats and the appearance that the FBI is busy thwarting them to keep Americans safe.

Worse, the media group’s skewed view obscures the real dangers faced by Occupy. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and “aspirational” plots currently being brought to trial reveal a security system infatuated with “anarchists,” and frantically engaged in infiltrating and implicating anarchist-related groups as a subset of Occupy.

This is the same “busy work” methodology behind the targeting of Muslim and Arab groups — and by all accounts, the FBI has been very busy, raiding activist homes for anarchist literature and even setting up a similar “aspirational” phony terror plot aimed at Occupy’s anarchists in Cleveland, fronted by a petty criminal espousing anarchist sympathies (“FBI supplied Occupy Cleveland ‘terrorists’ arrested in May Day plot,” Green is the New Red, 1 May 2012).

In such a context, the idea that the FBI had sent a Muslim former terrorist to infiltrate and subdue the “nonviolence” wing of Occupy Oakland — which the media group claimed to represent — is more than the delusional fantasy than it initially appears to be. It is, instead, seriously hazardous reasoning. In a final irony, for example, baseless accusations against pro-Palestinian activists of being Mossad agents turns out to be one of the tactics recently espoused by an Israeli government official for discrediting them.

Surprisingly, none of these issues ever rose to front and center of the public discussion. Because some of the signatories to the article were people of color, a discourse on racism defined by power dynamics which further confused the issue, dominated the conversation.

Racialized assumptions

Of course, it’s ostensibly crucial to use a functional definition of racism based on power dynamics, but in this case that construction achieved the opposite of the intended effect; it encouraged white members of the media group, and their white advocates, to assure themselves that they had no racist assumptions to examine. In fact, the person who reportedly first found the “evidence” of the “suspected” terrorism, and one of the most vehement in defending it, was a white male, the son of an affluent best-selling author and not from, or residing in, Oakland.

Members of the “Anonymous” community later claimed that he had shared the information with them and that they had warned him that the “evidence” was baseless according to their own research. He and the other members of the group went public regardless. More importantly, since the kind of racialized assumptions the group used in its analysis was an internalized product of a white supremacist structure, this was a worrisome mix of opposing ideals that unfortunately went unexamined.

The discussion about racism, though important, rapidly became confused and distracted from the salient issues. These aren’t just questions facing Arab-American and Muslim activists, or of representation of people of color, or even of profiling. Rather, these are issues that concern radical queers and feminists, anti-establishment labor organizers, and anti-imperialism activists of all races.

These questions concern all people who espouse substantive and honest critiques of US policies and organizations, critiques which are not always popular at any given time, even in the left — these groups can be caught in the middle of witch-hunts not only by the establishment, but also by ostensibly counter-establishment structures.

Undoubtedly, there will be a mass movement successor to Occupy in the coming months or years. And if that successor is to have a broad popular character, an effective focus on US domestic and foreign policy and a resistance to McCarthyite witch-hunts, activists will have to revisit these issues again and again. Hopefully, this story will be of some use in those times.

Jaime Omar Yassin has been involved in alternative media for nearly 20 years. He has written for Extra!, Meatpaper, n+1 and other publications. His writing on the Occupy movement appears in the books Dreaming in Public and We are Many. He has his own blog at Hyphenated-Republic.

 

–The Electronic Intifada, 16 January, 2013

 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/why-did-rogue-group-occupy-activists-smear-me-terror-claim/12099

E.I. Opinion: “Will Hamas squander its Gaza victory?”

From Democracy Now!:

Israel Rejects Global Opposition to Settlement Plans as U.S. Offers Tepid Response

Israel has rejected international condemnation of its latest plans for a major settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. On Monday, five nations — Britain, Spain, Sweden, France and Denmark — summoned their Israeli ambassadors to protest Israel’s plan to build 3,000 new settlement homes and expand the “E1″ settlement zone that splits the West Bank in two. The E1 construction had largely been put on hold following U.S. objections dating back to President George W. Bush. But Israel says it has resumed work there in direct response to last week’s Palestinian statehood vote at the United Nations. Despite harshly condemning the Palestinian Authority for advancing the statehood vote, the Obama administration has adopted a more hands-off approach to Israel’s settlement expansion. In Washington, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner called the settlement building “counterproductive.”

Mark Toner: “You know, we consider these kinds of actions, these kinds of unilateral decisions to be counterproductive and make it harder to resume direct negotiations. I mean, obviously, you know, we continue to consult closely with our allies and partners on how to get both parties back to the negotiating table, but I think, you know, our reaction is similar to their reaction, that this is not the kind of action that we need to see.”

–Democracy Now!, 4 December, 2012

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/4/headlines

Will Hamas squander its Gaza victory?

Will the latest attack on Gaza spell the end of Hamas as a radical resistance movement?

Palestinians in Gaza had barely buried their dead and tended to their wounded in the wake of Israel’s week-long assault when Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal was doling out concessions on the US mainstream media. The same day a ceasefire was announced last week, Meshaal told CNN’s venomous and condescending Christiane Amanpour that a Palestinian state within the “1967 borders” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was acceptable. Meshaal sounded more like a broken record of Mahmoud Abbas than that of a resistance leader emerging out of a hard-fought battle (“Mashaal: I accept a Palestinian state on ‘67 borders,” The Jerusalem Post, 22 November 2012).

Since then, the political flirtation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority has continued unabated. The latest move was Meshaal’s enthusiastic endorsement on Monday of Mahmoud Abbas’s theatrical bid for virtual statehood at the UN (upgrading the Palestine Liberation Organization’s observer status to that of a state) (“Hamas backs Abbas bid to upgrade Palestinian UN status,” France 24, 26 November 2012). The Hamas-Fatah rapprochement is increasingly depicted by media reports as a preamble for resuming national reconciliation talks between the two factions now that the UN bid is over.

National unity reasonably remains a top demand for most Palestinians. But with the Palestinian Authority unequivocally acting as the de facto native enforcer of Israeli occupation, unity can easily turn into impunity for the occupier and its agents, and co-optation for the forces fighting them. Achieving unity is easier said than done; previous attempts have failed. The future of armed resistance rests on the outcome of such talks, and those in turn will have to take into account the fall-out of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza amid an evolving military and regional political configuration.

Big Brotherhood

Few wars in Palestine have been as spun by all sides for political gain like this latest one. Having alienated many of its supporters due to its backing of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Iran and its allies were over eager to take explicit credit for their military and financial support to Hamas and to reassert that the worthy battle is that of Palestine not Syria. The opposing “moderate” camp was as eager to prove that it is equally capable of siding with Palestinian resistance while fighting its former allies in Damascus.

The fact that Hamas still had one foot in each camp when the attack began played to the movement’s favor. The highest form of support, military and financial, continued to flow from Iran, while diplomatic pressure was exerted by the new Egyptian regime seeking regional legitimacy to prevent a ground invasion and broker a ceasefire.

In the press conference jointly held by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to announce the ceasefire, Meshaal tried to appease all actors. He thanked those in the “moderate” camp such as Egypt, Turkey and Qatar, while acknowledging the role of Iran (Saudi Arabia was conspicuously absent from all declarations of gratitude by Hamas officials).

But it was clear from the press conference that Hamas’ new political patron is Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Even the Islamic Jihad, which still maintains some ties with Damascus and is known for its closer ties to Iran, seemed more aligned with Hamas’ new allegiance scheme when Islamic Jihad’s Secretary-General Ramadan Shallah thanked Egypt but not Iran in his brief interjection (“Resistance says its word: Zionist entity defeated,” Al-Manar, 21 November 2012).

Both leaders made explicit reference to the positive role that Egyptian intelligence reportedly played. Long seen as Israel’s ears and eyes in Gaza and Sinai, it is hard to take for granted that this blemished Egyptian state apparatus has turned into a backer of armed resistance without the necessary purges from its ranks taking place.

Even if the new Egypt, as Hamas claimed, was as firm in warning Israel of a ground invasion and pushing for an agreement favorable to the conditions of the resistance, sooner or later, Israel and the US will demand that Cairo play a more active role in clamping down on the flow of arms. Washington’s push for an increased Egyptian role in the prevention or proliferation of weapon smuggling will increase with the further sidelining of Syria and the search for alternative routes of weapons transport, namely via Sudan towards Suez and Sinai.

With the passage of time, the Brotherhood will have to come clean on where it stands regarding the question of financial and military support for Hamas. If precedence is any indication, it will likely seek to maintain a status quo: no active collusion with Israel in return for pushing Hamas to reign in radical elements and future armed operations rather than supply the financial and military assistance needed.

With Egypt a long way from possibly developing a strong, independent military purged of US influence and capable of replacing Iran, Hamas would be taking a foolish gamble if it placed all its eggs in the Cairo basket. A more reasonable arrangement would be to expect Cairo to overlook weapons smuggling, and to keep channels open with Tehran as a source. An Egypt-Iran arrangement of this sort — minus the corrupting Gulf links and the destabilizing Syria ones — is a new resistance order Hamas can build on should the political will be there. But this will seems to lie somewhere else: eyeing a new round of the dangerous game of national unity.

National unity trap

The Egyptian-brokered deal struck between the Hamas-led resistance factions and Israel suggests that a policy of containment rather than engagement is in the works for Gaza. In the unlikely event that Israel adheres to its provision, there are tangible gains to be won: the end of the siege and extrajudicial killings, as well as the cessation of all forms of land, aerial and maritime aggression.

But in return, the resistance has vowed to cease all military action originating from Gaza. In other words, the agreement is about disengagement, not rules of engagement. The former is in the spirit of a truce and leads to a long-term settlement, the latter in the spirit of a ceasefire and leads to advancing the struggle under new more amenable regulations.

As they stand, the current terms of agreement favor disengagement, linking resistance from Gaza to aggression against Gaza alone. This will further isolate the Strip from the West Bank, which has already disengaged from linking its struggle to aggression on Gaza.

Emotions aside, the shy protests and clashes with Zionist forces that erupted recently in the West Bank fell short of what is expected from the territory where the heart of the struggle is today. Zionists wish Gaza would disappear off the map, but they see the West Bank as the Eldorado of Zionist expansion.

Without full participation of the West Bank in future resistance, Gaza’s deterrence will fall short of turning into a long-term strategic threat. And national unity talks circulating today, as much as unity is needed, flow in that direction. Current Palestinian Authority complicity in consolidating occupation is beyond retribution. According to the 2011 report submitted by Israel to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (a 15-member group that includes the European Union, the US, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), the number of joint security operations between Israel and the PA jumped by 118 percent in one year, with close to 3,000 “instances of coordination” and over 600 bilateral meeting at the police and “civil defense” levels taking place in 2010 alone (“Measures taken by Israel in support of developing the Palestinian economy and socio-economic structure,” State of Israel, 13 April 2011 [PDF]).

The report praises the “professionalism and skill” of the Palestinian security force, which managed to “escort” more than 600 Israelis out of Area A — the part of the West Bank nominally under Palestinian Authority control — after the latter had strayed into it. That skill must have been put on hold when Israeli forces conducted an extensive arrest campaign in the West Bank against elected Palestinian officials and Hamas cadres before the ink on the recent ceasefire agreement had dried (“Israeli forces detain MPs around West Bank,” Ma’an News Agency, 23 November 2012). Buoyed by Arab Gulf money and the comfort zone of ruling over a disengaged Gaza, Hamas might easily fall into the faltering footsteps of Fatah, which has transformed itself from a popular resistance movement into the mutated occupation-enforcing apparatus it is today.

Back to resistance basics

Without a clear and uncompromising roadmap to engage the West Bank in the resistance project and end the Palestinian Authority’s stranglehold over it, the Hamas-Fatah rapprochement is bound to lead to co-optation of the worst kind. Arab resistance to Israel has historically been beset by a disappointing leadership that either promises victory and brings defeat or turns military victory into political loss. The verdict is out on whether the latter is the case in this war.

There is no question that Israel’s latest attack on Gaza enhanced the resistance’s deterrence capacity. The coordinated and consistent launch of an average 200 rockets a day and the unprecedented strategic depth of the attacks (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) reflected a highly disciplined and developed resistance force — credited by some to the efforts of the assassinated Ahmad al-Jabari. The movement’s military wing was also capable of breaching Israel’s broadcasting and telecommunications network and aired propaganda messages on both while releasing more than 300 media statements about the developments of battle.

The resistance is, therefore, slowly morphing into a holistic apparatus that is not dependent on a single person. The active participation of other resistance groups, namely Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Brigades will make a unilateral decision by Hamas to take a more “moderate” route difficult to implement without the risk of internecine fighting and factionalism within Hamas’ own ranks.

This is why the resistance’s best bet was and remains the successful formula of what may be termed unmediated deterrence and mediated negotiations. The first principle seeks to ensure that deterrence becomes fully reliant on the resistance’s own military and intelligence strength. Deterrence through diplomacy, as was partly the case in this war, is another strategy but cannot be taken for granted or relied on in the long run.

The second principle, mediated negotiations, lays out a strict rule of engagement: that negotiation with the enemy is never made directly but through honest brokers. Whether the brokers are seen as allies (Egypt), or not (Germany brokered prisoner exchange deals between Hizballah and Israel) is not the issue. The litmus test is the reliability of the broker as a mediator and more importantly perhaps the limited objective of negotiations: insisting on making incremental gains in the battle rather than setting an end-game designed to liquidate the resistance.

The resistance, of course, will outlive any attempt to liquidate it so long as Israeli occupation and apartheid exist. The risk is losing its cumulative momentum and progressive strength. For at this critical juncture of the struggle, the loss of another Ahmad al-Jabari would be one loss too many.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article mistakenly argued that during the CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, Khaled Meshaal insinuaged that the right of return did not necessarily entail the actual return of refugees. The article has been corrected.

Hicham Safieddine is a freelance journalist and researcher of the Middle East.

 

–The Electronic Intifada, 30 November, 2012

http://electronicintifada.net/content/will-hamas-squander-its-gaza-victory/11955

Reuters: Gaza assault raises anger in changed Arab world

BEIRUT, Nov 19 (Reuters) – Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has stirred anger across the Middle East among populations who hope that Arab uprisings can translate into a tougher stance against Israel.

Television footage of Israeli airstrikes and pictures of civilian casualties, including four children killed on Sunday, have fuelled rage in the region.

In six days of hostilities, 100 Palestinians have died in Gaza, while three Israelis have been killed by rocket fire from the blockaded coastal territory.

The violence echoes Israel’s invasion of Gaza four years ago. But since then, revolutions in North Africa have brought Islamist allies of Gaza’s Hamas rulers to power, changing the political map and raising expectations of a more robust Arab response.

“In every Arab state where the nation is rising up to demand its rights, it is also demanding the rights of Palestinians,” Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif wrote in al-Shorouk newspaper.

More than 500 Egyptian activists crossed into the Gaza Strip on Sunday to show solidarity with Palestinians, something unthinkable under former president Hosni Mubarak, who kept Egypt’s border with Gaza closed during the bloodiest days of the 2008-2009 Israeli air raids and land invasion.

Mubarak was overthrown last year and his successor Mohamed Mursi, whose Muslim Brotherhood is closely linked to Hamas, sent his prime minister to Gaza on Friday.

“For us to mobilise, and not close our ears and close the crossing like what used to happen before, is something good,” said Islam Mahmoud, a 30-year-old engineer speaking in Cairo.

“A military confrontation is very difficult now, but there are a lot of things that Arabs can do like pressuring countries that have interests with us to call on the U.S. and others to stop Israel’s savage assault.”

Wary of Israel’s military superiority, few voices are calling for an armed Arab response. But Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has called on Arab states to raise oil prices to pressure Israel.

A prominent Saudi cleric said Cairo should send arms to Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

“We call on the Egyptian government to open its borders to all people to come in and out of Gaza, as well as products, medicines and advanced weapons,” cleric Awad al-Qarni, who has more than 273,000 followers on Twitter, wrote on his account.

Palestinians demonstrating in the West Bank, home to Palestinian President and Hamas rival Mahmoud Abbas, have demanded the armed wing of Hamas, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades, take revenge.

“Al Qassam, strike Aviv,” they chanted. “Hamas will shake the ground.”

In Libya’s capital Tripoli, a taxi driver who gave his name as Mohammad said he was shocked by what was happening in Gaza.

“This is not just a problem for Palestinians – the whole world should intervene.”

ARAB VISIT

The head of the Arab League and a group of Arab foreign ministers will visit Gaza on Tuesday in the latest official display of solidarity with the 1.7 million Palestinians there.

“The barbaric bombardment we saw yesterday of Gaza children is a crime against humanity,” Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour, who will join the ministerial trip, told Reuters.

“The world must not stand silent. This is a terrorist act by all standards,” he said.

Palestinians deserved a “courageous and honourable stand” from Arab governments, Mansour said.

Despite the rhetoric, the violence in Gaza has not prompted demonstrations on the scale of the uprisings which toppled four Arab leaders last year, threaten Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and may be taking hold in its neighbour, Jordan.

Adel Soliman, head of the International Centre for Future and Strategic Studies in Cairo, said the sweeping political changes in the Arab world had not shifted the balance of power.

“The Middle East is changing, yes, but only in the political structures that are starting to form. The new structure is not stable and the capabilities are the same”.

Jordanian Islamist Jamil Abu Bakr said Arab states should do more.

“Although the Arab stance after the Arab spring is different from before, even now the steps taken – important as they are – are not sufficient to stop the aggression,” he said.

Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab countries to have signed peace treaties with Israel. Egypt recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv last week while Jordan, which has not pulled its envoy out, called for an end to “the targeting of civilians”.

“This matter will only lead to more tensions in the area and will lead to an explosion of the situation,” Foreign Minister Nasser Joudeh said.

In Turkey, a photograph showing the burnt body of a three-year-old girl was widely shared on Twitter under the caption “Ranan Yousef Arafat. 3 years. Killed today by IsraHell.”

Ties between Israel and Turkey, once Israel’s only Muslim ally, crumbled after Israeli marines stormed an aid ship in 2010 to enforce a naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. Nine Turks were killed in clashes with activists on board.

Qatar, whose leader broke the international isolation of Hamas with a visit to Gaza last month, said the U.N. Security Council should take “a clear position to restore rights to people (in Gaza)”.

“What is happening in Gaza is unacceptable on an Arab level,” Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said in Doha. “We are for a cease-fire, but it has to come about in a clear manner. It has to be by both sides.”

 

-Dominic Evans, Reuters, 19 November, 2012

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/19/palestinians-israel-arabs-idUSL5E8MJDF320121119