Palestine-Mandate

The caption reads: “An Israeli soldier delivers blindfolded Palestinian prisoners to a military base near the northern Gaza Strip”.

FIrst of all, we need to know where these Palestinians were taken prisoner:  Was it in Gaza?  Was it in the West Bank? Or, was it in Israel itself?

Then, we need to know where is the military base?

To detain Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory and take them outside of that territory — as in this case, to Israel — would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The caption also says: “An Israeli negotiator was due to travel to Egypt on Thursday in a bid to speed up indirect negotiations with the Hamas movement for the release of a soldier the Islamists have held for two years”

Apparently, either the photographer and/or the caption writer were aware of the irony of Israel continuing to “detain” Palestinians while the Israelis themselves are utterly preoccupied with the return of one IDF soldier (Gilad Shalit) who was captured at Kerem Shalom and held captive for the past two years inside Gaza, and with the issue of the return of two soldiers (or their bodies) who were captured by Hizballah in a disputed area along Israel’s northern border just after Shalit was seized near Gaza.

The Hizballah action, which triggered a massive Israeli military response — now known as the Second Lebanon War — was aimed at taking the pressure off Gaza and increasing the pressure on Israel, both to change its policies, and to negotiate for the release of its captured men.

This photo w.as taken apparently today for AFP by David Buimovitch

This is not an endorsement, and I do not agree with everything he writes, but this column by Bradley Burston in his section in Haaretz called “A Special Place in Hell” has some wonderfully compassionate remarks, including:

“…[T]his month, three generations since 1948, since your Nakba, this is what I ask you to consider:

“Your time is running out.

“If you do not begin to act with all of your wisdom in moving toward statehood, you run the risk of becoming the Kurds of the Mediterranean basin, the Native Americans of the Middle East, permanently stateless, eternally denied.

“If you do not begin to rethink the course which the Palestinian national movement has taken, you must begin to consider the idea of a world without a Palestine. The world is beginning to feel more and more comfortable with that possibility, and it is time for you to think hard about the reasons why.

“We in the post-modern West have spent years educating ourselves to believe that all cultures are equally valid - with the possible exception, of course, of our own. We have taken it on faith that to criticize the culture of an indigenous people is obscenely imperialist, paternalist.

“In short, we gave you a pass. And we encouraged you to give yourselves one. In respecting you for your steadfastness, we refrained from calling you on your passivity. In accepting and amplifying your contentions as to Israel’s acts of wrongdoing, we chose not to hold you accountable for your own, or to explain them away as a function of occupation.

“You learned, over time, to hold Israel responsible for the whole of your plight. You learned, over time, to ignore, explain away, blame entirely on Israel, or otherwise deny the ways in which your actions and, in particular, your passivity, have deepened and fostered your misery. You learned to excuse your leaders their corruption, and their policy of foiling Israeli and foreign attempts to improve your conditions. You learned to excuse your Arab brothers their duplicity and their lip service and their exploitation and their cold shoulder and their contempt and their consummate failure to come to your aid.

“In the process, you may have grown accustomed to a definition of time, and of indigenous peoples, that bears re-examination. There is, first of all, this:

“The Jews are an indigenous people here, no less than you.

“The Jews have every right to have a nation here, no less than you.

“The Jews are stubborn and proud and fundamentally fierce as hell, no less than you.

“You have dismissed the Jews as a foreign influence. You have dismissed their history, waved away their blood and sinew tie to Jerusalem, acted as though they have no business here but evil.

“But in the decades you have spent misleading yourself about the true nature of the culture and the origins of the Jews, generation upon generation of Jews has been born here. They are natives. They are not going anywhere. And even the leftists among them are willing to die in defense of staying on this soil…”

The full Bradley Burston column published today, entitled The Palestinians’ Time is Running Out, can be read here .

Hamas’ reputedly hardline leader in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar, has written an OpEd piece that was published today in the Washington Post. Here are some excerpts — Mahmoud Zahar, in his own words:

“President Jimmy Carter’s sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end.
…

“Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal — from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that ‘legalizes’ the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world’s largest open-air prison, can do no less.

“The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East.
…

“Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no ‘peace plan’, ‘road map’ or ‘legacy’ can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.

“Israel’s escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis ‘peace conference’ in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment — in violation of international conventions.
…

“Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled — my first-born — after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.

…
“Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state — the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees — to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away.  Judaism — which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam — has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.

“A ‘peace process’ with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again”.

The whole OpEd article can be read here .

These excerpts are from an excellent article by former Israeli journalist Yonatan Mendel, published in the London Review of Books:

“Interviewing Abu-Qusay, the spokesman of Al-Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, in June 2007, I asked him about the rationale for firing Qassam missiles at the Israeli town of Sderot. ‘The army might respond’, I said, not realising that I was already biased. ‘But we are responding here’, Abu-Qusay said. ‘We are not terrorists, we do not want to kill . . . we are resisting Israel’s continual incursions into the West Bank, its attacks, its siege on our waters and its closure on our lands.’ Abu-Qusay’s words were translated into Hebrew, but Israel continued to enter the West Bank every night and Israelis did not find any harm in it. After all it was only a response.

“At a time when there were many Israeli raids on Gaza I asked my colleagues the following question: ‘If an armed Palestinian crosses the border, enters Israel, drives to Tel Aviv and shoots people in the streets, he will be the terrorist and we will be the victims, right? However, if the IDF crosses the border, drives miles into Gaza, and starts shooting their gunmen, who is the terrorist and who is the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make Israel safer. It’s the implementation of a government decision!’

“Another interesting distinction between us and them came up when Hamas demanded the release of 450 of its prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit. Israel announced that it would release prisoners but not those with blood on their hands. It is always the Palestinians – never the Israelis – who have blood on their hands. This is not to say that Jews cannot kill Arabs but they will not have blood on their hands, and if they are arrested they will be released after a few years, not to mention those with blood on their hands who’ve gone on to become prime minister. And we are not only more innocent when we kill but also more susceptible when we are hurt. A regular description of a Qassam missile that hits Sderot will generally look like this: ‘A Qassam fell next to a residential house, three Israelis had slight injuries, and ten others suffered from shock.’ One should not make light of these injuries: a missile hitting a house in the middle of the night could indeed cause great shock. However, one should also remember that shock is for Jews only. Palestinians are apparently a very tough people.

“The IDF, again the envy of all other armies, kills only the most important people. ‘A high-ranking member of Hamas was killed’ is almost a chorus in the Israel media. Low-ranking members of Hamas have either never been found or never been killed. Shlomi Eldar, a TV correspondent in the Gaza Strip, bravely wrote about this phenomenon in his book Eyeless in Gaza (2005). When Riyad Abu Zaid was assassinated in 2003, the Israeli press echoed the IDF announcement that the man was the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza. Eldar, one of Israel’s few investigative journalists, discovered that the man was merely a secretary in the movement’s prisoner club. ‘It was one of many occasions in which Israel “upgraded” a Palestinian activist,’ Eldar wrote. ‘After every assassination any minor activist is “promoted” to a major one.’

“This phenomenon, in which IDF statements are directly translated into media reports – there are no checkpoints between the army and the media – is the result both of a lack of access to information and of the unwillingness of journalists to prove the army wrong or to portray soldiers as criminals. ‘The IDF is acting in Gaza’ (or in Jenin, or in Tulkarm, or in Hebron) is the expression given out by the army and embraced by the media. Why make the listeners’ lives harder? Why tell them what the soldiers do, describing the fear they create, the fact that they come with heavy vehicles and weapons and crush a city’s life, creating a greater hatred, sorrow and a desire for revenge?

“Last month, as a measure against Qassam militants, Israel decided to stop Gaza’s electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that ‘the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.’ Another thing the soldiers do is clearing – khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf means to expose something that is hidden, but as used by the IDF it means to clear an area of potential hiding places for Palestinian gunmen. During the last intifada, Israeli D9 bulldozers destroyed thousands of Palestinian houses, uprooted thousands of trees and left behind thousands of smashed greenhouses. It is better to know that the army cleared the place than to face the reality that the army destroys Palestinians’ possessions, pride and hope.

“Another useful word is crowning (keter), a euphemism for a siege in which anyone who leaves his house risks being shot at. War zones are places where Palestinians can be killed even if they are children who don’t know they’ve entered a war zone. Palestinian children, by the way, tend to be upgraded to Palestinian teenagers, especially when they are accidentally killed. More examples: isolated Israeli outposts in the West Bank are called illegal outposts, perhaps in contrast to Israeli settlements that are apparently legal. Administrative detention means jailing people who haven’t been put on trial or even formally charged (in April 2003 there were 1119 Palestinians in this situation). The PLO (Ashaf) is always referred to by its acronym and never by its full name: Palestine is a word that is almost never used – there is a Palestinian president but no president of Palestine.

” ‘A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,’ David Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, ‘and gradually, a new language emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.’ This ‘new language’ was adopted voluntarily by the media, but if one needs an official set of guidelines it can be found in the Nakdi Report, a paper drafted by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority. First set down in 1972 and since updated three times, the report aimed to ‘clarify some of the professional rules that govern the work of a newsperson’. The prohibition of the term East Jerusalem was one of them.

“The restrictions aren’t confined to geography. On 20 May 2006, Israel’s most popular television channel, Channel 2, reported ‘another targeted assassination in Gaza, an assassination that might ease the firing of Qassams’ (up to 376 people have died in targeted assassinations, 150 of them civilians who were not the target of assassinations). Ehud Ya’ari, a well-known Israeli correspondent on Arab affairs, sat in the studio and said: ‘The man who was killed is Muhammad Dahdouh, from Islamic Jihad . . . this is part of the other war, a war to shrink the volume of Qassam activists.’ Neither Ya’ari nor the IDF spokesman bothered to report that four innocent Palestinian civilians were also killed in the operation, and three more severely injured, one a five-year-old girl called Maria, who will remain paralysed from the neck down. This ‘oversight’, revealed by the Israeli journalist Orly Vilnai, only exposed how much we do not know about what we think we know.

“Interestingly, since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip one of the new ‘boo’ words in the Israeli media is Hamastan, a word that appears in the ‘hard’ news section, the allegedly sacred part of newspapers that is supposed to give the facts, free from editorialising. The same applies to movements such as Hamas or Hizbullah, which are described in Hebrew as organisations and not as political movements or parties. Intifada is never given its Arabic meaning of ‘revolt’; and Al-Quds, which when used by Palestinian politicians refers only to ‘the holy places in East Jerusalem’ or ‘East Jerusalem’, is always taken by Israeli correspondents to mean Jerusalem, which is effectively to imply a Palestinian determination to take over the entire capital city” … This excellent article can be read in full here.

Headlines and reports in the Israeli press over the last few days repeat the same mantra: Palestinians require supervision:

“Defense establishment follows events at Egypt-Gaza crossing with concern: ‘The free passage of Palestinians into Egypt and back, without any supervision, significantly increases the threat coming from the Strip’”

and

Headlines from the Hebrew Press - 24 January 2008
Haaretz: Contacts on new arrangement – Egypt and Hamas holding contacts in effort to rebuild crossing. They will not refuse European supervision of crossing.

and

From Haaretz tonight:
“The head of the security-political task force at the Defense Ministry, Amos Gilad, demanded over the weekend that Egypt restore order in Rafah, where thousands of Palestinians have been crossing into Egypt from the Gaza border town through a ruptured barrier since Wednesday. At the request of Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Gilad spoke to Egyptian officials and demanded that the Egyptian authorities take action to prevent the unsupervised crossing of Gazans back and forth between the two territories.

Now, this is a very dangerous moment. The killing and fighting has escalated to the brink of a major conflict — one that all sides have said they want to avoid. But, the momentum is there.

And, tonight, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — who last spring said that Hamas in Gaza were terrorist murderers — called the senior Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, to offer his condolences on the death of his son. It was the second of Zahar’s sons to be killed by the Israeli military.

Reuters reported this evening that “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called a leader of rival Hamas on Wednesday to commiserate on the killing of his son by Israeli forces, Hamas said, the first such contact since a Palestinian factional schism last year. Hamas routed Abbas’s secular Fatah to take over the Gaza Strip in June, prompting the Palestinian president to shun the Islamist group and step up Western-sponsored peace efforts with Israel. Hamas refuses to give up fighting the Jewish state. Hamas said Abbas suspended his boycott by phoning Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas official whose son, a gunman, was among 18 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza on Tuesday. ‘In the first call since June, President Mahmoud telephoned Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar … and paid his condolences at the killing of Zahar’s son, said Taher al-Nono, spokesman for the Hamas administration in Gaza. ‘The telephone conversation was very friendly and the two leaders spoke at length about the current political situation and they both stressed the unity of the Palestinian people regardless of the differences’ … Israeli officials have said rapprochement between Abbas and Hamas could scupper peace talks”. The Reuters report of the Abbas condolence call to Zahar is published here.

What is wrong in these lines, published in an article in the Jerusalem Post today: “Three of my sons serve in elite combat units. They risk their lives to protect this state. But when my daughter tries to exercise her right to settle the land of our forefathers, they treat her worse than an Arab.” From an article published in today’s Jerusalem Post here.

Kol Israel Radio reported this evening that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told European Union Ambassadors in a briefing today that if Fatah and Hamas agree to form another “National Unity” Government, then Israel will call off its negotiations with the Palestinians.

In an unusual action, the normally-oh-so-discreet International Committee of the Red Cross put out a booklet, with photos, saying that “Throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, in the Gaza Strip as well as in the West Bank, Palestinians continuously face hardship in simply going about their lives; they are prevented from doing what makes up the daily fabric of most people’s existence. The Palestinian territories face a deep human crisis, where millions of people are denied their human dignity. Not once in a while, but every day…”

“Nothing is predictable for Palestinians. Rules can change from one day to the next without notice or explanation. They live in an arbitrary environment, continuously adapting to circumstances they cannot influence and that increasingly reduce the range of their possibilities”.

…”Only prompt, innovative and courageous political action can change the harsh reality of this long-standing occupation, restore normal social and economic life to the Palestinian people, and allow them to live their lives in dignity”.

Dignity Denied, an informational booklet published today by the ICRC, can be seen here.

As Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams met today in preparation for the formal opening of new negotiations on 12 December, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said at a business conference in Tel Aviv today that “Annapolis does not constitute an historic breakthrough. It was not planned to be one either. However, it provided us backup and support for this process of firming up the foundations for serious negotiations, meaningful reconciliation and perhaps even peace accords“.

Olmert told the businessmen: “I do not intend to stop. Annapolis was not an event, nor was it a show for the sake of publicity. Over four years ago, in an interview with the ‘Yediot Ahronot’ newspaper, I said that I believed that the shortness of time obligated us to act quickly to reach a political agreement which would allow us to evacuate most of the territory in Judea and Samaria, create a clear barrier between ourselves and the majority of Palestinians and allow them to establish an independent, vibrant and democratic state of their own. The destruction of the two-state model and international backing for the idea of one state for all residents with equal rights to vote threatens the existence of the State of Israel. I never said that if there was not a political solution, the State of Israel was finished, despite the headline in the newspapers and the quote wrongfully attributed to me – that combination of words never left my mouth. If the solution of two nation-states for two people is removed from the international agenda – and we continue to be in all the territories, and the Palestinians demand total democratization of the country under whose patronage they live – this will create an existential threat to Israel, certainly as a Jewish state. Today there is a chance, there is an opportunity, there is the beginning of dialogue with a Palestinian leadership which declares its desire for peace. It is true that this leadership is not strong enough. They still do not have the firm infrastructure of a country, with all the accompanying institutions and law enforcement authorities needed for its establishment. However, there is a leadership which declares its desire to make peace with us. This is an opportunity with many uncertain components, many risks and many dangers. It is impossible not to recognize them, it is impossible to ignore them. Under no circumstances can we allow this uncertainty and the risks to decide. Because there is also an opportunity. I intend to take advantage of this opportunity to conduct serious, continuous, ongoing negotiations in order to reach a historic breakthrough towards a new political reality”.

Talking in terms designed to appeal to businesspersons, Olmert said that “One cannot prophesy economic growth while fighting against the reconciliation process and any negotiations with our Palestinian neighbors. One cannot be against Annapolis, endlessly frighten the public regarding national catastrophes, isolate Israel from the central stream of global politics and believe at the same time that markets can be increased, trade can be expanded, more foreign investors and investments can be brought here or that more and more countries can be encouraged to have improved economic relations with us”.

Paradoxically, however, Israel appears to be in better economic shape than ever — despite plenty of fighting against the reconciliation process and negotiations with Palestinians. Last year, Israel went to war against Lebanon — and everybody seemed to get rich.

Olmert told the business conference today that “This year, the growth of the economy will be no less than 5.5%, and perhaps even higher. The rate of unemployment decreased in the final quarter to a rate of 7.4% – the lowest in over a decade. Our balance of payments is positive for the third year in a row, and the surplus will this year stand at $8 billion. Inflation is close to zero, our national debt has decreased to a rate of 82% of the GNP. In 2007, product per capita will average close to $21,000 and in terms of consumer power in Israel, its value is even higher”.

Olmert’s remarks to business leaders can be found here.

So, Product per capita in Israel this year will average close to $21,000!!! In the occupied Palestinian territory, it is enormously less. If I recall correctly, it is $1,600 in the West Bank, and about half that in the Gaza Strip.  The potential for exploitation in any peace deal is enormous…