When Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists, religious zealots, ultranationalists and crypto-fascists in the apartheid state of Israel say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, believe them.
A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13, 2023, recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of the assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from right-wing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel.
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coalition government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily.
They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, whom Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhumans who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.
A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13, 2023, recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
It is a grave mistake not to take the blood-curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”
These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of the assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.
“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.
“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.
The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt. Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army – to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.
It is a short step to total Israeli control over Palestinian land. Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements, restricted military zones, closed highways and army compounds have seized over 60 percent of the West Bank, turning Palestinian towns and villages into ringed ghettos. There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land will explode. Over 133 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army and Jewish settlers since the Oct. 7 incursion by Hamas and thousands of Palestinians have been rounded up by the Israeli military, beaten, humiliated and imprisoned.
Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the horrific violence of the state. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are already being targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.
Fascists do not respect the sanctity of life. Human beings, even from their own tribe, are expendable to build their deranged utopia. The zealots in power in Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters but the Israeli captives with them.
“Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen,” Max Blumenthal writes in The Grayzone.
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, Blumenthal notes, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army.
Escapa told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers.
Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans, following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians.
The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on Aug. 1, 2014, captured an Israeli officer, Lt. Hadar Goldin. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles and shells on the area where he was being held. Goldin was killed along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.
Israelis who cheer on the Palestinian nightmare will soon endure a nightmare of their own.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Israel’s US-sponsored massacre in Gaza is much bigger than a mere “war between Israel and Hamas”.
Apartheid Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is part of a larger US-led Western neocolonialist war against the indigenous resistance in multiple countries in West Asia.
Israel is also bombing Syria and Lebanon. The US just bombed Syria too. Resistance forces are attacking the US military occupiers in Syria and Iraq. Yemen’s real government (in Sana’a, not the US puppets in Aden) has vowed military support for Palestine. Iran and the Lebanese resistance will defend their sovereignty and the Palestinian people against Western neocolonial aggression. Times have changed. The days of imperialism’s chokehold on the region are numbered.
International law clearly shows that the Palestinian people have a legal right to armed struggle against Israeli colonialism, just as South Africans did against apartheid. Gaza suffers under an illegal Israeli blockade that even a former British prime minister recognized to be a “prison camp”. Journalist Ben Norton looks over the evidence.
“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, […]
“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs to spy on, smear and attack critics, especially American university students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It shows how the Israel lobby uses huge cash donations, often far above the U.S. legal limit, and flies hundreds of members of Congress to Israel for lavish and unpaid vacations at Israeli seaside resorts, bribing the American lawmakers to do Israel’s bidding, including providing military aid such as the $38 billion (over 10 years) that was approved by Congress in 2016. It uncovers Israel’s sleazy character assassination of academics, activists and journalists, its well-funded fake grassroots activism, its manipulation of press coverage, and its ham-fisted attempts to destroy marriages, personal relationships and careers. The film highlights the efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations as tools of radical jihadists, referring, for example, to Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” and claiming that many members of the organization are not actually Jewish. Israel recruits black South Africans into an Israeli front group called Stop Stealing My Apartheid, in a desperate effort to counter the reality of the apartheid state that Israel has constructed. The series documents Israel’s repeated and multifaceted interference in the internal affairs of the United States, including elections; efforts to discredit progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter that express sympathy for the Palestinians; and routine employment of Americans to spy on other Americans. Israel’s behavior is unethical and perhaps illegal. But don’t expect anyone in the establishment or either of the two ruling political parties to do anything about it. It is abundantly clear by the end of the series that they have been intimidated, discredited or bought off.
“Imagine if China was doing this, if Iran was doing this, if Russia was doing this?” Ali Abunimah, the author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, says in the film. “There would be uproar. You would have Congress going off to them. You would have hearings.”
Those of us who denounce and expose the Israeli crimes committed against Palestinians are intimately familiar with the sordid and nefarious tactics of the Israel lobby. The power of the film series is that in dealing with the reporter—a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld, who goes by the name Tony in the film and poses as a pro-Israel student—major figures within the Israel lobby candidly explain and expose their massive covert campaign in the United States. There is no plausible deniability. And this is why Israel worked so hard to stop the film from being broadcast.
Clayton Swisher, who directed the series, wrote in the liberal Jewish newspaper The Forward that leaders from the Israel lobby met with the state of Qatar’s registered agent and lobbyist, a former aide to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz named Nick Muzin, to “see if he could use his ties with the Qataris to stop the airing.” Qatar funds Al-Jazeera. Muzin told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “he was discussing the issue with the Qataris and didn’t think the film would broadcast in the near future.” An anonymous source told Haaretz that “the Qatari emir himself helped make the decision” to spike the film.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates severed ties with Qatar in June 2017 and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Persian Gulf state. They accuse Doha of supporting terrorism and radical Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The four states have issued a list of demands for re-establishing ties that include Qatar’s shutting down Al-Jazeera, along with severing relations with Iran. Qatar has appealed to the United States to intercede and has, as part of this effort, reached out to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States for support. American Jewish leaders, including the former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have met with the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and have discussed with him what they describe as the network’s “anti-Semitism.” It is widely believed the series was sacrificed by Qatar in an effort to placate the Israel lobby and get its support for an end to the sanctions, although the blockade remains in force.
Episode 1
The series exposes how Israeli intelligence services monitor American critics of Israel and feeds real-time information about them to American Jewish organizations.
“We are for example in the process of creating a comprehensive picture of the campuses,” Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, tells a gathering of pro-Israel activists in the film. “If you want to defeat a phenomenon you must have the upper hand in terms of information and knowledge.”
The Israeli government operates Israel Cyber Shield, a civil intelligence unit that collects and analyzes BDS activities and coordinates attacks against the BDS movement.
“We are giving them data—for example, one day Sima’s deputy is sending me a photo. Just a photo on Whatsapp,” Sagi Balasha, who was CEO of the Israeli-American Council from 2011 to 2015, says when speaking on an Israeli-American Council panel. “It’s written ‘Boycott Israel’ on the billboard.”
He shows a picture of a roadside billboard that reads: “BOYCOTT ISRAEL UNTIL PALESTINIANS HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS. StopFundingApartheid.org.”
“In a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, people, and even their names, and where they live,” says Balasha, who now works with cyber-intelligence organizations that target BDS activists. “We gave it back to the ministry, and I have no idea what they did with this. But the fact is, three days later there were no billboards.”
“We use all sorts of technology,” Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, says in the film. “We use corporate-level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence software. Almost all of this happens on social media, so we have custom algorithms and formulae that acquire this stuff immediately.”
“Generally, within about 30 seconds or less of one of these things popping up on campus, whether it’s a Facebook event, whether it’s the right kind of mention on Twitter, the system picks it up,” says Baime. “It goes into a queue and alerts our researchers and they evaluate it. They tag it, and if it rises to a certain level, we issue early-warning alerts to our partners.”
Those recruited by the Israel lobby, including the undercover Al-Jazeera reporter in the documentary, are sent to training sessions such as Fuel the Truth. The film records a session in which trainees watch a video of Palestinian children as the narrator says, “Children are taught in UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] Palestinian schools to hate Jews.” The trainees are told that scenes of devastation in Gaza are, in fact, misrepresented images disseminated by critics from Syria or Iraq. They are instructed in role-playing workshops how to brand all those who criticize Israeli policies as anti-Semites, members of a hate group or self-hating Jews.
The reporter is placed in the so-called war room run by The Israel Project, known as TIP, which monitors American media for stories on Israel and the Palestinians. The goal is “neutralizing undesired narratives.”
“We develop relationships … ,” David Hazony, the managing director of The Israel Project, says about how to influence journalists. “A lot of alcohol to get them to trust us. We’re basically messaging on the following—BDS is essentially a kind of a hate group targeting Israel. They’re anti-peace. We try not to even use the terms because it builds their brand. We just refer to boycotters. The goal is to actually make things happen. And to figure out what are the means of communication to do that.”
The BDS movement, which I support, was formed in 2005. It is an attempt by Palestinian civil rights groups to build a nonviolent international movement to boycott Israel, divest from Israeli companies and eventually impose sanctions—as was done against apartheid South Africa—until basic Palestinian rights under international law are achieved. While the movement has not gained traction financially in the United States, with most colleges and universities refusing to divest, it has been very effective at illuminating the injustices committed against Palestinians by Israel and severely eroded Israel’s credibility and support in the U.S. This ongoing shift in public opinion terrifies Israel, which has poured tremendous resources into crushing the BDS movement.
“Government ministers attacked me in person,” Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement, says in the film. “One of them threatening BDS leaders with targeted civil assassination. Others threatened to revoke my permanent residency [in Israel], along other threats.”
“We suffered from intense denial-of-service attacks, hacking attacks on our website,” Barghouti says. “Israel decided to go on cyber warfare against BDS. Publicly, they said, ‘We shall spy on BDS individuals and networks, especially in the West.’ We have not heard a peep from any Western government complaining that Israel is admitting that it will spy on your citizens. Imagine Iran saying it will spy on British or American citizens. Just imagine what could happen.”
“So, like nobody really knows what we’re doing,” says Julia Reifkind, who was director of community affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “But mainly it’s been a lot of research, like monitoring BDS things and reporting it back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Like making sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need a lot of research done and stuff like that. When they talk about it in the Knesset, we’ve usually contributed to what the background information is. I’m not going to campuses. It’s more about connecting organizations and I guess campuses, providing resources and strategy if students need it.”
“I write a report and give it to my boss, who translates it,” Reifkind says. “It’s really weird. We don’t talk to them on the phone or email. There’s a special server that’s really secure that I don’t have access to because I’m an American. You have to have clearance to access the server. It’s called Cables. It’s not even the same [word translated] in Hebrew, it’s like literally ‘Cables.’ I’ve seen it. It looks really bizarre. So, I write reports that my boss translates into the cables and sends them. Then they’ll send something back. Then he’ll translate it and tell me what I need to do.”
“Is the Israeli Embassy trying to leverage faculty?” Tony, the undercover reporter, asks her.
“Yeah,” she says. “We are working with several faculty advocacy groups that kind of train faculty, and so we are helping them a little bit with funding, connections, bringing them to speak, having them to speak to diplomats and people at the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] that need this information. So, I want to be that resource to show students what we’re doing, to see what you’re doing, here’s some information if you need anything at all. We can connect you. Just kind of be that person there for you.”
Reifkind was president of the pro-Israel group at the University of California at Davis and worked closely with the Israel lobby to attempt to crush the BDS movement on campus, especially after Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) brought a divestment motion to the student senate.
“We knew they were going to win because the entire student senate was all pro-BDS,” she says. “They ran for that purpose and won for that purpose. We have been pushed out of student government for months.”
Reifkind and a few supporters went to the senate meeting where the vote was scheduled.
“We have been ignored and disrespected year after year, but we have never been silenced,” she tells the student gathering. “We are a beacon of peace and inclusion on a campus plagued by anti-Semitism.”
“The intolerance that spawned this [divestment] resolution is the same kind of intolerance that spawned anti-Semitic movements throughout history,” she shouts.
She and her handful of supporters walk out, an action they had agreed on in advance and then carefully filmed.
The passing of the BDS motion at UC Davis set the gears of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in motion.
“That day all of us released like 50 op-eds in major news sources so that when people made a hashtag, like a whole thing trending, so when people opened their Facebooks it wouldn’t be them celebrating their victory,” Reifkind says in the film. “It would be us sharing our stories. Once it blew up, then random people like The Huffington Post contacted me and was like, “Do you have anything to say?” And I was like, ‘Conveniently, I wrote an op-ed two weeks ago just in case.’ ”
Israel and its surrogates in the United States used their considerable resources to carry out vicious and anonymous personal attacks against the campus BDS activists at UC Davis, calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas sympathizers” who support Sharia on campus. The lobby also skillfully framed the narrative in the national media, claiming falsely that the pro-Israel students were forced out of the meeting room.
“Pro-Israel students were taunted by pro-Hamas students after an anti-Israel vote passed on campus,” says an announcer on Fox News as a caption underneath video reads, “RUNNING RAMPANT: UC Davis Plagued by Anti-Semitic Feelings.” “And right after the vote passed, a student senator posted this on Facebook, ‘Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis. Brb [be right back] crying over the resilience.’ ”
Shortly after the vote, Jewish students said they found two swastikas painted on their fraternity house in Davis. The media, tipped off, was at the fraternity house almost immediately. The BDS activists were blamed for the graffiti.
The film shows a CBS 13 news clip.
Television reporter: “Pro-Israel students said they feared recent events would lead to this.”
UC Davis male student: “This has been sort of a bad week to be Jewish on campus.”
Television reporter: “After years of heated meetings, the student body passed a resolution Thursday, urging UC Davis to end any affiliation with companies that support Israel.”
Episode 2
Another UC Davis male student, speaking in front of one of the swastikas: “So, this is not out of the blue. We’re pretty sure this is directly related.”
“StandWithUs helped us a little bit in terms of actual research on the speech,” Reifkind says in referring to her comments before the student senate. “They gave us some legal research type stuff. I’m always biased and want to work with AIPAC. They kind of helped, more like mold support. And David Projecthelped us a little bit. It was more help like gaining contacts in the media world. I guess we needed money to pay for someone to film the speech. We had a Davis Faculty for Israel group, and they were hugely helpful to us. Some of them were retired lawyers, they’d write legal documents for us. They knew the administration. They were tenured. They had pull.”
“After looking back on everything, I feel a little creepy because of what happened after the vote,” says Marcelle Obeid, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. “People who were affiliated with the [pro-Palestinian] group were just smeared and had to deal with these very personal crises—the world calling us terrorists, the world thinking that we were this spiteful hate group. It’s pretty unequivocal how organized they were, how brutal and ruthless that narrative was, and how it affected us.”
The Electronic Intifada’s Abunimah says,
“There’s an intensive effort by Israel and pro-Israel groups to get governments, universities, legislative bodies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism.”
“They have created this perverse definition of anti-Semitism where calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to have equal rights is somehow an attack on Jews,” he says. “They’re trying to get this pushed into official definitions. This has been a key goal of the Brandeis Center so they can go after people who are advocating for equality and bring them up on charges that they’re actually anti-Semitic bigots.”
“You have to show that they’re racist hate groups, that they are using intimidation to get funded, and to consistently portray them that way.”
But despite its campaign, Israel is acutely aware that it is losing the public relations war, especially among the young.
“The polling isn’t good,” David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, which combats BDS on American campuses, says in the film. “And all of you probably know that if you look at the polls, the younger you get on the demographic scales, the lower support for Israel is. … It seems to be achieving its goals. I think it threatens future American support for Israel. Younger people are leaving college less sympathetic to Israel than when they entered.”
And many of these young people are Jewish, finding their identity and meaning in values that Israel refuses to uphold.
“The work that Jewish Voice for Peace does is grounded in Jewish tradition, the most basic Jewish and human values that every single person has inherent worth and dignity and should be treated with respect,” Rabbi Joseph Berman says in the film. “We then see what’s happening to Palestinians, the occupation, the displacement, the inequality, and say we need to end these things.”
But while Israel may be losing in the court of public opinion, it tightly embraces elected officials in the United States, where legalized bribery is institutionalized.
“Does the war of ideas matter?” asks Eric Gallagher, who was a director at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. That’s what I’m proud to have been a part of for so long. My job was basically to convince students that participating in the war of ideas on campuses is actually a distraction. You can hold up signs and have rallies on campus, but the Congress gets $3.1 billion a year for Israel. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress. Congress is where you have leverage. So, you can’t influence the president of the United States directly, but the Congress can.”
“What the lobby is all about is to make sure that Israel gets special treatment from the United States, forever,” John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” says in the film.
Mearsheimer says,
“What AIPAC does is it makes sure that money is funneled your way if you’re seen as pro-Israel, and it will go to significant lengths to make sure that you stay in office if you continue to be staunchly pro-Israel.”
“What happens is Jeff [Talpins] meets with congressmen in the backroom, tells them exactly what his goals are,” David Ochs, founder of HaLev, says of the pro-Israeli hedge fund manager Jeff Talpins and how politicians receive sums of as much as $200,000 from the Israel lobby. “And by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million. Basically, they hand an envelope with 20 credit cards and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit card for $1,000 each.’ ”
“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,” Mearsheimer says. “And support that person very generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”
“They have questionnaires,” recalls former U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from northern Virginia who was in the House from 1991 to 2015. Moran, who opposed the 2002 congressional resolution to invade Iraq, became a target for the Israel lobby, which pushed hard for the war. “Anyone running for Congress is required [by the lobby] to fill out a questionnaire. And they [AIPAC] evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of [those questions]. And then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC support, then more often than not you’re going to win.”
“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume, by AIPAC,” Moran says. “He warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the Post. Sure enough, The Washington Post editorialized brutally. Everyone ganged up.”
There is a screen shot of a Washington Post headline: “Sorry, Mr. Moran, You’re Not Fit For Public Office.”
Character assassination is a common tactic used by the Israel lobby against its critics. Bill Mullen, a professor of American studies at Purdue University, has been a campaigner for the BDS movement for years. His wife was sent a link to a website containing a letter addressed to her.
“It was a Sunday,” he says. “I was in the kitchen. My partner was in the living room with my daughter. Came in with her laptop and said, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ This letter, reported to be by a former student, said she had been sexually harassed by me. She had found other students at Purdue who have had the same experience. And she was writing this letter to tell their story. Within a very short time, within about 48 hours, we were able to establish that these multiple sites that were attacking me had been taken out [created] almost at the same time. And that they were clearly the work of the same people. One of the accounts said, in the process of supposedly putting my hand on her, I invited her to a Palestine organizational meeting. Well, I thought, ‘You’re sort of putting your cards on the table there,’ whoever you are.”
“With the anti-Israel people, what we found has been most effective, in the last year, you do the opposition research,” says Baime, the Israel on Campus Coalition official. “Put up an anonymous website. Then put up targeted Facebook ads. Every few hours you drip out a new piece of opposition research, it’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down or they spend time investigating it and responding to it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. That’s incredibly effective.”
“It was really an attempt, by people who didn’t know us, ‘Maybe I can destroy this marriage at the very least,’ ” Purdue’s Mullen says. “ ‘Maybe I can cause them horrendous, personal suffering.’ The same letter purporting to me harassment, sent to my wife, used the name of our daughter. I think that was the worst moment. We thought, ‘These people will do anything. They’re capable of doing anything.’ ”
Perhaps the film’s greatest investigative coup is the unwitting disclosure by Eric Gallagher at The Israel Project that the hedge fund manager Adam Milstein is “the guy who funds” the anonymous Canary Mission website. The website provides the names, backgrounds and photos of students, professors, invited speakers and organizations that are allegedly tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism through their support for Palestinian rights.
“There’s a guy named who you might want to meet,” Gallagher says to Tony about Adam Milstein. “He’s a convicted felon. That’s a bad way to describe him. He’s a real estate mogul. When I was working with him at AIPAC, I was literally emailing back and forth with him while he was in jail. He’s loaded. He’s close to half a billion dollars.”
Milstein was convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for three months in 2009. The Israeli-American Council, which he leads, funds numerous pro-Israel organizations: Milstein also sits on the boards of AIPAC, StandWithUs and the Israel on Campus Coalition. He is close to billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the wealthiest donor to the pro-Israel lobby and the largest donor to the Trump campaign.
The promotional video for the Canary Mission, played in the film, says: “A few years later, these individuals are applying for jobs in your companies … ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”
“It was shattering to me because I had to look for a job, I had to start my life,” Obeid from UC Davis says. “And now I had this website smearing my name before I even got a chance to make a name for myself.”
“Somebody did contact my employer and asked for me to be fired based on my pro-Palestine activism,” says Summer Award, who campaigned at the University of Tennessee for Palestinian equal rights. “They said if they continued to employ me, their values are anti-Semitic. It can be really scary at first. I was mostly harassed via Twitter. They were tweeting me every two or three days. They take screen shots, even way back to my Facebook pictures that don’t even look like me anymore. Just digging and digging through my online presence.”
Israel’s moral bankruptcy is powerfully exposed in one of the last scenes in the film. Tony joins an “astroturf” protest organized by the Hoover Institution. Those in the protest have been paid to travel on a bus to George Mason University to disrupt a conference of Students for Justice in Palestine. They are coached by Lerman Mazar, the StandWithUs director of legal affairs, in what to shout.
“If you do happen to speak with any reporters just stay on message,” Mazar tells her lackluster protesters. “And what is the message? SJP is a ….”
“Hate group,” the protesters answer feebly.
*
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Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Israel has been branded an “illegal state” by the leader of Spain’s third-largest party, Podemos, for conducting an apartheid-like massacre at the Gaza fence bordering Palestine.
“We need to act more firmly on an illegal country like Israel,” Iglesias Turrion told Spanish RTVE channel. Accusing the country of violating international law and resorting to what he called apartheid-like policies, the leader of the left-wing party questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
“Israel’s actions are illegal. The apartheid policies of the state of Israel are illegal,” the politician said, adding that when it comes to international politics he and his party would continue to “defend international rights.”
Iglesias Turrion’s comments came mere days after a local fraction of Podemos on Valencia’s city counci “condemned” Israel’s illegal assassinations and declared that the third-largest Spanish city would be an “Israeli apartheid-free zone” from now on.
Valencia’s condemnation of disproportionate violence against Palestinians and the decision to refrain from any contact with Tel Aviv was supported by other Spanish cities, including Madrid, Barcelona and Andalusia, which decided to distance themselves from Israel in an expression of solidarity with the “boycott Israel“ movement.
While the number of casualties on the Israeli-Palestinian border is over 120, Israel has been trying to legitimize its bloodshed by portraying it as a lawful response to the presumed Palestinian violence and Israel’s attempt to protect its borders.
However, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that no Palestinian was killed “intentionally” and that “people died accidentally” revealed a disturbing inconsistency with an earlier statement by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Tel Aviv’s oppression of the Palestinians, along with the US’ controversial decision to move its embassy to the disputed city of Jerusalem, have been openly condemned by the EU. Seeing no better solution to stop bloodshed at the Gaza border, the European Union, represented by Federica Mogherini, has insisted on a two-state solution with Jerusalem remapped as the capital of “both of the state of Israel and the state of Palestine.”
The BDS movement is succeeding. Boycott everything Israeli until it ends the current Apartheid and genocide of Palestinians! Relocate Israel to Florida!
An overwhelming 64 percent of the students voted for pulling out of Hyundai, Boeing, and the Israeli national water carrier Mekorot.
In a major win for the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, BDS movement, students at the Barnard College, an elite women’s liberal arts college in New York City with a high percentage of Jewish students, have voted to divest from eight companies that do business in Israel.
An overwhelming 64 percent of the students voted for pulling out of Hyundai, Boeing and the Israeli national water carrier Mekorot, which according to the BDS movement’s website, practices “water apartheid for Palestinians.”
“Mekorot steals water from Palestinian aquifers, supplies water to illegal settlements and sells Palestinians their own water, often at exorbitant prices,” the campaign says on its website adding that it has been accused of violating international law.
The referendum was brought forth by the Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine and mentioned ways these companies “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”
So far, no university has ever divested from Israel but the students at Barnard are hoping that Barnard college may make an exception and be a bellwether.
“If Barnard, the most selective women’s college in the nation, divests, it will influence other schools,” SJP organizer Caroline Oliver stated, according to Forward news outlet.
“These things do matter, they influence how people think on campus,” the president of the pro-Israel club Aryeh, Albert Mishaan, told the Forward Tuesday. “These victories, however symbolic, become the next jumping-off point for further anti-Israel campaigns.”
Barnard has approximately 850 Jewish students, out of a total undergraduate population of around 2,500. Some 1,153 participated in the vote.
Like its predecessor movement decades ago in South Africa, assessing the success of BDS against Israel today necessarily rubs up against the tension between Israeli hasbara (propaganda) and its reality as an effective organizing tool against it throughout the world.
Though Israel has repeatedly claimed BDS has proven to be a failed venture, it’s a contention very much in desperate search of fact. Indeed, one need only look at the hundreds of millions of dollars that Israel has spent in various anti-BDS efforts to discern that its impact is not just productive, but poses a dynamic threat to the status quo ante of the state.
Why else would it continue to invest such large, indeed, increasing amounts of money against a movement that it asserts has had no cognizable impact upon its policies or its future?
To be sure, Israel has spent vast sums of money on anti-BDS lobbyists and publicity and on a veritable army of social media trolls used to promote fantasy as desperate push back against the truthful and appealing fact laden argument and results of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
It has expanded its use of public relations and law firms throughout the world in an effort to silence the movement through attacks on academic freedom, faculty and students and by legislative fiat designed to criminalize, sanction and otherwise deter persons or groups that engage in support for the BDS effort.
To the extent that pro Israeli lobbyists such as AIPAC have been able to purchase some state and federal anti-BDS legislative enactments in the United States, ultimately they will prove to be, of no moment, costly pyrrhic victories as courts strike them down as unconstitutional infringement upon free speech and association.
Further evidence of BDS achievement can be found through Israel’s dramatic increase in the use of travel and immigration bans to sanitize and control the debate over its domestic agenda.
Of late, thousands of Jews involved in the worldwide BDS movement have been banned from traveling to Israel. This unprecedented step demonstrates Israel fears BDS as a powerful global movement which could sway its domestic policy debate if activist Jews were permitted to enter the state. Ultimately, suppression of contentious ideas is the best evidence that the message itself is one the censor’s pen fears most.
In other ways Israel’s well-founded fear of BDS is conspicuous. Thus, while its machinery of censorship has long hidden behind the talisman of national security to control the publication of so-called military activity, it has expanded exponentially to now include information about the growth and efficacy of the BDS movement worldwide.
Indeed, attempts to silence the discussion of BDS success have become increasingly widespread in the massive world of social media. Whether by “voluntary” compliance of social networks or through legislative enactments of the Knesset, here, too, Israel seeks to downplay the achievement of BDS at, literally, the very moment it expands its assault upon it.
It takes little observation to see the palpable disconnect between Israel’s bullish claims that BDS poses no challenge to the course of its domestic strategy and the marked reality it sees as the mounting voice of BDS becomes a dramatic threat to those very policies.
Israel’s desperate, knee-jerk response to a purely peaceful international boycott speaks powerfully about its success in exposing not just the tailored and false Israeli narrative, but its significant impact on various aspects of its society including economic, social and political norms.
As so much the arsonist pouring gasoline on the flames while shouting fire, fire, fire, Israel’s attempt to silence internal political discourse and debate over the rights and freedom of Palestinians by seeking to curb those Jews who choose to partake in it, is destined to fail.
In point of fact, ultimately, it will only serve to expand opposition to Israeli policies among growing numbers of so-called Diaspora Jews who historically have served as a blind rubber stamp to its agenda.
If the BDS movement presents any weakness to date, it is that some of its advocates have conflated participation in geo-political support for a boycott effort with personal empowerment to seek to define, at times dictate, the nature of resistance on the ground, in occupied Palestine.
Thus, some movements and individual activists, particularly among Jewish supporters have used the BDS platform to argue that resistance to Israeli oppression in Palestine must necessarily be limited to individual acts of non-violence or peaceful mass protest alone.
In deigning to “legitimatize” and promote one form of resistance, to the exclusion of all others, advocates of such politically correct dogma subvert, indeed weaken, the core intent of BDS- namely that of an international movement designed to pressure Israel, as an adjunct to resistance in Palestine, as determined and defined solely by Palestinians themselves.
BDS was calculated to serve as an international movement to pressure from the outside an otherwise intransigent Israeli state and body politic. To some, however, it has apparently evolved to provide “entitlement” as full and equal partners in a decision-making process that is not theirs to partake in let alone to decide.
As with all international human rights movements and struggles, this disconnect is not one beyond repair. Ultimately, it will be overcome as the BDS movement continues to grow and mature.
Diaspora Jews
Today, there are twice as many Jews living in New York City than in any city of Israel. As a whole, there are more Jews who live outside of Israel than within it.
Historically, almost all the world’s Jewry has supported Israel as so much a rite of passage from childhood when, beginning long ago, parents and grandparents spoke with glowing praise of a Jewish state built of principled hard work… anchored by democratic ideal.
It was a lie. A grand, perverse lie; one passed with success, in silence, among Diaspora Jews who knew nothing but families and lives built largely of tradition and belief, insulated and isolated from the appalling reality of a far-off Israeli state ripped from the age-old land and history that was, and remains, Palestine.
If truth is the ultimate linchpin of freedom, for some, calculated falsehood has proven to be an accomplished segue between manipulated historical fact and unworthy political survival. Nowhere is that more manifestly apparent, or proven, than it has been with regard to the grand sale of Israel.
In this tale, Israel provides to Jews the hope of a place to one day visit or live, to spend time and passage with those of “shared belief” or, in times of need, to find refuge from a seeming repetitive, cruel history that has sought to punish them in many places… for little more than being Jews.
Born in a time where tailored controlled verse was so much the rule and technology of the day, for decades Zionists successfully sold the narrative of an enlightened state under siege; a small, idealistic pond surrounded by an enormous voracious sea of enemies hell-bent on its destruction.
For children in Hebrew schools throughout the world, be they from the most orthodox of families to those who embraced Reform Judaism to others anchored somewhere in between, the idea of an unbreakable birth-bond between them and Israel became the driving primer of each day.
At yearly festivals, prayers sought to connect today’s families with Jews of a distant millennium together with those who live an essentially state-defined life of Judaism in Israel, one far removed from the theological underpinning of its birth.
From these Zionist sacraments, it was expected, indeed, became the almost preordained norm, that Jews outside of Israel were obligated to lend their obedient voice and moral and financial support to a state most knew nothing about other than the carefully crafted message passed down from generation to generation.
Wars came and went with Israeli figures elevated to iconic stature built from little more than body counts meted out by them, and their minion, upon largely defenseless civilians.
Over time, with doublespeak in the lead, no outrage proved beyond the pale. A brutal occupation became a necessary, but tempered, security step; apartheid a misunderstood gesture to enable Jews and Palestinians to pursue and strengthen their unique identities and faith, among themselves, in safety; embargoes of food, medicine and water a minimal construct to prevent the introduction of weapons of terror. And so it goes, on and on and on. An institutional state of successful rewrite that has long controlled the storyline that defined it.
As with all myth, sooner or later reality swallows a sculpted sale… be it of the moment, the person or the state. In this case, for Diaspora Jews, a reckoning with painful truth was to come… and now grows, day by day, in particular among a generation of millennials weaned from dutiful support for a mythical place and time that did not, and does not, exist.
For a generation of Jews born against the pall of the atrocities of Deir Yassin and a hundred other ravaged, age-old Palestinian villages, the Hollywood classic “Exodus” proved to be a quixotic lure. After all, who could withstand the good looks and charisma of Paul Newman or Sal Mineo.
For them, the desperate flight from the strangle of genocide to the welcome and safe arms of their own “homeland” was a tale that echoed throughout Jewish communities of the day with scant second thought or challenge. To do so was rank heresy.
For those of us who came of age later, during the militant days of the US civil rights and anti war movements, the journey from obedient cheer to unbridled challenge proved to be an essential leap of faith that moved many from complacency to confrontation. For some Jews of the time, the ring of challenge necessarily meant a de nova look at long settled misconceptions about just what Israel was, indeed, had always been. It was not a pretty picture.
For more than a few, it set in motion a life-long examination that often stumbled for want of fresh eyes or reliable information. Decades away from cell phones, YouTube, the internet, and alternative news sources, we were largely driven by information cast by but a hand full of structured reports within acceptable margins controlled by a few major media outlets.
Indeed, when it came to Israel, ours was not a generation moved by the reality of bombings, assassinations or collective punishment that unfolded in virtual time for all to see. To the contrary, we were force-fed the dreamy tempt of socialist kibbutzim bringing forth life from a barren desert… only later to learn that its sanded base was but a thin windblown veneer over the rubble of destroyed Palestinian villages and the skeletal remains of children.
Lest there be any failed memory or fidelity on our part, once a year, tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors appear at memorials in Israel for those left behind, only later to be returned to the darkness of their own abject poverty. And who can forget the grandmotherly smile of Prime Minister Golda Meir wrapped in her apron preparing blintzes for guests only later to proclaim, “there is no such thing as a Palestinian…[it’s] not as though there was a Palestinian people… and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them… they did not exist.”
Today, the Jewish community in the United States is very different from the one that I was reared in. Generations have come and gone where the prettied-up narrative has long since been replaced by the reality of an open and honest examination, especially among young American Jews, of a state built of brazen land theft and ethnic cleansing; one maintained by occupation and apartheid punctuated by very public, periodic bursts of mindless death and destruction.
In the internet age, it is simply no longer possible to suppress or recast the horror of Palestinian life under the brutal control of an Israeli state that has long since held itself out as beyond the reach of international or humanitarian law in its drive to cleanse Palestine of its entire indigenous population. Today, this reality moves a generation of young Diaspora Jews in ways over fundamental human rights and social justice long ignored or rationalized away by their parents and grandparents.
Whether it’s the reality of Jewish picnickers overlooking Gaza and applauding with the blast of each phosphorous bomb exploding on civilians below, the death of infants for want of energy for incubators, mass incarceration of Palestinian children without formal charge or trial, the murder of defenseless unarmed demonstrators, rampaging “settlers” screaming death to Arabs or elected Palestinian “Israelis” ejected from the Knesset for daring to challenge the political rampage of its Jewish majority, the daily nightmare that is Palestine increasingly resonates with anger and resistance among millennial Jews who shout, “not in our name.”
For decades Israel came to depend upon Diaspora Jews for political, economic and moral support that was provided without question or challenge as so much primordial identification. Those days are gone. In demonstrations, meeting halls, academia, and through alliances with other social justice groups, a new generation of informed and outraged Jews has, at long last, rejected the notion of a Jewish state built on the back of endless Palestinian suffering and injustice. Indeed, more than a few challenge the very legitimacy of the state of Israel.
The idea of unconditional support for an authoritarian Jewish state has lost its long secure place as increasing numbers of millennial Jews see, and rightly so, silence as willing complicity.
The closure of Gaza is now more than a decade old as millions are held hostage, daily, to a cruel and systematic attack on their very existence. The occupation is more than fifty years old. Throughout Palestine, not a day passes without a new and very public Israeli outrage.
For Diaspora Jews, the battle against ruthless Israeli hegemony will neither be easy nor painless. At times, it will echo with the determined and peaceful call of BDS. Some will be drawn to the barricade of militant resistance and, perhaps, pay a terrible price for that step. Still, others will preach to the uncertain through prose or poetry that resonates with the sweet lyric of freedom.
Resistance demands determined diversity. It is long. It is hard. It is costly. For eleven million stateless Palestinians there is no alternative until justice be had.
Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – Israel has published a list of 20 international groups whose members will be barred from entering the country due to their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The so-called blacklist, which was released on Sunday by Israel’s strategic affairs ministry, includes organisations based in a number of European countries, as well as the United States, Chile and South Africa.
The BDS movement is a Palestinian-led nonviolent campaign launched more than a decade ago seeking to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. It demands equal rights for Palestinians by putting pressure on the Israeli government via economic and cultural boycotts.
Israel has long tried to to squash the movement, and Sunday’s move is seen as a continuation of a March 2017 decision to amend its entry law, permitting Israeli authorities to bar entrance to activists who promote the boycott of Israel or its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s strategic affairs minister, called the newly-published BDS registry “another step in our work to thwart anti-Israel boycott organisations”.
‘BDS blacklist’
According to Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs, the banned groups are:
Europe:
AFPS (The Association France Palestine Solidarite)
BDS France
BDS Italy
ECCP (The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine)
FOA (Friends of Al Aqsa)
IPSC (Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign)
Norge Palestinakomitee (The Palestine Committee of Norway)
Palestinagrupperna i Sverige (PGS- Palestine Solidarity Association in Sweden)
PSC (Palestine Solidarity Campaign)
War on Want
BDS Kampagne
United States:
AFSC (American Friends Service Committee)
AMP (American Muslims for Palestine)
Code Pink
JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace)
NSJP (National Students for Justice in Palestine)
USCPR (US Campaign for Palestinian Rights)
BNC (BDS National Committee)
Latin America:
BDS Chile
Africa:
BDS South Africa
“The State of Israel will actively prevent such groups from spreading their falsehoods and odious methods from within the country,” he said in a statement on Sunday.
‘A tactic to silence people’
Israel’s move elicited a variety of responses from the targeted groups, with some expressing disappointment and condemnation, and others hailing it as a “clear victory” for the BDS movement.
Shamiul Joarder, head of public affairs at Friends of Al Aqsa (FOA), one of the banned groups, said the list was evidence that “BDS is working”.
“Israel sees this as a deterrent, but I think that people will be even more dedicated to the cause,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that such policies could end up having positive effects for the movement.
Calling the move “a tactic to silence people”, Joarder said the list was meant to “intimidate our supporters and members” and to “scare people from being active and resisting the occupation”.
Also included in the list is the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 partly for its work rescuing and providing relief to Jews during the Holocaust.
Responding to the ban, the AFSC said in a statement that it had been supporting nonviolent resistance for more than 100 years -and had no plans of stopping now.
“We answered the call for divestment from apartheid South Africa and we have done the same with the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions from Palestinians who have faced decades of human rights violations,” said Kerri Kennedy, AFSC’s associate general-secretary for international programmes.
“We will continue to stand up for peace and justice in Israel, occupied Palestine, and around the world.”
‘We will not be bullied’
A spokesperson for Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs told Al Jazeera that the list did not represent a “blanket ban” on all members of the organisations, but the entry of their members would be considered on a “case by case basis”.
Those who would be banned, the spokesperson said, were “the main activists who have demonstrated ongoing, consistent and significant action to promote and advance the boycott of Israel”.
The spokesperson added that an inter-ministerial committee was “working out the criteria” that would necessitate barring an activist’s entry into Israel.
But activists said the new policy represented a “broader crackdown” on nonviolent Palestinian rights movements aimed at holding Israel accountable to international law.
Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which was also included in the list, said Israel’s move was “disconcerting but not surprising”.
“We will not be bullied by these attempts to punish us for a principled political stance that increasing numbers of Jews and non-jews support worldwide,” she said in a statement, while noting Israel’s “erosion of democratic norms” and its “rising anxiety about the power of BDS as a tool to demand freedom”.
Ahmad Tibi, a member of the Arab Joint List, a coalition of parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Knesset, said it was ironic that Israel – a self-proclaimed “Jewish state” – is permitting figures such as Austrian far-right leader Hans-Christian Strache to visit the country while banning the members of JVP.
“You cannot ban groups who are against settlements, occupation and apartheid and still call yourself a democracy,” Tibi told Al Jazeera.
As for Vilkomerson, who has family in Israel, the ban would be a “personal hardship”.
She was quick to add, however, that she was “heartened” by the fact that it signaled “the BDS movement’s growing strength”.
“[I] hope that it will bring the day closer when just as I go to visit my friends and family in Israel, so will Palestinian friends and colleagues be able to return home,” she said.
The short-term policies of the now discredited Netanyahu government that are aligned towards ensuring another war with Hezbollah and Hamas, treat the future of the next generation of both Israelis and Arabs, with complete contempt.
Netanyahu and his cabinet know full well that they are on a deliberate trajectory towards an escalating conflict with the blockaded peoples of Gaza and the West Bank who are forced to exist with virtually no electricity, or power, whilst Israelis in Tel Aviv’s affluent marina playground, in Herzliya, cavort about in their power boats as they plan their next luxury vacation to New York and the capitals of Europe.
Former Palestine is a land where shashlik salad and pitta fill the bellies of soldiers who strut their stuff in the coffee bars fronting Tel Aviv beach whilst the indigenous Arab population continue to live and work, often in darkness, under the heel of the Israeli military occupier.
The incomprehensible factor in this smouldering cauldron of religious, economic and cultural disparity, is the apparent unlimited support from the Diasporas of New York and London, and indeed from the US Congress and the British Parliament, who continue to send money and weapons, by the shipload and plane load, to shore up the occupying regime.
When the war does start: when the nuclear warheads are deployed: when the clouds of deadly radiation are released – they won’t, of course, stop at the Eastern Mediterranean. They will automatically continue north and west to darken the skies over Europe, bringing sickness and inevitable death and suffering to all who will breathe in the cancer of the contaminated air from the Negev-based, nuclear weapons facility in the Israeli desert. Inevitably, the trade winds will eventually push the irradiated rain westwards across the Atlantic, to poison even those who mistakenly thought they would be immune. [Of course, by that time, nobody in NY or London will still be importing diamonds; eating oranges or trying to use a dead cellphone .. they’ll be trying to build nuclear- fallout shelters – unaware that every Israeli family already has one].
That will be the terrifying consequence of today’s unqualified Western support for the occupation of the Holy Land, and the 10-year, inhuman blockade of essential supplies to over half a million Arab families in Gaza, by the Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Featured image is from Adeyinka Makinde.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Particularly in the US and some European States, the Israeli and Zionist versions of history are wide-spread. Israel’s narrative relies on a collection of myths aimed at bringing the moral right and the ethical behavior of the Palestinians into twilight and making their claim to their country appear as illegitimate. Israel’s negation of Palestinian existence in the Land of Palestine is, however, a falsification of history.
“Ten Myths About Israel” came out in Germany in 2016 under the title ” What’s wrong with Israel? The Ten Main Myths of Zionism”. The mainstream media ignored it, which could also be the case in the US. It’s sad but that how media power works in favor of Israel.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who lives in exile in Britain, deals in this book with the myths of Zionism and exposes them as legends consisting of half-truths and fabrications of history. The Zionist narrative has only little to do with historical reality and truth.
The “Running Gag” of the Zionist historical narrative is the story of the “empty land” of Palestine, into which people without a land had finally returned after 2000 years of exile. The slogan of a country without a people, for people without a country, is the most prominent expression of the Zionist mythology. For Pappe, it’s less important whether the Jews existed as a people, rather than that the Zionists deny the existence of a Palestinian population but simultaneously claim that the State of Israel represents all the Jews of the world and does everything for their benefit and acts for them. Such a claim is just as daring as the identification of Zionism with Judaism because it takes Jews hostage for Israel’s despising policy.
The Zionists presented the colonization of Palestine with biblical rhetoric; this served only as a means to an end. The highest prophet of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, even considered Uganda and other places instead of the Zionist Promised Land. Finally, they found their roots in Palestine. “From then on, the Bible became both the justification and the guideline of the Zionist colonization of Palestine,” writes Pappe. He describes Zionism as a “colonial settler movement” and Israel as a “Settler Colonial State.”
The author points out that the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1947/48 was “ethnic cleansing.” Likewise, the 1967 June war, which is also called the Sixth Day War, was not an act of self-defense of the “little David” against an overpowering “Goliath,” but an Israeli attack on which the Israeli security establishment has minutely prepared for years.
The claim of being the “only democracy in the Middle East” is put in the right perspective. Israel resembles rather an “ethnocracy” than a democracy in the classical sense of the meaning. The “peace process,” which was highly praised by the Western political establishment ended in the acceleration of the colonization of Palestine and in the establishment of Palestinian regime that has to do the dirty work for Israeli occupier.
In his book, Ilan Pappe gives his backing for the historical truth that the Israeli political establishment must face if it is interested in peace. Israel’s security establishment abuses Judaism because it equates its Zionist expansionist and oppressive policy with Judaism. Enlightenment is, therefore, more than a necessity, which the book does excellently by deconstructing the mythological web that surrounds the history of the State of Israel.
This book is an absolute must for an interested public, the political and the media class to understand what Israel is all about.
After Butcher Netanyahu failed to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin of abandoning Iran via cessation of Russia’s highly effective armed intervention in Syria, using 5th century events,
… the same Khazarian attack dog is warning Putin that Israel will strike Syria again, even if the apartheid regime has already lost a plane, a few days earlier.
Netanyahu to Putin: Israeli airstrikes in Syria will continue
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he has told Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israeli forces will continue airstrikes in Syria if they deem it necessary.
“If there is feasibility from an intelligence and military standpoint – we attack and so it will continue,” Netanyahu said during a visit to China, adding that he had informed Putin of Israel’s intentions.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli PM also dismissed reports that Russia was insisting that Israel cease its military operations on Syrian territory.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry says that Moscow is relying on Israel keeping in line with agreements reached during Netanyahu’s state visit to Russia earlier this month, when he held extended discussions on Syria with President Vladimir Putin.
“We will judge not by their statements, but by their actions, to what extent our Israeli partners are sticking to these agreements,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow on Wednesday.
On Monday, Syrian President Bashar Assad told visiting Russian MPs that he is counting on Russia to prevent further Israeli attacks on Syrian soil and to help Damascus avoid a full-blown conflict with Tel Aviv.
The same day, Russia’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Gary Koren, to demand explanations for the airstrikes Israel conducted near the Syrian city of Palmyra on Friday morning. Israeli Defence Force (IDF) warplanes hit several targets near Palmyra, allegedly destroying advanced arms provided to the Lebanese militant movement Hezbollah.
Syria’s air defense force fired anti-aircraft missiles at the Israeli planes as they were returning to base. Syrian media reported that one plane was downed, while Israel denied any losses.
Israel also said that it shot down one of the interceptor missiles with its Arrow long-range SAMs, which saw the first-ever use of the system in battle.
After the incident, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened that “next time, if the Syrian aerial defense apparatus acts against our planes, we will destroy it.”
The big question now is: will Trump’s government risks antagonizing Russia for the sake of the Rothschild pet project in the Middle East?
We don’t think so. We expect no attempts which could result to a direct confrontation between the two countries at this point in time. But, what Israel is doing does provide the necessary distraction while the Goldman Sachs operators embed themselves inside the new US administration.
All Donald Trump could do is apply political pressure to anybody who condemns Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Trump Administration Ousts U.N. Official to Protect Israel from Criticism
Glenn Greenwald, March 18 2017, 10:39 p.m.
On Wednesday, a U.N. agency published a report noting that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.” Yesterday, the author of that report, who has served as executive secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA) since 2010, Rima Khalef, resigned after the Trump administration, working in conjunction with Israel, pressured the U.N. secretary-general to demand that she withdraw the report.
Khalef, a Jordanian national who has served in multiple high government positions, refused the demand to repudiate her own report, instead choosing to resign. The report — which was co-authored by the Jewish American Princeton professor and former U.N. official Richard Falk, a longtime critic of Israeli occupation — has now been removed from the UNESCWA website.
Interestingly, Apartheid Israel is something that even some top Israeli officials had already warned about.
Top Israelis Have Warned of Apartheid, so Why the Outrage at a UN Report?
Mehdi Hasan March 22 2017, 8:07 p.m.
IN HIS MEMOIR, the Israeli journalist Hirsh Goodman described how he returned home from the Six Day War in June 1967 to hear the country’s founding father and first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, speak on the radio. “Israel, he said, better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible,” recalled Goodman. “If it did not Israel would soon become an apartheid state.”
Goodman was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa. “That phrase, ‘Israel will become an apartheid state,’ resonated with me,” Goodman wrote. “In a flash I understood what he was saying.”
Yet, Trump’s White House is still following the same policies that its predecessors have all been doing.
So, yes, we could be wrong when we said Trump is not capable of antagonizing Russia, considering the haphazard US bombing operations conducted right now in Raqqa and Mosul, where civilian deaths and dislocation surpassed that of Daesh, and yet the mainstream media conveniently ignore.
Those operations should have the blessings of The Donald. In fact, the Pentagon has lauded the present administration’s quick approval of all their op requests to the White House.
So far, all of these ongoing operations are not making the US much safer, because in the foreseeable future, those children being orphaned right now in Mosul, Raqqa, and Palestine, will become the lone terrorists which will destroy what peace remains in the great land called America.
We will continue looking for clues which could sustain our cautious optimism for this administration.
But, headlines like:
The Kagans are Back, or;
Donald Trump Is Filling Top Pentagon and Homeland Security Positions With Defense Contractors
… seem to ruin the day.
Finally, the alternating US administrations, where one is assigned to organize and unleash terrorism, and the other is tasked to eliminate the problems left by its predecessor, make us and the terrorists alike, all victims of the highly profitable scheme.
A U.N. report published this week accused Israel of imposing an “apartheid regime” of racial discrimination on the Palestinian people. Shortly after its release, the official who approved its publication resigned amid pressure to pull it, and the report has since been withdrawn.
The report, written by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), concluded that “Israel [has] established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole” — a charge Israel vehemently denies.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman likened the report to Der Sturmer, a Nazi propaganda publication that was strongly anti-Semitic.
It is a unique and beneficial position to be in wherein every legitimate criticism of one’s policies is deemed to be racially or politically motivated. In that sense, Israel wants to be ultimately free of criticism, even when the nation commits serious violations of international law. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. has staunchly come to Israel’s defense.
“The United Nations secretariat was right to distance itself from this report, but it must go further and withdraw the report altogether,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said in a statement, as reported by the Independent.
The ESCWA comprises 18 Arab states in Western Asia and has a view of supporting economic and social development in member states, according to its website. The report was prepared at the request of its member states and notes it reflects the views of the authors only. It was also published without any prior consultation with the U.N. secretariat.
Is the report entirely without merit, as the U.S. and Israel would have us believe? According to the report’s abstract, which Anti-Media cited before the publication was pulled:
“A history of war, annexation and expulsions, as well as a series of practices, has left the Palestinian people fragmented into four distinct population groups, three of them (citizens of Israel, residents of East Jerusalem and the populace under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza) living under direct Israeli rule and the remainder, refugees and involuntary exiles, living beyond. This fragmentation, coupled with the application of discrete bodies of law to those groups, lie at the heart of the apartheid regime. They serve to enfeeble opposition to it and to veil its very existence. This report concludes, on the basis of overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid, and urges swift action to oppose and end it.”
South Africa, a country whose infamous history of an apartheid regime shows its people are adept enough to recognize apartheid when they see it, has been a staunch backer of the Palestinian movement for years. South Africa’s International Relations Minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, once famously stated“the Palestinian struggle is our struggle.”
The U.N. report was authored by Richard Falk, a former U.N. human rights investigator for the Palestinian territories, and Virginia Tilley, a professor of political science at Southern Illinois University.
After its publication, U.N. Under-Secretary General and ESCWA Executive Secretary Rima Khalaf resigned amid pressure from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to withdraw it, Reutersreports. She stood by the report, adding, “It was expected that Israel and its allies would put enormous pressure on the United Nations secretary-general to renounce the report.”
The banned UN report published by Under Secretary General Rima Khalaf is no longer on ESCWA’s website. Find out what’s in it & where to read it. Image credit: UN ESCWA.
freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com
Makia Freeman
March 18, 2017
A banned UN report released on March 15th, 2017 has produced a ton of legal and scientific evidence exposing the existence and reality of Israeli apartheid. The banned UN report, entitled Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid: Palestine and the Israeli Occupation, Issue No. 1, was published by a group within the United Nations known as Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). ESCWA is composed of around 50 Middle Eastern nations (excluding Israel) who are known for the opposition to the Zionist regime. What makes this banned UN report unique is that is replete with legal references showing exactly how Israel has been flouting international law in a myriad of ways that “amounts to the commission of a crime against humanity”. Strong words! The report doesn’t hold back the ugly truth. It adopts a scientific approach to testing and enumerating its hypothesis of Israeli apartheid, showing convincingly that Israel uses a number of techniques to ensure Palestinians are discriminated against and denied the full rights and power given to Jewish citizens.
Predictably, the report was “banned” and basically disowned by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and taken off the ESCWA’s website – after intense complaining and lobbying by the Israeli and US. The UN Under Secretary General, Rima Khalaf, who headed ESCWA, was pressured to resign from her posts and ended up doing so. However, she made it clear that she still stood by the accuracy of the report.
Definition of Apartheid
The banned UN report begins by remind us that although apartheid was a word that came out of South Africa, the concept is still very important in any nation or society:
“Although the term “apartheid” was originally associated with the specific instance of South Africa, it now represents a species of crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, according to which:
“The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group …”
Apartheid is woven into the very fabric of Israel itself. No matter which political party holds power, racism and discrimination are institutionalized as public policy and part of the public purpose:
“The Israel Lands Authority (ILA) manages State land, which accounts for 93 per cent of the land within the internationally recognized borders of Israel and is by law closed to use, development or ownership by non-Jews. Those laws reflect the concept of “public purpose” as expressed in the Basic Law. Such laws may be changed by Knesset vote, but the Basic Law: Knesset prohibits any political party from challenging that public purpose. Effectively, Israeli law renders opposition to racial domination illegal.”
Illegal for Anyone to Challenge the Notion of a Jewish State
Did you know that Israel bans politicians from running for election to the Knesset (its Congress or Parliament)?:
“A candidates list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include one of the following:
(1) Negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic State…
Voting rights lose their significance in terms of equal rights when a racial group is legally banned from challenging laws that perpetuate inequality. An analogy would be a system in which slaves have the right to vote but not against slavery.”
Demographic Engineering
Another way they achieve this is through what the report terms as demographic engineering, which is the Zionist attempt to maintain a Jewish majority and hegemony in Israel, while trying to give the (perfunctory) appearance of being open, tolerant and non-discriminatory:
“Demographic engineering is another area of policy serving the purpose of maintaining Israel as a Jewish State. Most well known is Israeli law conferring on Jews worldwide the right to enter Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship regardless of their countries of origin and whether or not they can show links to Israel-Palestine, while withholding any comparable right from Palestinians, including those wits documented ancestral homes in the country.”
Israel’s Essentially Racist Character
The banned UN report further states:
“A principle task of the JA-WZO is to work actively to build and maintain Israel as a Jewish State, particularly through immigration policy:
The mission of gathering in the [Jewish] exiles, which is the central task of the State of Israel and the Zionist Movement in our days, requires constant efforts by the Jewish people in the Diaspora; the State of Israel, therefore, expects the cooperation of all Jews, as individuals and groups, in building up the State and assisting the immigration to it of the masses of the [Jewish] people, and regards the unity of all sections of Jewry as necessary for this purpose.
Such explicit language by the State’s authorized agencies conclusively underlines the State’s essentially racist character.
…
National rights are reserved to Jewish nationality. For instance, the Law of Return serves the “in-gathering” mission cited above by allowing any Jew to immigrate to Israel and, through the Citizenship Law, to gain immediate citizenship. No other group has a remotely comparable right and only Jews enjoy any collective rights under Israeli law.”
Conclusion: Israel’s Identity at the Heart of the Apartheid Crisis
At the core of the matter is Israel’s very identity. It wants to be a Jewish State and a Democratic State. But how is this possible exactly? Being truly democratic equates to allowing all citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, etc. equally partake in your society. Once you try to make a state Jewish or composed of a particular race or religion, it’s no longer open and democratic. Judging by Israel’s laws and the attitudes of leading politicians, it is more important for them to preserve the Jewishness of Israel than the democratic nature of it. Zionist politicians love to boast that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” however as this banned UN report convincingly demonstrates, that claim is highly dubious.
Beneath this tension is another inner struggle which cuts right to the heart of the matter. Can Israeli Jews and Zionists let go of the past and release their identity as victims of the Nazis and the Holocaust, so as to move on and create a better world? What Hitler and the Nazis did the to Jews was surely horrible. However, it is over 70 years since the end of World War 2. Can Jewish Israelis forgive but nor forget? To psychologically attach oneself, individually or collectively, to a past trauma or event is to identify with it – to the point where the individual or collective psyche only sees the world in those terms and unconsciously recreates it. Many people have pointed out how Zionism treats the Palestinians as the Nazis treated the Jews. The victim has become the perpetrator. Beneath this is a deep-seated fear that the they will be attacked and rounded up again. None of this conscious; it’s all operating beneath the surface.
Now, this Zionist and Israeli identity is causing horrible suffering upon the innocent Palestinians, whose land was handed over to the Rothschilds exactly 100 years ago via the British Balfour Declaration. I will finish with a quote attributed to Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, the many who helped Israel get the bomb and who defied JFK and other US Presidents:
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign a contract with Israel. It’s normal: We took their land. It’s true, that it was promised to us by God, but why should they care? Our God is not their God. There were anti-Semites, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was it their fault? They only see one thing: We came and stole their land. Why should they accept that?”
*****
Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news siteThe Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance.
The word resonated loud and clear from South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, widely described as a key architect of apartheid, was the far-right National Party’s propagandist, political strategist and, ultimately, party leader. In 1961, as South African Prime Minister, he noted that Israel was built on land taken ‘from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years.’ The point was to express his approval and to highlight Zionism’s common cause with the Afrikaner pioneers: ‘In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.’
Verwoerd was able to make this diagnosis without needing to live to see the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. Israel’s apartheid foundations were laid in its dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. They were reinforced by the immediate erection of colonial constitutional structures that cemented the exclusion of the colonised.
Since then, Israeli law and policy has only deepened the state apparatus of separation and segregation, discrimination and domination. Over the years, countless activists, authors and artists, as well as leading anti-apartheid figures from South Africa, have referred to Israel’s particular brand of structural discrimination as akin to apartheid. In the last decade, international lawyers have also begun to do likewise, but with reference to the definition of apartheid under international law rather than by analogy to southern Africa.
This week, a report commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) has concluded that ‘Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole’. According to the report, the Israeli regime governing Palestinians is a racial regime of institutionalised domination – the essence of the international legal definition of apartheid. The maintenance of Israel’s exclusionary constitutional character as the state of the Jewish people has entailed a “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people”. It has involved expulsion of Palestinian refugees into exile, discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel as second-class citizens, oppression of Palestinians under occupation; all through a concerted array of law, policy and practice that forges ‘a comprehensive policy of apartheid’.
This finding breaks new ground in the context of UN analysis on Israel/Palestine. Specialised UN bodies – such as the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine – have in recent years categorised Israeli law and policy in terms of racial segregation and apartheid. This framing has been geographically limited to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however – as distinct from inside Israel itself, or Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people writ large.
This was a somewhat necessary distinction, given the UN practice of analysing the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel as two separate territories under international law. But it was also in certain respects an artificial distinction. Much of what renders the situation in the occupied territory as apartheid is the separate and preferential legal system applied to Israeli settlers – a hierarchical legalism which is central to the constitution of Israel itself. Laws on citizenship, residency and family unification, as well as land, planning and housing rights, apply inside Israel to benefit Jewish-Israeli citizens over Palestinians. Those laws are then channeled into the West Bank to further stratify the population there. Colonisers living in the settlements are endowed with legal status and privilege that is denied to the Palestinian population of the same territory.
There are of course differences in the modalities of Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians – depending on whether they are inside Israel, in occupied territory, or in exile. The crucial point that the UN report highlights, however, is that this is nonetheless best viewed as a single overarching institutional regime which discriminates against the Palestinian people as a whole.
For a UN Commission report to state this so clearly, and to theorise Israel as a “racial state”, is significant. A people’s tribunal, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, did arrive at similar conclusions back in 2011. The momentum that this analysis has gathered in official UN settings since then shows the possibilities of an international law from below – one which is not afraid to confront the realities of a state in which increasingly discriminatory legislation has spewed thick and fast from an ascendant far-right.
While the report’s findings do hinge on the legal definition of apartheid, the Commission itself does not have the authority of an international tribunal. The International Court of Justice and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are among the relevant actors when it comes to determining Israel’s state responsibility for an unlawful apartheid regime. The International Criminal Court enters the fray for determining the criminal responsibility of individual Israeli officials for the perpetration of acts of apartheid, as crimes against humanity. Any adjudications from these and other legal institutions can feed into the UN political organs vested with the capacity to impose sanctions and arms embargoes, as was (eventually) done with apartheid South Africa. In this context, the report offers a potential platform for further developments in the political arena of the UN.
A UN spokesperson has said that ‘the report as it stands does not reflect the view of the Secretary-General’. The report made no claim to represent the views of the UN as a whole. It does, however, reflect the views of a regional UN commission, made up of eighteen member states of North Africa and West Asia. And here it is important to remember that the genesis of the UN sanctions and arms embargo against South Africa flowed up from below and inwards from the periphery, not down from on high or out from the core. The Third World states led the charge against apartheid for many years in the face of Western resistance and support for South Africa. It was 1952 when a group of thirteen Arab and Asian states first succeeded in adding ‘The Question of Race Conflict resulting from the policies of apartheid’ to the UN General Assembly’s agenda. It took another 25 years – after multiple abstentions and vetoes by Britain, France and the US, and a rising global social movement against apartheid – before the Security Council eventually imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa.
In the current conjuncture, the significance of this week’s report extends beyond Israel/Palestine. Verwoerd’s National Party is not the only white supremacist political movement to have seen the attraction of Israel’s constitutional structures. The “alt-right” movement in the US is premised on a white nationalism that incorporates very real antisemitic discourse and intimidation among its multiplicity of racisms. At the same time, it admires Israel’s exclusionary policies. Richard Spencer describes the alt-right project as ‘a sort of white Zionism’ and argues, as Omri Boehm has noted, that Israel’s ethnic-based politics is the basis of a strong, cohesive identity which the alt-right is seeking to emulate in the US.
With the alt-right now maintaining a foothold in the White House, it is imperative to think seriously about the apartheid nature of Israel’s constitutional order and about how to deepen anti-racist alliances and solidarities across borders. The Trump/Bannon travel ban agenda of course finds some parallel in Israel’s own long-standing border policies, and comes at a time when Israel has adopted new legislation purporting to ban boycott adherents. In that context, the ESCWA report’s call for member states and civil society to support and ‘broaden support for boycott, divestment and sanctions initiatives’ is another significant political move.
John Reynolds teaches international law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
Report breaks new ground on the UN’s examination of the situation in occupied Palestine by using the word ‘apartheid’.
A new United Nations report accuses Israel of having established “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”.
The publication comes amid renewed debate about whether, through its settlement policy and rejection of Palestinian self-determination, the Israeli government is creating – or even has already created – a de facto “one-state”, which critics warn would constitute a form of apartheid.
It urged governments to “support boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] activities and respond positively to calls for such initiatives”.
The report – Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid – was commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) and launched in Beirut.
John Reynolds, a lecturer in law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, told Al Jazeera the report “breaks new ground in the context of the UN’s analysis of the situation in Palestine”.
Israel’s UN envoy Danny Danon issued a statement condemning the report late on Wednesday.
“The attempt to smear and falsely label the only true democracy in the Middle East by creating a false analogy is despicable and constitutes a blatant lie,” he said.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric, when asked about the report, said it was published without any prior consultations with the UN Secretariat and its views do not reflect those of the secretary-general.
The report was authored by two critics of Israeli state practice: Virginia Tilley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University, and Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.
Noting how “the expert consensus [is] that the prohibition of apartheid is universally applicable and was not rendered moot by the collapse of apartheid in South Africa”, the report argues that Israel is “guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid”, a “crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.
The report is a “detailed analysis of Israeli legislation, policies and practices” that highlights how Israel “operates an apartheid regime”, including through “demographic engineering”.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are described as “subjected to oppression on the basis of not being Jewish”, it said.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem similarly experience “discrimination in access to education, healthcare, employment, residency and building rights”, as well as “expulsions and home demolitions”.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are governed by “military law” alongside Jewish settlers “governed by Israeli civil law”, the report said.
Palestinian refugees and exiles are “prohibited from returning to their homes in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory” on the basis that they “constitute a ‘demographic threat’ and that their return would alter the demographic character of Israel”.
As well as urging governments to back BDS, the report recommends that the UN and its member states should “revive the Special Committee against Apartheid, and the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (1976-1991)”, which would then “report authoritatively on Israeli practices and policies relating to the crime of apartheid”.
The report also suggests an advisory opinion be sought from the International Court of Justice “as to whether the means used by Israel to maintain control over the Palestinian people amount to the crime of apartheid”.
David Keane, associate professor in law at Middlesex University, said the new report differs from previous ones on the subject because it “expressly attaches the apartheid label”.
The report could contribute to an already deteriorating relationship between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the United Nations.
“For Palestinians and their allies, the report will help to provide a solid basis for their work,” Nadia Hijab, executive director of al-Shabaka – The Palestinian Policy Network – told Al Jazeera .
Citing the reputation and credibility of the authors, Hijab described the report as “a clear, concise document” whose recommendations are “timely and much needed”.
(ANTIMEDIA) United Kingdom — Anti-apartheid activist and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, has nominated imprisoned Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouthi, for a Nobel Peace Prize. The first black Archbishop of Cape Town, himself a living symbol of a liberation struggle, was also awarded the prestigious prize in 1984 for his opposition to South Africa’s brutal racist regime.
The African-Anglican leader, who is well known for his message of reconciliation, joins a number of rights groups and politicians in nominating the senior Fatah leader for the prize. In a letter sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, cited byAl Arabiya, Desmond Tutu describes Barghouthi — who is often referred to as “Palestine’s Mandela” — as a symbol of the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom.
On Wednesday, he took to his official Twitter account to make the announcement: “I have nominated imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi for #NobelPeacePrize 2017. For peace and justice,” he wrote.
Barghouthi is widely respected among Palestinians. Arrested in 2002 during the Second Intifada, the senior Fatah official is one of a large number of elected representatives imprisoned by Israel, in what the Archbishop has called “a blatant attack against the Palestinian nation, democracy and rights.”
The phrase, “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” has never been clearer than in Barghouthi’s nomination for the peace prize, as Israel continues to refer to him and the rest of the Palestinian political prisoners as terrorists. But human rights activist Tutu disagrees, and after witnessing the systematic humiliation of Palestinians, previously compared Israel’s treatment of them to the South African regime.
“Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government,” he said.
In a dire reflection of the imprisonment of a nation and the negation of its rights, 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners languish in Israeli jails. Archbishop Tutu claims the freedom of the prisoners is a prerequisite for the freedom of the Palestinian people.
Laying out his reasons for nominating “Palestine’s Mandela,” Barghouthi, for a Nobel Peace Prize, he added:
“I call on the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to seize this occasion to bring attention back to the question of Palestine and to the calls for a just and lasting peace, a prospect Marwan Barghouti continues advocating for despite years of imprisonment and isolation.”
A small scene from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolded last week on a Greek airport runway.Moments before an Aegean Airlines flight was due to take off, three Israeli passengers took secu…
A small scene from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolded last week on a Greek airport runway.
Moments before an Aegean Airlines flight was due to take off, three Israeli passengers took security into their own hands and demanded that two fellow passengers, from Israel’s Palestinian minority, be removed from the plane. By the end of a 90-minute stand-off, dozens more Israeli Jews had joined the protest, refusing to take their seats.
Like a parable illustrating Europe’s bottomless indulgence of Israel, Aegean staff caved in to the pressure and persuaded the two Palestinian men to disembark.
The lack of outcry from Israeli officials should be no surprise. Shortly before the Athens incident, Israel banned a Hebrew novel, Borderlife, from the schools curriculum because it features a romance between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian.
The education ministry said it feared the book would undermine Jewish pupils’ “national-ethnic identity” and encourage “miscegenation”.
As an Israeli columnist observed: “Discouraging ‘assimilation’ is an inseparable part of the Jewish state”. Strict separation operates in the key areas of life, from residence to schooling. As a result, marriages between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, are rare indeed.
It was therefore difficult not to see the paradox in Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments following a shooting by Nashat Melhem that killed three Israelis in Tel Aviv on New Year’s Day.
Attacks of this kind by a Palestinian citizen on Israeli Jews are uncommon and it elicited instant condemnation from the Palestinian leadership. Nonetheless, Netanyahu seized the chance to label as “criminals” the country’s 1.6 million Palestinians.
In a sequel to his notorious election eve statement last year, when he warned that Palestinian voters threatened the result by “coming to the polls in droves”, Netanyahu pledged extra police funds to crack down on the “lawless” minority.
“I will not accept two states within Israel. Whoever wants to be Israeli must be Israeli all the way,” he said.
But in reality there have always been two classes of Israeli, by design.
The search for Melhem ended on Friday with police shooting him dead. In the meantime, his immediate family had been either arrested as accomplices or interrogated at length.
Presumably in an effort to pressure Melhem, the police told his mother they would demolish the family home unless he turned himself in – only Palestinians, not Jews, face house demolitions.
Earlier, when police suspected Melhem was hiding in Tel Aviv, the lodgings of dozens of Palestinian students were raided by officers with weapons drawn, though no search warrants.
At the weekend, Netanyahu conditioned a promised rise in the paltry budgets received by the Palestinian minority on an end to the “lawlessness” in their communities, as though the lack of effective policing of those communities was the responsibility of Palestinian citizens, not the government.
The week-long hysteria contrasted with the handling of another terrible crime, this one committed by Israeli Jews.
In late July, a gang of extremist settlers torched a Palestinian home in the West Bank village of Duma. Three members of the Dawabsheh family, including an 18-month-old baby, burnt to death.
For weeks, in a familiar pattern following settler violence, the investigation made no progress. Then in September, defence minister Moshe Yaalon conceded that the culprits had been identified but the police would make no arrests to avoid exposing their informers.
Only after an international outcry, and Arab legislators threatened to petition the supreme court, did the wheels of law enforcement start to grind.
The attorney general approved the first-ever use of torture – a staple interrogation technique for Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories – on the Jewish suspects.
Prominent Israeli commentators and government ministers have agonised ever since about the abuses faced by these Jewish detainees.
Bezalel Smotrich, an MP, publicly rejected treating the Dawabshehs’ killers as terrorists. Asked in parliament to repudiate Smotrich’s remarks, Netanyahu stepped down from the podium in silence.
No one, of course, has suggested arresting the Jewish suspects’ parents – in one case a settlement rabbi – or demolishing their homes. Settlement seminaries have not been raided, or their students questioned at gun point.
Budgets for the settlements have been rising, with settlers receiving far more government money than Israelis inside Israel’s recognised borders. Their long record of violence and “lawlessness” has made no difference to their funding.
Legal experts now warn that the courts will likely free the main suspects in the Duma killings because their confessions were forced.
Meanwhile, the settler communities from which the men came are unrepentant. A recent wedding video showed guests celebrating the Dawabshehs’ deaths, including a reveller who repeatedly stabbed a photo of the toddler.
Although both settlers and Palestinian citizens face inadequate policing, they do so for very different reasons.
Depriving Palestinian citizens of law enforcement – except when repressing dissent – has left their communities weak and oppressed by crime and guns. For years Netanyahu has ignored pleas from Palestinian leaders for increased gun control – until now, when one of those weapons targeted Jews.
Settlers have also been policed lightly, so long as their violence was directed at Palestinians, whether in the occupied territories or Israel. More than a decade of settler violence – labelled “price-tag” attacks – has gone largely uninvestigated.
The truth is that most Israeli Jews have long supported two Israels: one for them and another for the Palestinian minority, with further, even more deprived ghettos for Palestinians under occupation.
The inhabitants of one Israel remain hostile towards, and abusive of, those in the other, who refuse to accept Jewish privilege as the natural order – just like the mob that insisted that their fellow citizens had no right to share a plane.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone