From CounterPunch 23 August  2019

Jewish Settlers Rule the Roost in Israel, But at What Price?

by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph Source: Wilson44691 – Public Domain

Israeli Jewish settlers are on a rampage in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. While settler violence is part of everyday routine in Palestine, the violence of recent weeks is directly linked to the general elections in Israel, scheduled to be held on September 17.

The previous elections, on April 9, failed to bring about political stability. Although Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is now the longest-serving prime minister in the 71-year history of the country, he was still unable to form a government coalition.

Tarnished by a series of corruption cases involving himself, his family and aides, Netanyahu’s leadership is in an unenviable position. Police investigators are closing in on him, while opportunistic political allies, the likes of Avigdor Lieberman, are twisting his arm with the hope of exacting future political concessions.

The political crisis in Israel is not the outcome of a resurrected Labor or invigorated central parties, but the failure of the Right (including far-right and ultra-nationalist parties) to articulate a unified political agenda.

Illegal Jewish settlers understand well that the future identity of any right-wing government coalition will have lasting impact on their colonial enterprise. The settlers, however, are not exactly worried, since all major political parties, including that of the Blue and White, the centrist party of Benjamin Gantz, have made the support for Jewish colonies an important aspect in their campaigns.

The decisive vote of the Jewish settlers of the West Bank and their backers inside Israel became very clear in the last elections. Subsequently, their power forced Gantz to adopt an entirely different political stance since April.

The man who, on April 7 (two days before the last elections), criticized Netanyahu’s “irresponsible” announcement regarding his intention to annex the West Bank, is now a great supporter of the settlements. According to the Israeli news website, Arutz Sheva, Gantz vowed to continue expanding the settlements “from a strategic point of view and not as a political strategy”.

Considering the shift in Gantz’ perspective regarding the settlements, Netanyahu is left with no other option but to up the ante, as he is now pushing for complete and irreversible annexation of the West Bank.

Annexing the West Bank, from Netanyahu’s viewpoint, is a sound political strategy. The Israeli prime minister is, of course, oblivious to international law which sees Israel’s military and settler presence as illegal. But neither Netanyahu, nor any other Israeli leader, for that matter, have ever cared about international law whatsoever. All that truly counts for Israel is Washington’s support, which is often blind and unconditional.

According to the Times of Israel newspaper, Netanyahu is now officially lobbying for a public statement by US President Donald Trump to back Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
Although the White House refused to comment on the story, and an official in Netanyahu’s office claimed that it was “incorrect”, the Israeli right is on the fast track of making that annexation possible.

Encouraged by US Ambassador David Friedman’s comment that “Israel has the right to retain some of the West Bank”, more Israeli officials are speaking boldly and openly regarding their intentions of making that annexation possible.

Netanyahu had, himself, hinted at that possibility in August during a visit to the illegal settlement of Beit El. “We come to build. Our hands will reach out and we will deepen our roots in our homeland – in all parts of it,” Netanyahu said, during a ceremony celebrating the expansion of the illegal settlements to include 650 more housing units.

Unlike Netanyahu, former Israeli justice minister and leader of the newly-formed United Right, Ayelet Shaked, didn’t speak in code. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, she called for the full annexation of Area C, which constitutes nearly 60 percent of the West Bank. “We have to apply sovereignty to Judea and Samaria,” she said, referring to the Palestinian land using biblical designations.

Public Security, Strategic Affairs and Information Minister Gilad Erdan, however, wants to go the extra mile. According to Arutz Sheva and The Jerusalem Post, Erdan has called for the annexation of all illegal settlements in the West Bank and the ouster of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas as well.

Now situated at the center of Israeli politics, Jewish settlers are enjoying the spectacle as they are being courted by all major political parties. Their increased violence in the West Bank is a form of political muscle-flexing, an expression of dominance and a brutish display of political priorities.
“There’s only one flag from the Jordan to the sea – the flag of Israel,” was the slogan of a rally involving over 1,200 Jewish settlers who roamed the streets of the Palestinian city of Hebron (Al-Khalil) on August 14. The settlers, together with Israeli soldiers, stormed al-Shuhada street and harassed Palestinians and international activists in the beleaguered Palestinian city.

Just a few days earlier, an estimated 1,700 Jewish settlers, backed by Israeli police, stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, over 60 Palestinians were wounded when Israeli forces and settlers attacked worshippers.

The violent scene was repeated in Nablus, where armed women settlers stormed the town of al-Masoudiya and conducted “military training” under the protection of the Israeli occupation army.
The settlers’ message is clear: we now rule the roost, not only in the West Bank, but in Israeli politics as well.

All of this is happening as if it is entirely an Israeli political affair. The PA, which has now been dropped out of American political calculations altogether, is left to issue occasional, irrelevant press releases about its intention to hold Israel accountable according to international law.

But the guardians of international law are also suspiciously absent. Neither the United Nations, nor advocates of democracy and international law in the European Union, seem interested in confronting Israeli intransigence and blatant violations of human rights.

With Jewish settlers dictating the political agenda in Israel, and constantly provoking Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, violence is likely to grow exponentially in the coming months. As is often the case, this violence will be used strategically by the Israeli government, this time to set the stage for a final and complete annexation of Palestinian land, a disastrous outcome by any count.

More articles by:Ramzy Baroud

 

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.

CONDESCENSION AND CLIMATE CHANGE: AUSTRALIA AND THE FAILURE OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS FORUM

From CounterPunch: 21 August 2019

Condescension and Climate Change: AustraliaAugust 21, 2019

Condescension and Climate Change: Australia and the Failure of the Pacific Islands Forum

by Binoy Kampmark

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

It was predictably ugly: in tone, in regret, and, in some ways, disgust. Australia emerged from the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting isolated, the true spoiler of the party which saw 17 states facing the obstinacy of one. It had taken place on Tuvalu, some two hours flight north of Fiji. The capital Funafuti is located on vanishing land; the island state is facing coastal erosion, the pressing issue of salinity, the very crisis of its existence.
Pacific Island leaders were already wise to the accounting cosmetics of Canberra’s accountants prior to the Forum. It reeked, for instance, of a gesture for permissive pollution to the tune of $500 million: we give you money to boost “resilience” and sandbag your countries against rising water levels; we will keep polluting and emitting with expanded fossil fuel projects because that is what we are good at.
Alex Hawke, Australia’s Minister for International Development and the Pacific, called the cash promise the “most amount of money Australia has ever spent on climate in the Pacific”. As Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga explained, “No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse not to do the right thing.” That right thing was a reduction in emissions, “including not opening your coal mines”.
The PIF leaders were also aware about what disruptive role Australia was going to play. Australian politicians of the past and present have done little to endear themselves to a forum they have only recently felt more interest in because of China’s increasingly conspicuous presence. In 2015, when Tony Abbott held the reins of power, his culturally challenged immigration minister Peter Dutton, in conversation with the prime minister, quipped rather darkly that “time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.” The remark was a response to a meeting on Syrian refugees which had been running late, or on “Cape York time”, as he put it.
Ahead of the leaders’ forum, an annotated draft of the Pacific Islands Forum declaration revealed a sprinkling of qualifications, repudiations and rejections on the part of the Australian delegation. The comments from August 7 sought to restrict any total decarbonisation, bans on the future use of coal power plants, opt out clauses for the 1.5C limit in temperature rise, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies and the very mention of the term climate change.
When it came to proceedings, Prime Minister Scott Morrison showed his true garish colours: Australia was a small contributor to emissions; it was a global problem, and so others had to do more. In short, the weak excuse of any emission producing state. Besides, he kept trumpeting, Australia was a leading investor in the sector of renewables.
Back in Australia, the Australian broadcaster and regular vulgarian Alan Jones was busy attacking the leaders of the gathering, most notably New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who had suggested that Australia “had to answer the Pacific” on the climate change issue. A sock, he suggested, should have been strategically placed down her throat. He subsequently suggested that this was a “wilful misrepresentation of what I said obviously distract from the point that she was wrong about climate change and wrong about Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide levels.”
Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama was sickeningly unimpressed, having expressed open admiration for New Zealand’s efforts to combat climate change. “Easy to tell someone to shove a sock down a throat when you’re sitting in the comfort of a studio. The people of the Pacific, forced to abandon their homes due to climate change, don’t have that luxury. Try saying it to a Tuvaluan child pleading for help.”
Michael McCormack, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, added the most revealing touch on Australia’s position at the PIF during a revealing business function in the rural town of Wagga Wagga on Friday. (McCormack, it should be noted, is on record as disputing evidence of an increase in global temperatures.) With an address heavy with bruising paternalism, he thought the PIF leaders were bellyaching, needlessly lamenting their fate. He admitted “getting a bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and saying we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive.” He had little doubt they would continue to do so, due to the “large aid assistance from Australia” and “because their workers come here and pick our fruit, pick our fruit grown with hard Australian enterprise and endeavour and we welcome them and we always will.” The only think lacking in the statement was a Boris Johnson-styled garnish: a reference to cannibalism, or the toothy water melon smiles.
A neat summary of the entire encounter between the Pacific Island leaders and Australia was provided by Tuvalu’s Sopoaga. “You [Scott Morrison] are concerned about saving your economy in Australia… I am concerned about saving my people in Tuvalu.”
The final communique proved lukewarm and non-committal, a feeble reiteration of existing understandings that climate change was a serious matter. Bainimarama supplied an acid opinion on the final text. “We came together in a nation that risks disappearing to the seas, but unfortunately, we settled for the status quo of our communique. Watered-down climate language has real consequences – like water-logged homes, schools, communities, and ancestral burial grounds.” Sopoaga was even more dramatic in assessing the response to the weakened language of the communique. “There were serious arguments and even shouting, crying, leaders were shedding tears.”
Sadly, the main Australian opposition party would not have done much better. Efforts on the part of Senator Penny Wong to claim a drastically different Labor approach must be put to rest. This is a party torn on the subject of King Coal, energy costs and renewables.
The hysterical aspect to PIF is that Australia’s denuding contribution will only serve to damage its own interests. In the short-term, Chinese diplomats will be delighted by the self-sabotaging efforts of the Morrison government. Beijing’s Special Envoy to the Pacific, Ambassador Wang Xuefeng, was on hand to tell the forum that “no matter how the international situation evolves, China will always be a good friend, partner and brother of Pacific Island Countries.” Expect a surge of interest towards the PRC in the forthcoming months.
A longer term consequence is also impossible to ignore. Fine to joke about having refugee islanders pick the fruit of your country, but to do so requires places to grow fruit. Rising sea levels may will cause the dreaded vanishing of the island states, but it will also submerge a good deal of Australia’s precariously placed coastal cities. What a bitter, if not deserved outcome that would be.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by:Binoy Kampmark

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

and the Failure of the Pacific Islands Forum

by Binoy Kampmark

Facebook Twitter Reddit Email

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

It was predictably ugly: in tone, in regret, and, in some ways, disgust. Australia emerged from the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting isolated, the true spoiler of the party which saw 17 states facing the obstinacy of one. It had taken place on Tuvalu, some two hours flight north of Fiji. The capital Funafuti is located on vanishing land; the island state is facing coastal erosion, the pressing issue of salinity, the very crisis of its existence.
Pacific Island leaders were already wise to the accounting cosmetics of Canberra’s accountants prior to the Forum. It reeked, for instance, of a gesture for permissive pollution to the tune of $500 million: we give you money to boost “resilience” and sandbag your countries against rising water levels; we will keep polluting and emitting with expanded fossil fuel projects because that is what we are good at.
Alex Hawke, Australia’s Minister for International Development and the Pacific, called the cash promise the “most amount of money Australia has ever spent on climate in the Pacific”. As Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga explained, “No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse not to do the right thing.” That right thing was a reduction in emissions, “including not opening your coal mines”.
The PIF leaders were also aware about what disruptive role Australia was going to play. Australian politicians of the past and present have done little to endear themselves to a forum they have only recently felt more interest in because of China’s increasingly conspicuous presence. In 2015, when Tony Abbott held the reins of power, his culturally challenged immigration minister Peter Dutton, in conversation with the prime minister, quipped rather darkly that “time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.” The remark was a response to a meeting on Syrian refugees which had been running late, or on “Cape York time”, as he put it.
Ahead of the leaders’ forum, an annotated draft of the Pacific Islands Forum declaration revealed a sprinkling of qualifications, repudiations and rejections on the part of the Australian delegation. The comments from August 7 sought to restrict any total decarbonisation, bans on the future use of coal power plants, opt out clauses for the 1.5C limit in temperature rise, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies and the very mention of the term climate change.
When it came to proceedings, Prime Minister Scott Morrison showed his true garish colours: Australia was a small contributor to emissions; it was a global problem, and so others had to do more. In short, the weak excuse of any emission producing state. Besides, he kept trumpeting, Australia was a leading investor in the sector of renewables.
Back in Australia, the Australian broadcaster and regular vulgarian Alan Jones was busy attacking the leaders of the gathering, most notably New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who had suggested that Australia “had to answer the Pacific” on the climate change issue. A sock, he suggested, should have been strategically placed down her throat. He subsequently suggested that this was a “wilful misrepresentation of what I said obviously distract from the point that she was wrong about climate change and wrong about Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide levels.”
Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama was sickeningly unimpressed, having expressed open admiration for New Zealand’s efforts to combat climate change. “Easy to tell someone to shove a sock down a throat when you’re sitting in the comfort of a studio. The people of the Pacific, forced to abandon their homes due to climate change, don’t have that luxury. Try saying it to a Tuvaluan child pleading for help.”
Michael McCormack, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, added the most revealing touch on Australia’s position at the PIF during a revealing business function in the rural town of Wagga Wagga on Friday. (McCormack, it should be noted, is on record as disputing evidence of an increase in global temperatures.) With an address heavy with bruising paternalism, he thought the PIF leaders were bellyaching, needlessly lamenting their fate. He admitted “getting a bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and saying we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive.” He had little doubt they would continue to do so, due to the “large aid assistance from Australia” and “because their workers come here and pick our fruit, pick our fruit grown with hard Australian enterprise and endeavour and we welcome them and we always will.” The only think lacking in the statement was a Boris Johnson-styled garnish: a reference to cannibalism, or the toothy water melon smiles.
A neat summary of the entire encounter between the Pacific Island leaders and Australia was provided by Tuvalu’s Sopoaga. “You [Scott Morrison] are concerned about saving your economy in Australia… I am concerned about saving my people in Tuvalu.”
The final communique proved lukewarm and non-committal, a feeble reiteration of existing understandings that climate change was a serious matter. Bainimarama supplied an acid opinion on the final text. “We came together in a nation that risks disappearing to the seas, but unfortunately, we settled for the status quo of our communique. Watered-down climate language has real consequences – like water-logged homes, schools, communities, and ancestral burial grounds.” Sopoaga was even more dramatic in assessing the response to the weakened language of the communique. “There were serious arguments and even shouting, crying, leaders were shedding tears.”
Sadly, the main Australian opposition party would not have done much better. Efforts on the part of Senator Penny Wong to claim a drastically different Labor approach must be put to rest. This is a party torn on the subject of King Coal, energy costs and renewables.
The hysterical aspect to PIF is that Australia’s denuding contribution will only serve to damage its own interests. In the short-term, Chinese diplomats will be delighted by the self-sabotaging efforts of the Morrison government. Beijing’s Special Envoy to the Pacific, Ambassador Wang Xuefeng, was on hand to tell the forum that “no matter how the international situation evolves, China will always be a good friend, partner and brother of Pacific Island Countries.” Expect a surge of interest towards the PRC in the forthcoming months.
A longer term consequence is also impossible to ignore. Fine to joke about having refugee islanders pick the fruit of your country, but to do so requires places to grow fruit. Rising sea levels may will cause the dreaded vanishing of the island states, but it will also submerge a good deal of Australia’s precariously placed coastal cities. What a bitter, if not deserved outcome that would be.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by:Binoy Kampmark

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

NEWSFLASH ARTICLE IN THE DAILY MAVERICK, 20 AUGUST 2019

Justice Edwin Cameron urges fight for constitutional values as he steps down from the Bench

By Greg Nicolson• 20 August 2019

20 August 2019: Justice Cameron delivers his final judgement. Justice Edwin Cameron's last day of work as a judge in South Africa's Constitutional Court. Picture: James Oatway

Less

48 Reactions

Lauded legal mind and activist Justice Edwin Cameron delivered his final judgment in the Constitutional Court on Tuesday before calling for the fight for constitutional values to continue.

Justice Edwin Cameron was hailed on Tuesday as a courageous South African who has continually stood up for the rights of the marginalised in society and upheld the Constitution with his integrity and intellect during his 25 years as a judge and more than 11 years in the Constitutional Court.

Cameron, who is retiring, delivered his final judgment in the court on Tuesday before a special session was held to honour his service to South Africa as an activist, jurist and judge.

His colleagues, government leaders and representatives from legal associations celebrated his work in the apex court and spoke glowingly of his work ethic, integrity and commitment to humanity.

“Thank you for introducing me to quiche, Edwin,” joked Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, saying Cameron was the only justice to have invited him to his chambers for lunch.

He called Cameron a “brave and bold” man for publicly disclosing he was HIV positive while stigma abounded. Cameron further tackled the topic in his celebrated book Witness to AIDS.

“When HIV and AIDS was or attracted stigma, he stood and declared openly, I’m HIV positive. He knew the attitude of South Africans at the time,” said Mogoeng.

“His love for the multitudes of South Africans and many across Africa and beyond could not allow him to shut up,” Mogoeng continued.

The chief justice said Cameron, 66, was “the epitome of non-racialism” and was almost always calm, even while the court was tackling difficult issues. Professor David Bilchitz said Cameron’s public stance as a gay, HIV-positive man had inspired him in his public life. He cited the play Angels in America: “We won’t die secret deaths any more. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”

In a testimonial sent by British lawyer Timothy Dutton SC, he recalled Cameron’s “massive capacity for hard work”. Dutton said Cameron had completed his law studies at Oxford in five rather than nine terms and had a supreme intellect, heroism and courage.

“By fixing your eyes on each one of us, you make us feel that there is no other person in your life that matters more. This is the quality of stardust,” said Dutton.

Jeremy Gauntlett SC recalled Cameron’s time working as an advocate on the Bar in the late 1980s and early 1990s, calling him a “gifted intellectual troublemaker”.

Gauntlett said Cameron brought to the court an “Olympian bearing, sense of engagement but detachment. He has brought to bear the remarkable gifts of lucid thinking and exactitude of expression”.

Justice Minister Ronald Lamola said Cameron was a role model as a citizen and a jurist and was likely to be called upon to serve in some form as a retired judge. He said the justice had fought the rights of vulnerable groups and was part of the independent judiciary which prevented mass looting and the country potentially becoming a failed state.

When Cameron finally spoke to the packed courtroom, standing room only, he said the court faced enormous pressures during his tenure and is likely to face greater pressures in the future.

“After almost 11 years here, what strikes me as most enduring about this court is its commitment to the future, to our country’s future, to a future for its young people,” he said, acknowledging the babies in the audience. “As public values have been sometimes dimmed in the grim tissue of lies, deception and double dealing through which our country has had to survive in the preceding decade, this court has continued to look forward and to look ahead.”

Cameron said the justices had striven to understand the depth and complexity of the issues brought to court, which sometimes saw justices divided but always saw them grounded in their commitment to the Constitution.

“In this I do not think, chief justice, that any single one of us feels the slightest self-satisfaction, complacency or self-congratulation, not at all. There’s still too much to be done and the perils facing our country and the rule of law remain too large,” said Cameron.

“The fight for our constitutional values is now more urgent than ever and future-directed and future-regarded commitment is more vital than ever,” he concluded. DM

MARIKANA, SEVEN YEARS ON

Another year, another Marikana commemoration – but betrayal, neglect and injustice are still there

By Greg Nicolson, Chanel Retief and Yanga Sibembe• 16 August 2019

Photo: Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana. (Greg Marinovich)

59 Reactions

‘They say in this country we’re free, but only some are free, others are not. A policeman has the power to kill and it’s not a big deal. Justice is not a real thing. I have not seen it.'

Zameka Nungu on Wednesday stirred pap on the stove in between washing dishes in her two-bedroom apartment in Karee Hostel, Marikana. An Amcu calendar was pinned to the wall.

It was Nungu’s day off from her job cleaning the K3 shaft at Lonmin, the platinum giant recently taken over by Sibanye-Stillwater, the same shaft where her husband Jackson Lehupa worked before he was shot by police 11 times — in his back, shoulder, thighs, buttock, groin and feet — on 16 August 2012.
Life has changed for Nungu in the seven years since the Marikana massacre. Her children lost their father and she had to move from Mount Fletcher, Eastern Cape, to the platinum belt to take up a job working for the same company many believed was complicit in her husband’s murder.
There has been one constant since the day SAPS officers killed 34 striking mineworkers, with 78 more injured at the scene of the massacre — the feeling of betrayal, neglect and injustice.

Police officers open fire on striking mineworkers outside the Nkageng informal settlement on August 16, 2012 in North West, South Africa.  (Photo by Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Since then, there have been a handful of actions taken to achieve accountability and improve the livelihoods of mineworkers and the Marikana community. They have largely come in spite of, and not because of, efforts from government, the platinum company and SAPS.
“They say in this country we’re free, but only some are free, others are not. A policeman has the power to kill and it’s not a big deal. Justice is not a real thing. I have not seen it,” said Nungu.

 

Police officers open fire on striking mineworkers outside the Nkageng informal settlement on August 16, 2012 in North West, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Mineworker Mlungiseleli Makhatshwe, who still wonders how he survived the police onslaught while he was part of the strike seven years ago, said:
“It pains me that no one has been held accountable for what happened, that the police who were responsible have never been held accountable. There are families who lost loved ones. I also lost my comrades. It’s very difficult because these policemen are free, but us as mineworkers are still oppressed.”
Eight police officers face criminal charges in the North West High Court. They were charged in 2018 for concealing how one injured miner was left to die in a police vehicle on 16 August 2012 and for causing the chaos on 13 August 2012 that led to the killing of two SAPS officers and three mineworkers.
Activists have welcomed the charges, but they are related to the five deaths on 13 August — a gruesome precursor to the massacre — and appear hard to prove, a strange first step for the NPA, which has evidence from the two-year Marikana Commission of Inquiry of more direct failures in SAPS leadership on 16 August as well as cases of cold-blooded murder.

 

Mineworkers gather to plan a way forward near the Nkaneng informal settlement on 14 August 2012 after clashes at Lonmin’s Marikana mine claimed nine lives. The gathering happened two days before the Marikana massacre. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

While the cops aren’t the only ones to blame, they have been the most successful in avoiding accountability. Ten people were killed in the week leading up to the massacre. The Marikana Inquiry failed to make conclusive findings, but it heard arguments that striking mineworkers killed two SAPS officers and two mine security guards in the week leading up to the massacre. Three mineworkers thought to be against the strike were also killed.
Until the SAPS officers were recently charged for issues largely unrelated to the massacre, however, accountability has only gone one way. Hundreds of striking mineworkers were initially charged for causing SAPS to kill their own comrades and 17 mineworkers have long faced charges for the violence in the week leading to the massacre. Like the other dependents of those killed, Nungu only became a part of the violence once her husband was slaughtered. She still wants to know the truth about what happened and to see the culprits charged. She also wants the state to pay her and the other widows and their dependents the compensation they deserve.

 

Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana, outside Rustenburg in the North West Province of South Africa August 15.  (Photograph by Greg Marinovich)

“There is a narrative out there that the president compensated the families of the slain miners. However, we have only received a portion of what we were promised,” she said.
“We’re not saying money will replace the void left by the death of our husbands, or that it will erase the pain, but it would be something to show that government cares about us.”
In 2018, the government agreed to pay compensation for loss of support to the families of those who were killed. The families are arguing they should be paid R1.5-million each for the pain they suffered beyond losing their breadwinners. Those injured are still fighting to receive any compensation.

In the wake of the massacre, Lonmin offered jobs to the family members of the deceased and offered to pay the school fees for their children, education which at least one report has suggested is sub-par.
Living conditions were a major driver behind the 2012 strike and Lonmin committed to improvements such as upgrading single-sex hostels for workers to bachelor and family units, but Marikana residents complain that little has changed, either for workers or the surrounding community still dependent on the economy generated by the mine.

 

Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana, outside Rustenburg in the North West Province of South Africa August 15, 2018. Photo by Greg Marinovich

Local activist Wiseman Dibakwe, who has worked for a nearby mine since 2013, said:
“The 2012 massacre could have been something that is teaching the government, the mines, the community, the municipality that they must get together, they must come with a solution to solve, eradicate poverty, unemployment.”
“Go around the location, you’ll see the community are suffering that because they believed that one day things will be right, but since the whole years that I’ve been staying here I’ve never seen any progress.”

The 2012 strikes, first at Impala Platinum and then Lonmin, focused on the fight for a living wage, a basic salary of R12,500 a month. Salaries in the platinum sector have since moved closer to that goal, but workers say those increases aren’t yet making a significant difference in their lives.
“After the strike, there was a change. We were able to earn a slightly better salary. Though even today we haven’t reached that R12,500, which we were promised in the aftermath of the strike, but at least it’s a bit better,” said mineworker Austin Mofokeng, who was part of the 2012 strike. “The working conditions can only improve when our employer takes us seriously. For example, when we’re underground, they could have a doctor or nurse nearby so that if there is an emergency (we) can get medical assistance as soon as possible.”

 

Photo by Greg Marinovich

Demands in Marikana often centre on two institutions. The first is the mining company. The community wants it to help improve services and boost the local economy, while workers want decent living standards and improved wages and conditions. But after Sibanye-Stillwater recently took over Lonmin, many workers just want to avoid potential job losses and uncertainty as they continue to fight for better wages in current negotiations.
The second is the government and its leader, President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was accused of causing the massacre when he called for “concomitant action” during the 2012 strike while he was a Lonmin shareholder. “The government hasn’t even come to us, even when president Zuma was in power, he never once came to Marikana to apologise for what had happened in his country. Zuma is no longer in office and there is a new president, Cyril Ramaphosa. He too has never come to see us. Plus, if there is one person who knows what happened at Marikana, it’s him,” said Nungu in her workers’ quarters.
It’s unlikely Ramaphosa will ever visit, despite his commitments. The president rarely faces criticism over Marikana after the commission of inquiry found he was not the cause of the massacre and the plight of the workers and community has largely disappeared from the public eye.

It also appears unlikely that there will be any significant moves towards achieving justice or developing the community soon, despite ongoing efforts from a committed group of lawyers and activists.

“My life was great when my husband was around,” said Nungu, who now has to fill her husband’s shoes at the mine in order to provide for her children.
“I only agreed to this job because I didn’t really have a choice, I needed the money. So I agreed to take up my husband’s space, even though it was difficult”. DM

From CounterPunch: 12 August  2019

Rattling the Nuclear Cage: India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and the US

by Robert Fisk

Photograph Source: Leslie Groves, Manhattan Project director, with a map of Japan – Public Domain

We like our anniversaries in blocks of 50 or 100 – at a push we’ll tolerate a 25. The 100th anniversary of the Somme (2016), the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain (2015). Next year, we’ll remember the end of the Second World War, the first – and so far the only – nuclear war in history.

This week marks only the 74th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It doesn’t fit in to our journalistic scorecards and “timelines”. Over the past few days, I’ve had to look hard to find a headline about the two Japanese cities.

But, especially in the Middle East and what we like to call southeast Asia, we should be remembering these gruesome anniversaries every month. Hiroshima was atomic-bombed 74 years ago on Tuesday, Nagasaki 74 years ago on Friday. Given the extent of the casualty figures, you’d think they’d be unforgettable. But we don’t quite know (nor ever will) what they were.

The bombing of the two cities, we are told, left between 129,000 and 226,000 dead. The first US statistics suggested only 66,000 dead in Hiroshima, 39,000 in Nagasaki. But in later years, the Hiroshima authorities estimated their dead alone at 202,118 – taking account of those who later died of radiation sickness, rather than just the incinerated corpses and human shadows left in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.

In the Middle East, where Aleppo and Mosul and Raqqa count the dead from conventional bombs – American, Russian, Syrian – in the tens of thousands, you might think the 1945 statistics would leave the folk who live there pretty cold. But the book of crises unfolding in the region – by the chapter, almost every month – is of critical importance to every soul who lives between the Mediterranean and India.

For India itself is a nuclear power. So is Pakistan. And so, of course, is Israel. None of them have signed the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT). All are threatening war, over Kashmir, or over Iran, the only nation under threat which has not (yet) got nuclear weapons.

Ayatollah Khomeini originally seized on America’s refusal to express its remorse at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: “They’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people … many years have passed and they can’t even bring themselves to apologise,” he said, and the current Iranian leadership has continued Khomeini’s theme. The “only nuclear criminal in the world”, according to the “supreme leader’s” successor, Ali Khamanei, “is falsely claiming to fight the proliferation of nuclear weapons”.

Iran, it should be added, did sign the NPT, but was later found in non-compliance of the safeguard agreement. And Iran, of course, is the non-nuclear power now being constantly threatened with war by two nuclear powers – America and Israel – the first of which, under Donald Trump, tore up his country’s commitment to the only international agreement that ever existed to limit Iran’s nuclear programme.

As the US applies new sanctions to Iran – miserably supported by the ever-compliant banks and big businesses of Europe – Iran marginally breaks its side of the nuclear control agreement. And thus becomes the recipient of even more ferocious threats from Washington and Israel.

The word “nuclear” is not just a harmless adjective. Look at the old photographs of the blisters on the dying Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iran itself suffered the horrors of gas warfare when Iraq – supported at the time by the US – used chemicals on Iranian soldiers and civilians. I saw their gas-gangrene wounds with my own eyes in the late 1980s and they reminded me of the Hiroshima snapshots. The Iranians really do know the effects of “weapons of mass destruction”.

Yet they, we are supposed to believe, are the nuclear “threat” in the Middle East. The Islamic republic is no saints’ paradise. Its corruption (within the government), its cruelty towards its own dissenters, its hangman’s noose justice against its own people and its prim disgust at even the most innocent demand for freedom scarcely qualify the immensely wealthy Revolutionary Guards Corps – “heroes” of a new “tanker war” and masters of Houthi drone technology – to give lectures on morality. And if we thought that the Iranians held in reserve – let us say – 200 nuclear warheads, we should be trembling in our boots. But they don’t. It’s Israel that conceals – but will not say so – perhaps 200 nuclear warheads.

Not only do we not complain about this. We regard any suggestion of their existence as akin to interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Israel has never confirmed that their nuclear weapons exist: therefore we must not say that they do. Enquire about their exact number and you are treated by Israel’s supporters with deep suspicion. It’s a private matter, we are led to understand. Anyway the Israelis can be trusted with such vile weapons. Can’t they?

Which brings us to Saudi Arabia. Every nation in the Middle East which seeks nuclear power – and the list includes Egypt, by the way – insists, like Iran, that the technology is needed to build power plants.

Yet when Reuters – whose investigations of human rights and secret criminal activities in the region are first-class in both courage and detail – reports on the accurate leaks that US energy secretary Rick Perry approved six secret authorisations to give nuclear assistance to Saudi Arabia, few outside congress issued a murmur of concern. Not even Israel – which always rages when America’s arms manufacturers hoover up billions of dollars from Arab arms buyers, especially from Saudi Arabia.

South Koreans – those endangered people always under nuclear threat from the Rocket Man turned good guy further north – are also bidding for the Saudi nuclear deal. So are the Russians. So how come, now that the Saudi regime has talked of “cutting off the head of the snake” in Iran, we don’t regard Riyadh as a potential nuclear threat?

How soon will it be before we wonder if the Saudis aren’t going a bit too far down the nuclear path and we suggest a nuclear control agreement along the lines of Obama’s Iran deal? After all, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – and let’s not bring up the little matter of the Saudi evisceration and chopping up of poor Jamal Khashoggi at this point – told CBS last year that his kingdom would develop nuclear weapons if Iran did.

And as we digest all this – although we really are not talking about it at all, are we? – India decides to tear up its own legal arrangements in Jammu and Kashmir. As the only Muslim-majority state in India, it is now to be split into two union territories, diminishing Muslim power and allowing non-Muslim Indians from other regions to move into this dangerous remnant of the old Raj. The Hindu-led government used a presidential order to revoke the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan, which holds the other bit of Kashmir – both claim the whole area as their own – is understandably infuriated by this change in the status quo.

And both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Indeed, there was nothing more pathetic, after Pakistan’s first nuclear tests in 1998, than to travel around this other “Islamic republic” and, amid the abject poverty of its villages, gaze at the awful commemorative papier-mache recreations of the granite mountains in which the explosions took place. There is, I suppose, no point in adding that there are more armed extremist Islamists on Islamabad’s payroll in both Pakistan and Afghanistan – coddled by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency – than there are in the whole of Iran.

So this is a very good week, as we typically ignore the commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for us to remember the nuclear threat in the Middle East. At least one nation in every potential conflict in the region is a nuclear power or a prospective one. India against Pakistan and vice versa, the US with Iran, the Israelis with Iran – or just about any other Levantine power – and the Saudis versus Iran, and Iran against almost anyone else except Syria.

Oh yes, and Donald Trump has just pulled out of the Cold War Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia – blaming Russia for violating the ban on missiles ranging up to 3,400 miles. All Russia’s fault, says Mike Pompeo. The treaty is now “dead”, the Russian foreign ministry confirms. So it’s time, perhaps, to rewatch those old documentaries of the the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay and the bomb codenamed “Little Boy” and the brilliant mushroom cloud and all those scorched corpses at Hiroshima.

More articles by:Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared. 

PATTERNS OF OCCUPIED PALESTINE

Patterns of Occupied Palestine: Part 1 of Uncountable

Posted on June 20, 2019 by pritigulaticox
 

See also at PINK TANK


There is no one poster child who embodies the struggle of the Palestinian people living in the shadow of Israeli settlers and military occupation. Every Palestinian child, woman, and man will tell you intricate stories of what life and death is like under the perennial burden of occupation, and what that means for the land beneath their feet, their usurped rivers, their beloved farmers and the artisans, etc.


Aisha Lulu, Amal Mustafa al-Taramsi, Haitham Ismael Saada, Amin Mansour Abu Moammar, Ahmad Ghazal, Izzedin Bani Gharra, Malak Shaker Abu Shouqa, Qutayba Ziad Zahran, Naji Jamil Abu ‘Aasi, Iyad Ousamah Sha’th, Bushra al-Taweel and Yousef Abu Sbeikha al-Boheiri are just twelve of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have either been displaced, killed in cold blood by Israeli occupation forces, arrested, injured physically and psychologically, or have died indirectly by the regime’s sadistic design of collective punishment.

Each pattern of occupied Palestine tells its own story. As part of a lifelong project, I will be embroidering images of hundreds of Palestinians, deceased and living. Each of the embroidered portraits to come has a border inspired by Tatreez — a traditional Palestinian embroidery-style, and by the occupied territories’ natural, threatened landscape. Each bordered portrait is also a statement against the ugly and violent apartheid border wall.


Below are the first twelve portraits of occupation in this open-ended series:

Border pattern includes the hairy pink flax flower

“My heart broke every day my daughter was away… Why does Israel treat us like this? We are not affiliated to any political faction, we are just normal people,” says Muna, whose 5-year-old daughter Aisha Lulu of the Bureij Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip was one of the latest casualties of the Israeli occupation. Diagnosed with brain cancer in April, Aisha died on May 17 in a Gaza hospital. Prior to this, she spent a month alone in a hospital bed in Jerusalem, crying for her family, who were denied permits by the Israeli military to accompany her.

The first Palestinian to be killed by Israeli occupation forces this year was a 44-year-old resident of the Shaikh Radwan neighborhood of north Gaza City, Amal Al-Taramsi, who was shot in the head during protests in the occupied Gaza Strip on Friday, January 11, 2019.

Border pattern includes the endangered Palestinian mountain gazelle

“Haitham was not yet 15 when he died. His average grade in school this year was 87. In the memorial photos he wears a dark kaffiyeh on his head. He was the firstborn child and only son of his parents; there are three younger sisters.

His father, Ismail, 43, a construction worker in Kiryat Gat, looks as though he has not yet absorbed what happened. A crooked smile occasionally crosses his lips as he recounts the events of his Black Friday.” Ismail’s son, 14-year-old Haitham Saada was hit by two Israeli bullets on February 5, 2016. The IDF accused him of getting ready to throw a Molotov cocktail at the soldiers, and so they fired and killed him.

On March 30, 2018, during the Land Day protests along the Gaza-Israel boundary, more than 1,400 Palestinians were wounded by live ammunition and rubber-coated steel bullets, and 16 were killed by Israeli occupation forces. One of the dead was 22-year-old Amin Mansour Abu Moammar from Rafah, in the southern Gaza strip.

17-year-old Ahmad Ghazal from the Ras Al-’Ain neighborhood of northern occupied West Bank, was shot and killed after he stabbed and wounded two Israeli men in the Old City of Jerusalem on April 1, 2017. The Accountability Program Director for Defense for Children International – Palestine, Ayed Abu Eqtaish, said, “Israeli forces now appear to routinely resort to the use of intentional lethal force in situations not justified by International norms, which in some incidents amount to extrajudicial killings.”

21-year-old Izzeddin Bani Gharra was one of almost 200 Palestinians killed by occupation forces in the occupied territories in 2015. He was shot and killed during an Israeli arrest raid on June 10, 2015. “I lost everything after Izz was killed, it was a shock, my son Izz loves life and he loves Palestine. Israel killed him in cold blood,” Bani Gharra’s mother told Ma’an News Agency.

Border pattern includes the Palestinian sunbird

Between July 7 and August 26, 2014 the besieged Gaza strip was bombarded by Israeli explosives, killing more than 2,130 Palestinians. 18-month-old Malak Shaker Abu Shouqa lived in the Al Nuseirat refugee camp, which is home to more than 80,000 refugees, and is located in the middle of the Gaza strip. On July 31, she, along with 12 other Palestinians were killed when an Israeli F-16 warplane struck their homes. Two of the others killed were her relatives.

Border pattern includes olives

The Israeli border police continued to fire into 17-year-old Qutayba Ziad Zahran’s body after he fell on the ground at the Zaatara military checkpoint in northern occupied West Bank. The Israeli authorities alleged that the teenager attempted to carry out a knife attack on Israeli forces, but in fact a soldier was hurt in a friendly fire incident. Hundreds attended Zahran’s funeral procession on September 9, 2017, 20 days after the incident. Zahran’s father learned of his son’s death through local news and Facebook. According to Ma’an News Agency “Israel often delays the delivery of slain Palestinian bodies to their families in the occupied Palestinian territory, and imposes strict conditions on funerals, alleging that funerals of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces leads to ‘incitement.’”

Twenty of the twenty-three Palestinians killed in the month of September, 2018, were from Gaza, including 16-year-old Naji Jamil Abu ‘Aasi, who was killed on the 17th by an Israeli missile, along with his cousin, 19-year-old Ala Ziad Abu ‘Aasi (portrait follows in part 2 of this series.) Both were from the Bani Sohaila town in eastern Khan Younis.

Border pattern includes the Dead Sea which has been “shrinking rapidly due to Israel’s diversion of the head waters of the Jordan River.”

Israeli General Ariel Sharon’s September 28, 2000 walk through the Muslim holy site Haram Al-Sharif in occupied east Jerusalem, as he was accompanied by hundreds of Israeli police officers, triggered the second Palestinian Intifada. But the uprising had more to do with the failed peace process, continuing settlement expansion and the deteriorating lives of Palestinians living under occupation. According to Defense for Children International, more than 1,996 children have been killed since then, with 700 children killed between September 2000 and February 2005, including a 14-year-old resident of Khan Younis, Iyad Ousamah Sha’th, who was killed by live ammunition on October 24, 2000.

The 26-year-old journalist and photographer Bushra al-Taweel has been arrested three times in her young life by occupation forces, with the latest arrest happening on November 01, 2017. According to the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association ADDAMEER, “Human Rights Defender Bushra al-Taweel has been subjected to continuing adversity imposed by the occupation forces. She was first arrested at 18 years old and was released from her second arrest in May 2015 after serving almost a year in detention. Now, Bushra is imprisoned under administrative detention. She will, hopefully, be released in July 2018 after spending 8 months without having any charges brought against her and without having the opportunity to stand trial.” Bushra remains a detainee at the Hasharon (Telmond) Prison in Israel.

Border pattern includes olive trees. “Since 1967 some 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank alone.”

A 48-year-old farmer, Yousef Abu Sbeikha al-Boheiri from the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, died on December 27, 2015 from gunshot wounds he had sustained the previous Friday while working in his farmland.


Part 2 follows…


I would like to thank The Electronic Intifada, Defense for Children International, Addameer, Israel-Palestine Timeline and B’tselem for providing valuable material for this project.

----------------------------------------------------------

August 5, 2019

Patterns of Occupied Palestine: Part 2 of Uncountable:

by Priti Gulati Cox

What do Shahed Amer al-Bayoumi, Abdel-Raouf Salha, Arafat Jaradat, Ayoub Asaleya, Mohammed Suleiman, Sawsan Ali Dawud Mansour, Mohammad H., Isma’il Muslem Hamad Abu Bteihan, Ala Ziad Abu ‘Aasi, Fadi al-Darbi, Atef al-Maqousi, Jaber Ibrahim Abu Hweige,Fadiyah Jaber Abu Hweigeand MuhammadJaber Abu Hweigehave in common? They are Palestinians between the ages of 9 and 69 who have been severely injured, imprisoned, or killed by Israeli occupation forces since 1992.

The first segment of this series, Patterns of Occupied Palestine:Part 1 of Uncountable, included a portrait of 18-month-old Malak Shaker Abu Shouqa. She was one of 13 people who were killed on July 31, 2014 when an Israeli F-16 warplane struck their homes. Four of the people killed that day included members of the al-Bayoumi family.

 

 

This segment, Part 2, includes 9-year-old, Shahed Amer al-Bayoumi, who survived that attack but was badly injured. According to the multimedia web documentary Obliterated Families, “She now shivers all the time. She was in a coma for 38 days… initially she could not recognize her family. She cannot hold a pen to write, so sometimes her cousin sits with her at the school to help her write.” Shahed lost her cousin Hassan, and her three sisters Abeer, Aseel, and Hadil in the attack.

13-year-old Abdel-Raouf Salha,was the first Palestinian child to be killed by occupation forces this year. Abdel was injured while participating in the Great March of Return protests on January 11 in the northern Gaza Strip when he was struck in the head by an Israeli-fired tear gas canister causing severe brain injury. He died two days later in a hospital in Gaza City. 

According to Ayed Abu Eqtaish, the Accountability Program Director for Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), “Crowd control weapons such as tear gas canisters can become lethal weapons when fired at children, especially if the point of impact is on a child’s head or torso.” DCIP also said that “a high proportion of the Gaza Strip fatalities, 45, were killed by Israeli forces since the start of Great March of Return protests on March 30, 2018, often in the context of protests or related activities.”

Suspected of throwing stones and a Molotov cocktail at occupation forces, 33-year-old Arafat Jaradat from the occupied West Bank was arrested on February 18, 2013 and locked up in Israel’s Megiddo prison, where he died five days later after being interrogated by the security agency Shin Bet. On February 24, the Palestinians rights group Al-Haq tweeted saying that the “autopsy of #ArafatJaradat confirmed that he didn’t die of heart attack. Body displayed multiple signs of beating.” He was tortured. According to The Electronic Intifada (EI), “Israel has failed to launch a single criminal investigation for torture despite more than 1,000 complaints by victims since 2001.”

Arafat had two children, Yara and Mohammad. His wife Dalal was expecting their third child at the time of his death. According to the prisoner solidarity network Samidoun, she gave birth to a boy on June 30and named him Arafat, “after his martyred father.”

12-year-old Ayoub Asaleya was playing with his cousins when he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Jabalia refugee camp on March 11, 2012, as cross-border fighting between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants raged on for a third day. Adel Essi,63, was killed by shrapnel from another missile as he was guarding an orchard. According to the New York Times, the attacks had begun “when Israeli air-to-ground missiles killed the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, Zuhair al-Qissi, and his assistant in Gaza.” The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu boasted, saying, “My instructions are to strike at anyone planning to harm us… The combination of offensive capabilities, defensive capabilities and civilian resilience is a winning combination, and we have it.”

Mohammad Suleiman, was arrested on April 18, 2011. He is 34-years old and suffers from thalassemia and chronic anemia for which he requires daily medical care, including frequent blood transfusions. As a result of the transfusions his blood contains high levels of iron, causing a perpetual weakening of his heart muscle for which he has had to undergo a daily routine of intravenously injecting a medication called Desferal for 8 to 10 hours to cleanse his body of some of the excess iron. Since his arrest and subsequent medical neglect, his health has deteriorated rapidly; tests confirm that he has an enlarged heart and liver.

According to the prisoner support group Addameer, Mohammad is currently in administrative detention, “a procedure that allows the Israeli military to hold detainees indefinitely on secret evidence without charging them or allowing them to stand trial… The entire family, except for his 20-year-old sister, is currently forbidden from visiting Mohammed.” In early October of ’11 Mohammed’s wife gave birth to Suleiman, their first child.

In a new wave of unrest that broke out between Occupation forces and Palestinians in October 2015, 28 Israelis and more than 200 Palestinians were killed, including the latest victim, 19-year-old Sawsan Ali Dawud Mansour, who was gunned down near the Ras Biddu checkpoint north of Jerusalem on May 23, 2016. According to Ma’an News Agency (MNA), an Israeli spokesperson claimed that a “female terrorist” allegedly attempted to stab a soldier, when “another officer immediately fired gunshots at the Palestinian teen and ‘neutralized’ her.” No Israelis were reported injured in the incident.

“I used to play soccer and ride my bike but now my life has completely changed… My message to Israel is that I was participating in a peaceful march and they shot me in the leg and now I don’t have a leg.” Those are the words of 13-year-old Mohammad H., who was severely injured on June 29, 2018. According to DCIP, Israeli forces shot him “at around 6:30 p.m., near Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip… He marched toward the fence with a group of other protesters. Mohammad was unarmed and making a ‘victory’ sign with his fingers. Israeli forces fired multiple rounds at the group and one bullet struck Mohammad’s leg.” 

In 2018, DCIP “documented 18 cases of Palestinian children who suffered permanent disability as a result of injuries sustained in the context of Great March of Return protests.”

The patterns of Israeli atrocities and collective punishment carried out on the Palestinians, their families and neighbors, their homes and infrastructure can clearly be seen in the summer of 2014 and the 51-day onslaught of explosives that rained down on the Gaza Strip. The explosive force that killed more than 520 children, including Malak Abu Shouqa and Shahed al-Bayoumi’s three sisters and cousin and left her constantly shivering with fear was “roughly equivalent to that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb,” according to EI.

Just four days before the August 26 ceasefire agreement that ended the assault, Isma’il Muslem Hamad Abu Bteihan, a 69-year-old resident of a-Zawaydah, Deir al-Balah district was killed in a missile attack. According to B’Tselem, he was “killed while sitting under the shade of a tree opposite his home. Four hours later his home was bombarded and completely destroyed.”

In addition to Malak Shaker Abu Shouqa, Part 1 of Patterns of Occupied Palestine featured 16-year-old Naji Jamil Abu ‘Aasi, who was killed on the 17th of September, 2018 by an Israeli missile along with his cousin. According to Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, “At 12:50 am the next day… Palestinian Red Crescent Society medical teams found the bodies of two civilian-dressed persons. Both had shrapnel injuries on various parts of their bodies and one of them was torn to pieces. The two bodies were taken to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where they were identified as Naji Abu ‘Asi, 16, and Alaa’ Abu ‘Asi, 19 [featured here, in part 2]—both residents of Al-Zanna area in Bani Sohaila town in eastern Khan Younis.”

A 30-year-old Palestinian resident of Jenin named Fadi al-Darbidied on October 14, 2015 after suffering “medical negligence by the Israeli Prison Service.” Fadi had been detained by Israeli forces back in 2006 and sentenced to 16 years in jail. The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said in a statement “that he suffered bleeding in his abdomen two years ago, but was left in solitary confinement, without medical treatment.”

 

 

37-year-old Atef al-Maqousi from Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza died on November 8, 2107, after living in a quadriplegic state for 25 years. According to the media center IMEMC, he was shot in the spine by Israeli soldiers in 1992 and as a result suffered ongoing infections and other complications that  eventually lead to his death.

“At 11:27 am on 27 December 2008, Gaza was bombarded by Israeli warplanes. Instead of the anticipated school bell, the children heard the horrifying sound of bombs.” That’s when Operation Cast Lead began. According to the EI “Israel used its air force, navy, infantry and artillery against a population that already had a long experience of being under military occupation and, more recently, under siege.”

This following testimony is of Jaber Abu Abu Hweij, a resident of Gaza City:

“I lived with my parents and brothers and sisters in the Tufah neighborhood in Gaza City. Our house is between the police building and the al-Mahata mosque. On Saturday, 27.12. 08, while I was at work, one of my neighbors called me and told me to come home quickly.

I got home and was shocked by what I saw. The house had been hit by an explosion and was a pile of rubble. Where the house had been there was a big hole. There were dozens of people trying to get my family out of the ruins, but they only managed to get some of them out alive.

My father, Jaber Abu Hweij, 52, my sister, Fadia, 22, and my brother Muhammad, 18, were killed in the bombing. Many other family members were injured.

The neighbors told me the house had been hit three times, one right after the other. Some of my family was hurt in the first strike and while others tried to help them, the house was hit again and others were injured. It happened so quickly there was no time to flee.

I keep seeing my sister Fadia in my mind. She was the last one I saw that morning when I left for work. She is the one who woke me for morning prayers and to go to work. Her voice still echoes in my ears….

Our family has fallen apart. Some [have] been killed and others are hospitalized. We lost our home and all our possessions: all our mementos, our dreams, our stories, our furniture, everything is under the ruins. The important thing now is for me to take care of my family that is still alive. I am particularly taking care of my brother Ahmad, who is still in intensive care.”

Please go here to see Patterns of Occupied Palestine: Part 1 of Uncountable. Part 3 will follow next month . . .

I would like to thank Obliterated Families, DCIP, The EI, Samidoun, ADDAMEER, MNA, B’Tselem, Al Mezan, and IMEMC for providing valuable material for this project.

More articles by:Priti Gulati Cox

Priti Gulati Cox is an interdisciplinary artist, and a local coordinator for the peace and justice organization CODEPINK. She lives in Salina, Kansas, and can be reached at p.g@cox.net. Please click here to see more of her work.