BENNETT'S POLITICAL THEATRE: THE DECISIVE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN FIGHT AHEAD

2 July 2021
Bennett’s Political Theater: the Decisive Israeli-Palestinian Fight Ahead
by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Many Palestinians believe that the May 10-21 military confrontation between Israel and the Gaza Resistance, along with the simultaneous popular revolt across Palestine, was a game-changer. Israel is doing everything in its power to prove them wrong.

Palestinians are justified to hold this viewpoint; after all, their minuscule military capabilities in a besieged and impoverished tiny stretch of land, the Gaza Strip, have managed to push back – or at least neutralize – the massive and superior Israeli military machine.

However, for Palestinians, this is not only about firepower but also about their coveted national unity. Indeed, the Palestinian revolt, which included all Palestinians regardless of their political backgrounds or geographic locations, is fostering a whole new discourse on Palestine – non-factional, assertive and forward-thinking.

The challenge for the Palestinian people is whether they will be able to translate their achievements into an actual political strategy, and finally transition past the stifling, and often tragic, post-Oslo Accords period.

Of course, it will not be so easy. After all, there are powerful forces that are keenly invested in the status quo. For them, any positive change on the path of Palestinian freedom will certainly lead to political, strategic and economic losses.

The Palestinian Authority, which operates with no democratic mandate, is more aware of its vulnerable position than at any other time in the past. Not only do ordinary Palestinians have no faith in this ‘authority’, but they see it as an obstacle in their path for liberation. It was unsurprising to see PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, and many of his corrupt inner circle, riding the wave of Palestinian popular revolt, shifting their language entirely, though fleetingly, from a discourse that was carefully designed to win the approval of ‘donor countries’, to one singing the praises of ‘resistance’ and ‘revolution’.

This corrupt clique is desperate, eager to sustain its privileges and survive at any cost.

If Palestinians carry on with their popular mobilization and upward trajectory, however, Israel is the entity that stands to lose most. A long-term Palestinian popular Intifada, uprising, with specific demands and under a unified national leadership, would represent the greatest threat to Israel’s military occupation and apartheid regime in many years.

The Israeli government, this time under the inexperienced leadership of current Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, and his coalition partner, future Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, is clearly unable to articulate a post-Gaza war strategy. If the political raucous and the bizarre power transition from former Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, to Bennett’s coalition is momentarily ignored, it feels as if Netanyahu is still holding sway.

Bennett has, thus far, followed Netanyahu’s playbook on every matter concerning the Palestinians. He, and especially his Defense Minister, Benny Gantz – Netanyahu’s former coalition partner – continue to speak of their military triumph in Gaza and the need to build on this supposed ‘victory’. On June 15, the Israeli army bombed several locations in the besieged Strip and, again, on June 18. A few more bombs, however, are unlikely to change the outcome of the May war.

It is time to convert our “military achievements (to) political gains,” Gantz said on June 20. Easier said than done; as per this logic, Israel has been scoring ‘military achievements’ in Gaza for many years, namely since its first major war on the Strip in 2008-09. Since then, thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed and many more wounded. However, Palestinian resistance continued unabated and zero ‘political gains’ have actually been achieved.

Gantz, like Bennett and Lapid, recognizes that Israel’s strategy in Gaza has been a complete failure. Since their main objective is remaining in power, they are bound to the rules of the old game which were formulated by right-wing politicians and sustained by right-wing extremists. Any deviation from that failed stratagem means a possible collapse of their shaky coalition.

Instead of mapping out a new, realistic strategy, Israel’s new government is busy sending symbolic messages. The first message is to its main target audience, Israel’s right-wing constituency, particularly Netanyahu’s disgruntled supporters, that the new government is equally committed to Israel’s ‘security’, to ensuring a demographic majority in occupied Jerusalem as in the rest of Palestine, and that no Palestinian state will ever be realized.

Another message is to the Palestinians and, by extension, to the whole region whose peoples and governments rallied behind the Palestinian revolt during the May war, that Israel remains a formidable military force, and that the fundamental military equation on the ground remains unaltered.

By continuing its escalation in and around Gaza, its violent provocations in Sheikh Jarrah and the entirety of East Jerusalem, its continued restrictions on Gaza’s urgent need for reconstruction, Bennett’s coalition is engaging in political theater. As long as attention remains fixated on Gaza and Jerusalem, as long as Bennett and Lapid continue to buy time and to distract the Israeli public from an imminent political implosion.

The Palestinians are, once more, proving to be critical players in Israeli politics. After all, it was Palestinian unity and resolve in May that humiliated Netanyahu and emboldened his enemies to finally oust him. Now, the Palestinians could potentially hold the keys to the survival of Bennet’s coalition, especially if they agree to a prisoner exchange – freeing several Israeli soldiers captured by Palestinian groups in Gaza in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held under horrific conditions in Israel.

On the day of the last prisoner exchange, in October 2011, Netanyahu delivered a televised speech, carefully tailored to present himself as Israel’s savior. Bennett and Lapid would relish a similar opportunity.

It behooves Israel’s new leaders to exercise caution in how they proceed from this point on. Palestinians are proving that they are no longer pawns in Israel’s political circus and they, too, can play politics, as the past few weeks have testified.

So far, Bennett has proven to be another Netanyahu. Yet, if Israel’s longest-running prime minister ultimately failed to convince Israelis of the merit of his political doctrine, Bennett’s charade is likely to be exposed much sooner, and the price, this time, is sure to be even heavier.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

1 June 2021

How Palestinian Resistance Altered the Equation

by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph Source: Neil Ward – CC BY 2.0

The ceasefire on May 21 has, for now, brought the Israeli war on Gaza to an end. However, this ceasefire is not permanent and constant Israeli provocations anywhere in Palestine could reignite the bloody cycle all over again. Moreover, the Israeli siege on Gaza remains in place, as well as the Israeli military occupation and the rooted system of apartheid that exists all over Palestine.

This, however, does not preclude the fact that the 11-day Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip has fundamentally altered some elements about Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, especially the Palestinian Resistance, in all of its manifestations.

Let us examine the main actors in the latest confrontation and briefly discuss the impact of the Israeli war and the determined Palestinian resistance on their respective positions.

‘Mowing the Grass’ No More

‘Mowing the grass’ is an Israeli term used with reference to the habitual Israeli attacks and war on besieged Gaza, aimed at delineating the need for Israel to routinely eradicate or degrade the capabilities of the various Palestinian resistance groups on the street.

‘Mowing the grass’ also has political benefits, as it often neatly fit into Israel’s political agendas – for example, the need to distract from one political crisis or another in Israel or to solidify Israeli society around its leadership.

May 2021 will be remembered as the time that ‘mowing the grass’ can no longer be easily invoked as a military and political strategy by the Israeli government, as the Gaza resistance and the popular rebellion that was ignited throughout all of Palestine has raised the price by several-fold that Israel paid for its violent provocations.

While Israeli military and political strategists want to convince us, and themselves, that their relationship with Gaza and the Palestinian Resistance has not changed, it actually has and, arguably, irreversibly so.

The Altered Equation

The Palestinian fight for freedom has also been fundamentally altered, not only because of the unprecedented resilience of Palestinian resistance, but the unity of the Palestinian people, and the rise of a post-Oslo/peace process Palestinian nation that is united around a new popular discourse, one which does not differentiate between Palestinians in Jerusalem, Gaza, or anywhere else.

Palestinian unity around resistance, not peace process, is placing Israel in a new kind of quandary. For the first time in its history, Israel cannot win the war on the Palestinians. Neither can it lose the war, because conceding essentially means that Israel is ready to offer compromises – end its occupation, dismantle apartheid, and so on. This is why Israel opted for a one-sided ceasefire. Though humiliating, it preferred over-reaching a negotiated agreement, thus sending a message that the Palestinian Resistance works.

Still, the May war demonstrated that Israel is no longer the only party that sets the rules of the game. Palestinians are finally able to make an impact and force Israel to abandon its illusions that Palestinians are passive victims and that resistance is futile.

Equally important, we can no longer discuss popular resistance and armed resistance as if they are two separate notions or strategies. It would have been impossible for the armed resistance to be sustained, especially under the shocking amount of Israeli firepower, without the support of Palestinians at every level of society and regardless of their political and ideological differences.

Facing a single enemy that did not differentiate between civilians and fighters, between a Hamas or a Fatah supporter, the Palestinian people throughout Palestine moved past all of their political divisions and factional squabbles. Palestinian youth coined new terminologies, ones that were centered around resistance, liberation, solidarity and so on. This shift in the popular discourse will have important consequences that have the potential of cementing Palestinian unity for many years to come.

Israel’s Allies Not Ready to Change

The popular revolt in Palestine has taken many by surprise, including Israel’s allies. Historically, Israel’s Western supporters have proven to be morally bankrupt, but the latest war has proved them to be politically bankrupt as well.

Throughout the war, Washington and other Western capitals parroted the same old line about Israel’s right to defend itself, Israel’s security and the need to return to the negotiation table. This is an archaic and useless position because it did not add anything new to the old, empty discourse. If anything, it merely demonstrates their inability to evolve politically and to match the dramatic changes underway in occupied Palestine.

Needless to say, the new US Administration of Joe Biden, in particular, has missed a crucial opportunity to prove that it was different from that of the previous Donald Trump Administration. Despite, at times, guarded language and a few nuances, Biden behaved precisely as Trump would have if he was still President.

What ‘Palestinian leadership’?

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and his circle of supporters represent a bygone era. While they are happy to claim a large share of whatever international financial support that could pour in to rebuild Gaza, they do not represent any political trend in Palestine at the moment.

Abbas’s decision to cancel Palestine’s elections scheduled for May and July left him more isolated. Palestinians are ready to look past him; in fact, they already have. This so-called leadership will not be able to galvanize upon this historic moment built on Palestinian unity and resistance.

The Palestinian Authority is corrupt and dispensable. Worse, it is an obstacle in the way of Palestinian freedom. Palestine needs a leadership that represents all Palestinian people everywhere, one that is truly capable of leading the people as they attempt to chart a clear path to their coveted freedom. Expanding the Circle of Solidarity The incredible amount of global solidarity which made headline news all over the world was a clear indication that the many years of preparedness at a grassroots level have paid off. Aside from the numerous expressions of solidarity, one particular aspect deserves further analysis: the geographic diversity of this solidarity which is no longer confined to a few cities in a few countries.

Pro-Palestine solidarity protests, vigils, conferences, webinars, art, music, poetry and many more such expressions were manifest from Kenya to South Africa, to Pakistan to the UK and dozens of countries around the world. The demographics, too, have changed, with minorities and people of color either leading or taking center stage of many of these protests, a phenomenon indicative of the rising intersectionality between Palestinians and numerous oppressed groups around the globe.

A critical fight ahead for Palestinians is the fight of delegitimizing and exposing Israeli colonialism, racism and apartheid. This fight can be won at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), UNESCO and numerous international and regional organizations, in addition to the countless civil society groups and community centers the world over.

For this to happen, every voice matters, every vote counts, from India to Brazil, from Portugal to South Africa, from China to New Zealand, and so on. Israel understands this perfectly, thus the global charm offensive that right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been leading for years. It is essential that we, too, understand this, and reach out to each UN member as part of a larger strategy to deservingly isolate Israel for ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

THE RUSSIAN ALTERNATIVE: HOW MOSCOW IS CAPITALISING ON US RETREAT IN PALESTINE, ISRAEL

12 February 2021
The Russian Alternative: How Moscow is Capitalizing on US Retreat in Palestine, Israel
by Ramzy Baroud
Photograph Source: Mahmoud Abbas and Vladimir Putin. April 18, 2016 in Kremlin – CC BY 4.0

Israeli anxiety was palpable when it was reported that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was not contacted by the new American President, Joe Biden, for days after the latter’s inauguration. While much is being read into Biden’s decision, including Washington’s lack of enthusiasm to return to the ‘peace process’, Moscow is generating much attention as a possible alternative to the United States by hosting inner Palestinian dialogue and conversing with leaders of Palestinian political groups.

Indeed, a political shift is taking place on both fronts: the US away from the region and Russia back to it. If this trend continues, it could only be a matter of time before a major paradigm shift occurs.

The Israelis are rightly worried at the potential loss of the unconditional support of their American benefactors. “There are 195 countries in the world, and … Biden has not contacted 188 of them,” Herb Keinon wrote in The Jerusalem Post on February 2, adding, “but only in Israel, people are concerned about the significance of this delay”.

The concern is justified as Israel has been designated as Washington’s most prominent ally for many years, both in the Middle East and globally.

It is unclear whether the relegation of Netanyahu during Biden’s early days in office is an indicator that Israel — in fact, the entire region – is no longer an American priority or a warning message to Netanyahu who has rallied for years in support of the Republican Administration of Donald Trump.

Thanks to Netanyahu’s foreign policy miscalculation, support for Israel has, in recent years, become an unprecedented partisan issue in US politics. While the overwhelming majority of Republicans support Israel, only a minority of Democrats sympathize with Israel, as recent public opinion polls revealed.

While it is true that Netanyahu’s behavior in recent years earned him special status within Republican ranks thus making him persona non grata among Democrats, it is equally true that the US seems to be divesting from the Middle East altogether.

According to Politico, reporting on the Biden Administration’s initial days in office, a major restructuring has already taken place among the staff of the US National Security Council, flipping the previous structure “where the Middle East directorate was much bigger than it is now and the Asia portfolio was managed by a handful of more junior staffers.”

However, it is not only Washington that is shifting its geostrategic center of gravity. Russia, too, is undergoing a major restructuring in its foreign policy priorities. While Washington is retreating from the Middle East, Moscow is cementing its presence in the region, which began gradually in its calculated involvement in the Syrian conflict in 2015. Moscow is now offering itself as a political partner and a more balanced mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.

Like the US, Russia might not necessarily see its political involvement as a precursor to actually ending the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though Moscow insists, unlike Washington, on the centrality of international law and United Nations Resolutions in the quest for a just peace. Writing in the Polish Institute of International Affairs, Michał Wojnarowicz argues that Russia’s involvement in Palestine and Israel is consistent with its overall strategy in the Middle East, aimed at building “a network of influence among regional actors and boost its image as an attractive political partner.”

A variation of this view was offered in the New York Times in 2016, when Moscow began working to translate its strategic gains in Syria to political capital throughout the region. It was during this time that the American-sponsored peace process had reached a dead end, giving Russia the opportunity to float the idea of a Moscow-sponsored talk between Israel and Palestine.

“Russia’s new-found Middle East peace push, part of President Vladimir V. Putin’s reinsertion of Moscow into the region in a profound way after years of retreat, seems to be about everything but finding peace in the Middle East,” a NYT op-ed argued. “Instead, it is about Moscow’s ambitions and competition with Washington.”

At the time, Netanyahu rejected the Russian overture, in the hope that a Republican Administration would grant Israel all of its demands without making any concessions. The Palestinians, including relatively isolated movements like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, found in Moscow a welcoming environment and a crucial international power that is able to balance out Washington’s blind support for Israel.

Despite Israel’s refusal to engage with the Palestinians under Russian auspices, many Palestinian delegations visited Moscow, culminating, in January 2017, in a political breakthrough when rival Palestinian factions, Fatah, Hamas and others, held serious talks in the hope of bridging their differences. Although the round of talks did not bring about Palestinian unity, it served as Russia’s political debut in a conflict that has fallen squarely within the American geopolitical space.

Since then, Russia has remained very involved through well-structured efforts championed by Putin’s Special Envoy, Mikhail Bogdanov. These efforts are channeled through three different areas: inner Palestinian dialogue, Palestinian-Israeli dialogue and, of late, dialogue within the Fatah movement itself. The latter, especially, is indicative of the nature of Moscow’s involvement in the multi-layered conflicts at work in the region.

Even when Palestinian groups are finalizing their previous agreements in Cairo, top Palestinian officials continue to coordinate their actions with Moscow and with Bogdanov, personally.

Russia’s credibility among Palestinian groups is boosted by similar credibility among ordinary Palestinians as well, especially as it emerged in January that they will be receiving the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, scheduled to be available in the Occupied Territories in the near future.

Moreover, while Washington publicly declared that it will not roll back any of Trump’s actions in favor of Israel, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, is pushing for an international peace conference on Palestine, to be held in the coming months.

The US now has no other option but to slowly retreat from its previous commitments to the peace process: in fact, the region as a whole. As is often the case, any American retreat means a potential opening for Russia, which is now laying claim to the role of peace broker, a seismic change that many Palestinians are already welcoming.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT FOR PALESTINE AFTER 100 YEARS

ICC clears way for war crimes probe of Israeli actions in Palestinian territories

By Josef Federman
6 February 2021

Jerusalem: Judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague have decided the court has jurisdiction over war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, paving the way for a possible a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions.

The decision prompted swift reactions from both Israel, which is not a member of the court and rejects its jurisdiction, and the Palestinian Authority, which welcomed the ruling.

ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said her office was studying the finding and would decide what to do next “guided strictly by its independent and impartial mandate” to prosecute grave war crimes and atrocities when countries are unable or unwilling to do so themselves.

Palestinian children wait in line while holding pots to receive free meals of green pea stew cooked by Samera Abu Amra, unseen, for distribution to poor residents in Gaza City on Thursday.

The ICC judges said their decision was based on the fact that Palestine has been granted membership to the tribunal’s founding treaty, and had referred the situation to the court. The judges said the jurisdiction decision does not imply any attempt to determine Palestinian statehood, which is uncertain, or national borders.

“The court’s territorial jurisdiction in the situation in Palestine ... extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” they said.

Bensouda had found in December 2019 that there was a “reasonable basis” to open a probe into potential war crimes “in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”. But she asked the court to determine whether she had territorial jurisdiction before proceeding.

Chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.Credit:AP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decried the decision and vowed to fight “this perversion of justice."

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the ruling meant it was “historic day for [the] principle of accountability”. Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said it was a “victory for justice and humanity.”

The Palestinians, who joined the court in 2015, have pushed for an investigation. Israel has said the court has no jurisdiction because the Palestinians do not have statehood and because the borders of any future state are to be decided in peace talks. It also accuses the court of inappropriately wading into political issues.

Related Article A battle of wills is under way in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has demolished the village of Khirbet Humsu three times in as many months.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict
How a remote West Bank village became the focus of a battle of wills

The Palestinians have asked the court to look into Israeli actions during its 2014 war against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, as well as construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem.

The international community widely considers the settlements to be illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace but has done little to pressure Israel to freeze or reverse their growth.

Israel’s military has mechanisms to investigate alleged wrongdoing by its troops, and despite criticism that the system is insufficient, experts say it has a good chance of fending off ICC investigation into its wartime practices.

When it comes to settlements, however, experts say Israel could have a difficult time defending its actions. International law forbids the transfer of a civilian population into occupied territory.

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, territories the Palestinians want for their future state. Some 700,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

A boy holds a Palestinian flag after Israeli troops demolished tents and other structures of the Khirbet Humsu hamlet in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank on Wednesday.

A boy holds a Palestinian flag after Israeli troops demolished tents and other structures of the Khirbet Humsu hamlet in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank on Wednesday.Credit:AP

Israel says east Jerusalem is an indivisible part of its capital and that the West Bank is “disputed” territory whose fate should be resolved in negotiations.

While the court would have a hard time prosecuting Israelis, it could issue arrest warrants that would make it difficult for Israeli officials to travel abroad. A case in the ICC would also be deeply embarrassing to the government. Netanyahu led the 2014 war in Gaza, while current Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz was the military chief of staff at the time.

In a videotaped statement released after midnight, Netanyahu accused the court of “pure anti-Semitism” and having a double standard.

“The ICC refuses to investigate brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria, who commit horrific atrocities almost daily,” he said. “We will fight this perversion of justice with all our might!”

Nabil Shaath, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, welcomed the decision and said it proved the Palestinians were right to go to the ICC. “This is good news, and the next step is to launch an official investigation into Israel’s crimes against our people,” he said.

The ICC could also potentially investigate crimes committed by Palestinians militants. Bensouda has said her probe would look into the actions of Hamas, which fired rockets indiscriminately into Israel during the 2014 war.

In Washington, US State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters that the Biden administration was “taking a close look” at the decision.

“However, we have serious concerns about the ICC’s attempts to exercise jurisdiction over Israeli personnel,” Price said. “We have always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for those who consent to it or are referred by the UN Security Council.”

The decision, detailed in a 60-page legal brief, was released late on Friday (Saturday AEDT), after Israel had shut down for the weekly Jewish Sabbath.

Human Rights Watch welcomed the decision, saying it “finally offers victims of serious crimes some real hope for justice after a half century of impunity.”

“It’s high time that Israeli and Palestinian perpetrators of the gravest abuses — whether war crimes committed during hostilities or the expansion of unlawful settlements — face justice,” said Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at the New York-based group.

The three-judge pretrial chamber ruled that Palestine is a state party to the Rome Statute establishing the ICC. With one judge dissenting, it ruled that Palestine qualifies as the state on the territory in which the “conduct in question” occurred and that the court’s jurisdiction extends to east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions against ICC officials, after earlier revoking Bensouda’s entry visa, in response to the court’s attempts to prosecute American troops for actions in Afghanistan.

The US, like Israel, does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction. At the time, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the steps were meant as retribution for investigations into the United States and its allies, a reference to Israel.

The Biden administration has said it will review those sanctions.

AP, Reuters

January 12, 2021

Defending Apartheid

by Lawrence Davidson
12 January 2021

In 2017 the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) issued a report on the conditions of Palestinians under Israeli rule. The report covered the situations of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and the subject population in the Occupied Territories. The report concluded “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”

Though U.S. and Israeli pressure managed to suppress the report, evidence for this charge of apartheid is clear-cut. More recently, the facts have been brought together in a succinct presentation by the noted journalist Jonathan Cook. In a 2018 issue of The Link, a publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding, he wrote an expose` entitled “Apartheid Israel.” Some of the particulars Cook looks at are citizenship inequality, nationality inequality, marriage inequality, legal inequality, and residential inequality. The predictable Palestinian struggle seeking equality and the end of apartheid is seen as a subversive movement by both Israel’s Jewish majority and its increasingly rightwing governments.

Of course, some Israeli Jews do understand that the country has a serious problem with racism. For instance, this comes through in the June 2020 Haaretz report that indicates that as “world sensitivity to racism and oppression” increases “historical injustice in Israel is … only getting worse.”

The “Nation-State” Law

One of the ways things are getting worse in Israel is through the enshrining of Zionist-inspired apartheid in law. On 18 July 2018 the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) enacted a “Nation-State” Law. It defines the State of Israel as the nation-state “of the Jewish people only.” In other words, only Jews can hold “nationality rights” in Israel.

MK (member of the Knesset) Yariv Levin dubbed the law “Zionism’s flagship bill … that will put Israel back on the right path. A country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” MK Amir Ohana, who chaired the special committee that shaped the bill, stated: “This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people.” The absurdity of this proposition is exposed by the fact that the Palestinian minority has been denied significant aspects of its human rights for over 70 years. As it turns out, the two categories of rights, national and human, have been interdependent ever since the development of the sovereign state.

Hannah Arendt’s Insight

Acting on the claim that one can separate out human rights, much less civil rights, from “national rights” has proven disastrous in the modern political era. Significantly, it was a brilliant Jewish intellectual, Hannah Arendt, who pointed this out following the horror of the Holocaust and on the occasion of the U.N. pronouncement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arendt pointed out that, in the era of the nation-state, rights are defined and enforced within state entities claiming sovereignty over both territory and population. If a state decides that for racial, ethnic, religious, or any other reason, that only one portion of its population is worthy of first-class citizenship, it can proceed to deny to all those who do not qualify any and all rights. This is, of course, what the Nazis did to the Jews, and more recently is reflected in how Myanmar treats its ethnic minorities, how China treats its Uyghur population, and Saudi Arabia discriminates against its Shia religious minority, and so.

The United Nations has proven unable to effectively challenge this perversion of sovereignty. Keep in mind that the United Nations is itself made up of nation-states which reserve the power to discriminate as a consequence of sovereignty. This has made it difficult for the U.N., as an organization, to enforce a “universal” and “inalienable” conception of rights. In truth, the only way to achieve universal rights is to replace the nation-state’s claim that its sovereignty allows it alone to grant rights—replace it with enforceable international law that assures equitable application of rights.

Israel’s High Court of Justice Defends Apartheid

Israel is now acting out the scenario Arendt identified. There were many complaints against the nation-state bill, coming not only from the Palestinian Arabs, but also from the Druze community and even elements of the Mizrachi Jewish population. Thus, on 22 December 2020, fully two and a half years after the passage of the bill, the High Court of Justice held a public review of the law.

Two sections of the law drew particular objection from those appearing before the court. First was the objection to the bill’s official designation of “Jewish settlement as a value that the state is obligated to promote.” Considering the fact that such settlements most often lead to eviction of Palestinians from their land and homes, and the steady segregation of populations based on ethnicity and religion, it can’t help but be seen as an important historical factor in Zionist apartheid. The second was the law’s purposeful demotion of Arabic—it will no longer be an official language of Israel. The implication here is that loss of recognition of the language spoken by the Palestinians, Druze, and at least the first generation of Mizrachi Jews is equivalent to their loss of equal social and political status with those who speak Hebrew.

Throughout the ensuing debate the eleven High Court judges could not, or would not, recognize that giving elite legal and social status in law to one group of religiously identified citizens must have detrimental legal consequences for other non-elite citizens and subjects. That it would was a point made by Attorney Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah—the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights.

The rejoinder of the judges made in reference to the emphasis on “Jewish settlement” was that “the fact that Jewish settlement is perceived as a national value does not mean that there should be no equal allocation and legitimate civil rights for others.” As observers noted, this reply is ahistorical. It simply ignores Israel’s history of “over 70 years of discrimination, in which hundreds of towns, cities, and villages were established for Jews while not a single new locale was built for Palestinian citizens. As if Palestinian land was not expropriated for constructing Jewish communities.”

The same obtuseness was displayed when it came to the demotion of the Arabic language. The judges just could not see why losing its status as an official language was so painful for Arabic speakers. They were not moved when one of the plaintiffs pointed out, “there is a violation of convention here. The rules of the game have changed. My language, at least formally, has maintained its status from the time of the Ottomans until the 20th Knesset. Language was the only collective right [afforded to] the indigenous minority in its homeland.”

The cultural divide between Jews and non-Jews in Israel/Palestine that has been evolving into apartheid since before 1948 reached a tragic legal climax in the decision-making of these eleven judges. They confirmed in law a process that condemns non-Jews to a legal no-man’s-land. As the Druze lawyer told the court, “There is not a word on minority rights; it is a badge of shame for the State of Israel. … It is doubtful whether Jewish students who are educated on this law will be willing to accept Arab citizens at all in the future.”

“The Desired Reality”

Why were the eleven Israeli High Court judges so obtuse? Perhaps it is because they have been acculturated to see Zionist Israel as an exceptional place—a justification unto itself. As Yariv Levin described it above, Israel is “a country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” This exclusiveness is the raison d’être of the Zionist project—it is its ultimate “noble” goal. For those within the exclusive Zionist tent, assigning the term apartheid to their accomplishment is to judge a special case by supposedly non-applicable generic rules. To persist in doing so is regarded as a sign of anti-Semitism rather than facing the facts.

This situation has been addressed by the Haaretz journalist Amira Haas. Haas is “the daughter of Holocaust survivors and resides in Ramallah, where she is the only Jewish Israeli journalist living in the West Bank.” She was in the United States in June 2019 and gave an interview to Mari Cohen for the publication Jewish Currents.

Haas explains the current situation this way: “The current reality is actually one state, which is an apartheid state. This means there are two separate laws: one for Palestinians and one for Israeli Jews. The Palestinian population is subdivided into groups and subgroups like the nonwhite population of [former apartheid] South Africa. They’re disconnected from each other. They are treated differently by Israel, while Israeli Jews live in the entire country, like one people, with full rights.”

The apartheid nature of Israel is a developmental plan of the state. Haas explains that Israel’s main goal is “to get more land, and to manipulate the Palestinian demography. … You see that this is really a plan. [Israeli leaders] sit and they think about how to implement it, and what regulations will achieve this goal. … One by one, step by step.” And, one has to conclude after seventy years that Israeli apartheid is sustainable because most of the world’s governments accept it. That, of course, could change, but there is no sign that it will in the near future.

It is also sustainable because it is what Israeli Jews want. “For Israel, this is the desired reality: that Palestinians live in their enclaves, deprived of any ability to develop their economy, and that the world gives them donations so that they can sustain themselves. And that’s it. There is no desire on the part of Israel to reach a different reality. There has been a kind of an illusion among Jews [in the diaspora] that Israel wants a solution. But [Israeli Jews] don’t see that this is a problem.”

Can it get worse? Yes, it can. Religious fanaticism can make it worse. Haas goes on to explain, “The question is, will the Israeli messianic religious right-wing segment of the population that has gained a lot of power in Israeli politics—will it succeed in accomplishing its aims: the mass expulsion of Palestinians and annexation of the great majority of the West Bank? It’s not enough for them to have Palestinians living in enclaves. They want more.”

It is this overall attitude that explains the ability of Israeli Jews to feel little or no obligation to help Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to maintain their health care systems or provide Covid-19 vaccinations. The act of official segregation has not diminished Israeli control, only any acceptance of Israeli responsibility.

Conclusion

History is full of tragic irony. At the end of the 19th century Germany was considered one of the most civilized nations on the planet. One world war and a Great Depression later, many Germans were electing Nazis and gearing up for the Holocaust. Up until the mid-20th century, the Jewish people were considered peace-loving and a reservoir of brilliant minds. One Holocaust later, many of them, both survivors and those in the diaspora, had joined a Zionist movement determined to create a racist warrior state.

Over time we become products of our local environment. That environment narrows our range of thought and choice. When the environment changes, those who endure change with it, not always for the best. The Holocaust traumatized its survivors, and some of them went on to produce “a nation-state for the Jewish people.” They might have pulled this off benignly if they had done so on some unpopulated planet. However, they chose Palestine in an allusion to biblical Israel—a disingenuous choice given that most Zionists were atheists. Palestine was not an unpopulated place, and thus, today, over 20 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish.

The fact that Palestinians have no nationality rights means, historically, that their possession of any other sort of rights is precarious. They are like the Jews in any number of anti-Semitic historical circumstances—a fact that seems to have escaped our modern-day Hebrews.

It didn’t have to be this way. As a species we have a very wide range of experience, and with the proper historical awareness we can broaden out our current decision-making beyond the dictates of our local environment. In fact, after World War II some Jews tried to do just this. Even through the trauma of the Holocaust, they could see that the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine meant war with the indigenous population. Their own sense of the Jewish past told them that there were alternatives. These people were known as “cultural Zionists,” and they sought a democratic, equalitarian Palestine as a shared, multicultural home that guaranteed the protection and continuing development of Jewish cultural heritage, alongside those of Muslims and Christians. Palestine could have become a “spiritual” home for the Jews, with generous though controlled immigration opportunities. It was a possible peaceful route to Jewish recovery after the Holocaust.

Whatever one might think of this alternative, it was never seriously considered by those “political” Zionists convinced by persistent anti-Semitism that the survival of the Jews could only come through having their own nation-state. This path combined an evolving Jewish nationalism with a racist exclusiveness (the “chosen people” claim) that also ran through Jewish history. Zionists ignored that part of their historical reality, and today’s Apartheid Israel, along with its insistence that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous, is the result. As you sow, so shall you reap.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

HOW ISRAEL WAGES WAR ON PALESTINIAN HISTORY

From CounterPunch 21 August 2020

HOW ISRAEL WAGES WAS ON PALESTINIAN HISTORY

By Jonathan Cook 

Photograph Source: A street in Jenin, 2011 – Almonroth – Template:Hey – CC BY-SA 3.0

When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.

Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.

Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants.

It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse.

The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless legal battles to keep it off screens.

Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high personal price. Deaths threats, loss of work and endless legal bills that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him – this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the next few weeks.

Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples.

For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterise them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone.

The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.

These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.

The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court.

Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history.

Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net.

The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.

In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider population to flee.

Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to return.

Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.

The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.

A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.

Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.

Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.

Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.

Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritised on these digital maps.

Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.

And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognised the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.

Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.

Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.

Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.

The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.

But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

More articles by:Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

CounterPunch 31 July  2020

List of Israeli Targets Leaked: Tel Aviv Fears the Worst in ICC Investigation of War Crimes

by Ramzy Baroud

When International Court of Justice (ICC) Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, confirmed last December that the Court has ample evidence to pursue a war crimes investigation in occupied Palestine, the Israeli government responded with the usual rhetoric, accusing the international community of bias and insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’

Beneath the platitudes and typical Israeli discourse, the Israeli government knew too well that an ICC investigation into war crimes in Palestine could be quite costly. An investigation, in itself, represents an indictment of sorts. If Israeli individuals were to be indicted for war crimes, that is a different story, as it becomes a legal obligation of ICC members to apprehend the criminals and hand them over to the Court.

Israel remained publicly composed, even after Bensouda, last April, elaborated on her December decision with a 60-page legal report, titled: “Situation in the State of Palestine: Prosecution Response to the Observations of Amici Curiae, Legal Representatives of Victims, and States.”

In the report, the ICC addressed many of the questions, doubts and reports submitted or raised in the four months that followed her earlier decision. Countries such as Germany and Austria, among others, had used their position as amici curiae – ‘friends of the court’ – to question the ICC jurisdiction and the status of Palestine as a country.

Bensouda insisted that “the Prosecutor is satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine under article 53(1) of the Rome Statute, and that the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza (“Occupied Palestinian Territory”).”

However, Bensouda did not provide definitive timelines to the investigation; instead, she requested that the ICC’S Pre-Trial Chamber “confirm the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in Palestine,” an additional step that is hardly required since the State of Palestine, a signatory of the Rome Statute, is the one that actually referred the case directly to the Prosecutor’s office.

The April report, in particular, was the wake-up call for Tel Aviv. Between the initial decision in December till the release of the latter report, Israel lobbied on many fronts, enlisting the help of ICC members and recruiting its greatest benefactor, Washington – which is not an ICC member – to bully the Court so it may reverse its decision.

On May 15, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, warned the ICC against pursuing the investigation, targeting Bensouda, in particular, for her decision to hold war criminals in Palestine accountable.

The US slapped unprecedented sanctions against the ICC on June 11, with President Donald Trump issuing an ‘executive order’ that authorizes the freezing of assets and a travel ban against ICC officials and their families. The order also allows for the punishing of other individuals or entities that assist the ICC in its investigation.

Washington’s decision to carry out punitive measures against the very Court that was established for the sole purpose of holding war criminals accountable is both outrageous and abhorrent. It also exposes Washington’s hypocrisy – the country that claims to defend human rights is attempting to prevent legal accountability by those who have violated human rights.

Upon its failure to halt the ICC legal procedures regarding its investigation of war crimes, Israel began to prepare for the worst. On July 15, Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, reported about a ‘secret list’ that was drawn up by the Israeli government. The list includes “between 200 and 300 officials”, ranging from politicians to military and intelligence officials, who are subject to arrest abroad, should the ICC officially open the war crimes investigation.


Names begin at the top of the Israeli political pyramid, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his current coalition partner, Benny Gantz.
The sheer number of Israeli officials on the list is indicative of the scope of the ICC’s investigation, and, somehow, is a self-indictment, as the names include former Israeli Defense Ministers – Moshe Ya’alon, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett; current and former army chiefs of staffs – Aviv Kochavi, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot and current and former heads of internal intelligence, the Shin Bet – Nadav Argaman and Yoram Cohen.

Respected international human rights organizations have already, repeatedly, accused all these individuals of serious human rights abuses during Israel’s lethal wars on the besieged Gaza Strip, starting with the so-called ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008-9.

But the list is far more extensive, as it covers “people in much more junior positions, including lower-ranking military officers and, perhaps, even officials involved in issuing various types of permits to settlements and settlement outposts.”

Israel, thus, fully appreciates the fact that the international community still insists that the construction of illegal colonies in occupied Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the transfer of Israeli citizens to occupied land are all inadmissible under international law and tantamount to war crimes.

 Netanyahu must be disappointed to learn that all of Washington’s concessions to Israel under Trump’s presidency have failed to alter the position of the international community and the applicability of international law in any way.

Furthermore, it would not be an exaggeration to argue that Tel Aviv’s postponement of its plan to illegally annex nearly a third of the West Bank is directly linked to the ICC’s investigation, for the annexation would have completely thwarted Israel’s friends’ efforts aimed at preventing the investigation from ever taking place.

While the whole world, especially Palestinians, Arabs and their allies, still anxiously await the final decision by the Pre-Trial Chamber, Israel will continue its overt and covert campaign to intimidate the ICC and any other entity that aims to expose Israeli war crimes and to try Israeli war criminals.

Washington, too, will continue to strive to ensure Netanyahu, Gantz, and the “200 to 300” other Israeli officials never see their day in court.

However, the fact that a “secret list” exists is an indication that Tel Aviv understands that this era is different and that international law, which has failed Palestinians for over 70 years, may, for once, deliver, however a small measure of justice.

More articles by:Ramzy Baroud

 

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

BRITISH JUSTICE IS BLIND - OR NON-EXISTANT: JULIAN ASSANGE'S POLITICAL INDICTMENT: OLD WINE IN OLDER BOTTLES

.......and the Australian government has done nothing to help its citizen who it is leaving to rot in hell, so Australians overseas should know how its government looks after those citizens who have no significance for them politically. 

From CounterPunch 31 July 2020

Julian Assange's Political Indictment: Old Wine in Older Bottles

By Binoy Kampmark

The book of hours on Julian Assange is now being written. But the scribes are far from original. Repeated rituals of administrative hearings that have no common purpose other than to string things out before the axe are being enacted. Of late, the man most commonly associated with WikiLeaks’ publication project cannot participate in any meaningful way, largely because of his frail health and the dangers posed to him by the coronavirus. Having already made an effort to attend court proceedings in person, Assange has come across as judicial exotica, freak show fodder for Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s harsh version of Judge Judy. He was refused an application to escape his glass commode when he could still attend in person, as permitting him to descend and consult his defence team in a court room would constitute a bail application of some risk. This reading by the judicial head was so innovative it even puzzled the prosecutors.

What we know to date is that restrictions and shackles on Assange’s case are the order of the day. Restricted processes that do nothing to enable him to see counsel and enable a good brief to be exercised are typical. Most of all, the ceremonial circus that we have come to expect of British justice in the menacing shadow of US intimidation has become gloomily extensive. On July 27, that circus was given yet another act, another limping performance. As before, the venue was the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.

During the proceeding, Assange did appear via video link from Belmarsh Prison, albeit it an hour late, and only at the insistence of his legal team. The Guardian report on his presence reads like an account of a sporting engagement. “Wearing a beige sweater and a pink shirt, Assange eventually appeared from Belmarsh prison after an earlier attempt was aborted.”

Others were alarmed. During his call-over hearing, noted Martin Silk of the Australian Associated Press, “neither the Australian, nor his guards, were wearing face masks. I don’t understand the reason for that given we have to wear them inside shops.” This point was also made by Assange’s partner, Stella Moris: “Belmarsh hasn’t provided Julian with a face mask throughout this #covid crisis. The prison guards he interacts with don’t wear them either.” WikiLeaks supporter Juan Passarelli also felt that Assange “was having trouble following the proceedings due to the Judge and lawyers not speaking loud enough and into the microphones.”

Arrangements for the hearing for observers proved characteristically sloppy. Freelance journalist Stefania Maurizi was unimpressed by being on the phone for two hours during which she “couldn’t understand more than 20 percent of what has been discussed.” She was adamant that “UK authorities don’t care at all about international reporters covering” the Assange proceedings. “Dial in system is, as usual,” agreed Passarelli, “a shambles!”

The topic of discussion during this administrative hearing was what was announced by the US Department of Justice on June 24, namely the second superseding indictment. That document proved to be a naked exercise of political overreach, adding no further charges to the already heavy complement of eighteen, seventeen of which centre on the US Espionage Act. The scope of interest, however, was widened, notably on the issue of “hacking” and conferencing. Assange is painted as devilish recruiter and saboteur of the international secret order, a man of the conference circuit keen to open up clandestine governments and make various reasons for doing so. “According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.”

Edward Fitzgerald QC, in representing Assange, fulfilled his norm, submitting that the recently revised document did little to inspire confidence in the nature of clarified justice. “We are concerned about a fresh request being made at this stage with the potential consequences of derailing proceedings and that the US attorney-general is doing this for political reasons.” Fitzgerald reminded the court that US President Donald Trump had “described the defence case as a plot by the Democrats.”

This should have been obvious, but Baraitser’s court would have none of it. To admit at this point that Assange is wanted for political reasons would make it that much harder to extradite him to the United States, given that bar noted in the US-UK Extradition Treaty. Whilst it was good of Fitzgerald to make this point, he should know by now that his audience is resolutely constipated and indifferent to such prodding. Assange is to be given the sharpest, rather than the most balanced, of hearings. Accordingly, Baraitser insisted that Fitzgerald “reserve his comments” – she, in the true tradition of such processes, had not been supplied, as yet, with the US indictment. This made the entire presence of all the parties at the Westminster Magistrates’ not merely meaningless but decidedly absurd.

Assange’s defence team could draw some cold comfort from Baraitser’s comments that July 27 was the deadline for any further evidence to be adduced by the prosecution before the September extradition hearing. One exception was permitted: psychiatric reports.

The current chief publisher of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson had a few choice words for the prosecutors of Wikileaks. “All the alleged events have been known to the prosecution for years. It contains no new charges. What’s really happening here is that despite its decade start the prosecution are still unable to build a coherent case.” The scrapping of the previous indictments suggested that they were “flagrantly disregarding proper process.”

Assange is facing one of the most disturbing confections put together by any state that claims itself to be free. Should this stratagem work, the publisher will find himself facing the legal proceedings of a country that boasts of having a free press amendment but is keen on excluding him from it. What is even more troubling is the desire to expand the tent of culpability, one that will include press outlets and those who disseminate classified information.

To the next circus instalment we go: a final call-over hearing in Westminster Magistrates’ Court on August 14, then the September 7 extradition hearing, to be held at the Central Criminal Court most of us know as the Old Bailey. Will justice prove blind, or merely blinded?

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

CounterPunch 12 June 2020

Palestine Bleeds: Execution of Autistic Man is Not an Exception but the Norm

by Ramzy Baroud

A 32-year-old man with the mental age of an 8-year-old child was executed by Israeli soldiers on May 30, while crouching behind his teacher near his special needs school in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The cold-blooded murder of Iyad al-Hallaq might not have received much attention if it were not for the fact that it took place five days following the similarly heartbreaking murder of a 46-year-old black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, at the hands of American police.

The two crimes converge, not only in their repugnancy and the moral decadence of their perpetrators, but also because countless American police officers have been trained in Israel, by the very Israeli ‘security forces’ that killed al-Hallaq. The practice of killing civilians, with efficiency and callousness, is now a burgeoning market. Israel is the biggest contributor to this market; the US is the world’s largest client.

When thousands of people rushed to the streets in Palestine, including hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli Jewish activists in Jerusalem, chanting “Justice for Iyad, justice for George”, their cry for justice was a spontaneous and heartfelt reaction to injustice so great, so blatant.

Al-Hallaq’s story might appear particularly unique, as the ‘suspected terrorist’ was killed while merely walking in King Faisal Street in Jerusalem, on his way to take out the trash. He was afraid of soldiers and terrified of blood.

“He was also afraid of the armed police officers who stood along the route to the special needs center he went to, where he participated in a vocational training program,” the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported.

Al-Hallaq’s many fears, which may have appeared exaggerated by his family, turned out to be true. Even an autistic person in Palestine is not safe from the vengeance of soldiers.

But Iyad al-Hallaq did not need to die for Israel to maintain its pathological sense of ‘security’. The fact that he was already shot and wounded, and found bleeding in a roofless garbage room in Jerusalem’s Old City, was not enough to spare him that horrific fate. The fact that the man screamed in agony while hiding behind his caregiver, who pleaded with the soldiers, begging them to stop puncturing his already bleeding body with more bullets, was also not enough.
Still, the soldiers stepped forward, and from a very close range, fired three bullets into al-Hallaq’s midsection as he lay wounded on his back. Instantly, the young man, the ‘apple of the eyes of his parents’, ceased breathing.

“He was our mother’s love, her entire life,” Iyad’s sister, Diana said in an interview with +972 magazine. “She would hold his hand like he was a baby, and he would walk with her to the market, or the mosque or the clothing store. He was like her shadow. She worried about him and whether other kids would bother or hurt him.”

Caught off guard by the grisly nature of the murder and the mental state of the victim, Israel’s spin doctors moved quickly to contain the damage, initially spreading lies that al-Hallaq was carrying a toy gun at the time of the shooting, then backing off, promising an investigation.

But what is there to investigate? In recent years, the Israeli army has upgraded its code of conduct, adopting a shoot-to-kill policy of any Palestinian they suspect of attempting to harm Israeli occupation soldiers, even when the alleged Palestinian ‘attacker’ is no longer posing a threat.

In the case of Gaza, where protesters are separated from Israeli snipers by barbed wire and nearly a mile-long empty space, the Israeli military issued orders, as of June 2019, to shoot and kill ‘key instigators’ of the mass protests even while ‘at rest’. Hundreds of people have been killed in Gaza’s Great March of Return in this way, and the ‘key instigators’ included medics, journalists, young boys and girls.

Indeed, the killing of Palestinian civilians is a regular occurrence. It is the devastating routine with which Palestinians have been forced to co-exist for many years and for which Israel was never ever held accountable.

Only one day before al-Hallaq was murdered, Fadi Samara Qaad, 37, was killed by Israeli occupation soldiers while driving his car near the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, west of Ramallah.

The Israeli military immediately claimed that Qaad “tried to ram his car into a group of soldiers” before they opened fire, killing him on the spot.

This is the go-to Israeli military pretense that is often offered when a Palestinian driver is shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. Otherwise, the Palestinian victim, whether a man, a woman, or a child, is often accused of carrying a ‘sharp object’.

Al-Hallaq’s mental disability might have spared him, in the eyes of some, from being that archetypical ‘terrorist’, although the Israeli army immediately raided his house, looking for ‘evidence’ that would implicate him and be useful in their sinister propaganda.

In the case of Qaad, a Palestinian worker, on his way to join his wife in a nearby town to celebrate the Muslim Eid holiday, the Israeli army statement suffices, no questions asked.

This is the same stifling logic that has prevailed in Palestine for so many years, and counting. Children are killed for throwing stones at men with guns, who have invaded their homes and villages; pregnant women are gunned down at Israeli army checkpoints; men with amputated legs on wheelchairs shot by snipers while protesting and demanding their freedom.

All of this is taking place in the complete absence of any promising political horizon. Even the protracted and ultimately useless ‘peace process’ has been halted in favor of greater American backing of Israel and of the Israeli government’s mad rush to expand illegal Jewish settlements.

To secure his colonial accomplishments – read: land theft – Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is about to reveal the crown jewel of his legacy, as he prepares for the expansion of Israel’s borders through the annexation of yet more Palestinian land.

Inspired by the common struggle that ties them with their African-American brethren, Palestinians are now left only with their cries for justice: Palestinian lives matter, hoping, for once, the world may hear and echo their screams and, perhaps, do something.

More articles by:Ramzy Baroud

 

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

CounterPunch 22 May 2020

Why Israel Fears the Nakba: How Memory Became Palestine’s Greatest Weapon

by Ramzy Baroud

On May 15, thousands of Palestinians in Occupied Palestine and throughout the ‘shatat’, or diaspora, participated in the commemoration of Nakba Day, the one event that unites all Palestinians, regardless of their political differences or backgrounds.

For years, social media has added a whole new stratum to this process of commemoration. #Nakba72, along with #NakbaDay and #Nakba, have all trended on Twitter for days. Facebook was inundated with countless stories, videos, images, and statements, written by Palestinians, or in global support of the Palestinian people.

The dominant Nakba narrative remains – 72 years following the destruction of historic Palestine at the hands of Zionist militias – an opportunity to reassert the centrality of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees. Over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine in 1947-48. The surviving refugees and their descendants are now estimated at over five million.

As thousands of Palestinians rallied on the streets and as the Nakba hashtag was generating massive interest on social media, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, paid an eight-hour visit to Israel to discuss the seemingly imminent Israeli government annexation, or theft, of nearly 30% of the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

“The Israeli government will decide on the matter, on exactly when and how to do it,” Pompeo said in an interview with Israeli radio, Kan Bet, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Clearly, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has American blessing to further its colonization of occupied Palestine, to entrench its existing Apartheid regime, and to act as if the Palestinians simply do not exist.

The Nakba commemoration and Pompeo’s visit to Israel are a stark representation of Palestine’s political reality today.

Considering the massive US political sway, why do Palestinians then insist on making demands which, according to the pervading realpolitik of the so-called Palestinian-Israeli conflict, seem unattainable?

Since the start of the peace process in Oslo in the early 1990s, the Palestinian leadership has engaged with Israel and its western benefactors in a useless political exercise that has, ultimately, worsened an already terrible situation. After over 25 years of haggling over bits and pieces of what remained of historic Palestine, Israel and the US are now plotting the endgame, while demonizing the very Palestinian leaders that participated in their joint and futile political charade.

Strangely, the rise and demise of the so-called ‘peace process’ did not seem to affect the collective narrative of the Palestinian people, who still see the Nakba, not the Israeli occupation of 1967, and certainly not the Oslo accords, as the core point in their struggle against Israeli colonialism.

This is because the collective Palestinian memory remains completely independent from Oslo and its many misgivings. For Palestinians, memory is an active process. It is not a docile, passive mechanism of grief and self-pity that can easily be manipulated, but a generator of new meanings.

In their seminal book “Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory”, Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod wrote that “Palestinian memory is, at its heart, political.”

This means that the powerful and emotive commemoration of the 72nd anniversary of the Nakba is essentially a collective political act, and, even if partly unconscious, a people’s retort and rejection of Donald Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’, of Pompeo’s politicking, and of Netanyahu’s annexation drive.

Despite the numerous unilateral measures taken by Israel to determine the fate of the Palestinian people, the blind and unconditional US support of Israel, and the unmitigated failure of the Palestinian Authority to mount any meaningful resistance, Palestinians continue to remember their history and understand their reality based on their own priorities.

For many years, Palestinians have been accused of being unrealistic, of “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” and even of extremism, for simply insisting on their historical rights in Palestine, as enshrined in international law.

These critical voices are either supporters of Israel, or simply unable to understand how Palestinian memory factors in shaping the politics of ordinary people, independent of the quisling Palestinian leadership or the seemingly impossible-to-overturn status quo. True, both trajectories, that of the stifling political reality and people’s priorities seem to be in constant divergence, with little or no overlapping.

However, a closer look is revealing: the more belligerent Israel becomes, the more stubbornly Palestinians hold on to their past. There is a reason for this.

Occupied, oppressed and refugee camps-confined Palestinians have little control over many of the realities that directly impact their lives. There is little that a refugee from Gaza can do to dissuade Pompeo from assigning the West Bank to Israel, or a Palestinian refugee from Ein El-Helweh in Lebanon to compel the international community to enforce the long-delayed Right of Return.

But there is a single element that Palestinians, regardless of where they are, can indeed control: their collective memory, which remains the main motivator of their legendary steadfastness.

Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 that totalitarianism is a system that, among other things, forbids grief and remembrance, in an attempt to sever the individual’s or group’s relation to the continuous past.
For decades, Israel has done just that, in a desperate attempt to stifle the memory of the Palestinians, so that they are only left with a single option, the self-defeating peace process.

In March 2011, the Israeli parliament introduced the ‘Nakba Law’, which authorized the Israeli Finance Ministry to carry out financial measures against any institution that commemorates Nakba Day.

Israel is afraid of Palestinian memory, since it is the only facet of its war against the Palestinian people that it cannot fully control; the more Israel labors to erase the collective memory of the Palestinian people, the more Palestinians hold tighter to the keys of their homes and to the title deed of their land back in their lost homeland.

There can never be a just peace in Palestine until the priorities of the Palestinian people – their memories, and their aspirations – become the foundation of any political process between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Everything that operates outside this paradigm is null and void, for it will never herald peace or instill true justice. This is why Palestinians remember; for, over the years, their memory has proven to be their greatest weapon.

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.

UK SUPREME COURT REVERSES BDS BAN

From The Real News Network, 7 May 2020

UK Supreme Court Reverses BDS Ban

May 7, 2020

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the largest British Palestinian solidarity group, successfully petitioned to reverse a 2016 ban preventing local governments divesting from companies involved in the Israeli occupation.

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Story Transcript

This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Kim Brown: Welcome to The Real News. I’m Kim Brown. A major decision by the UK Supreme Court protects the rights of organizations, including government organizations, to boycott, divest and sanction the State of Israel, even companies that support the exploitation of Palestine. In 2016, the British government issued severe guidelines banning government organizations and even local governments from participating in the BDS movement in any way.

Now this has impacted the Local Government Pension Scheme, the LGPS, which were obligated to invest the pension money of public service workers in companies that violate international law. Now, that decision was met in Britain with some resistance. Channel four of the BBC spoke with Rafeef Ziadah from the Palestine Society at SOAS University.

Rafeef Ziadah: I think it’s disgraceful that the British government has decided to intervene in this way, attacking local democracy and stopping councils from making ethical decisions around investments. I think the public has every right to be able to intervene in these issues, to talk to our elected officials and to have an impact on corporations that we disagree with, involved in arms trade, against sweatshop labor and for Palestinian rights as well.

Kim Brown: In response to the government decision at the time, world famous journalist Glenn Greenwald said that the attempt to ban BDS is the worst attack on freedom of speech in the West in contemporary times. So joining us to discuss this today is Ben Jamal. Ben is the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which is the largest UK civil society organization dedicated to securing Palestinian human rights. He joins us today from London. Ben, thank you so much for being here.

Ben Jamal: Nice to be here Kim.

Kim Brown: So, Ben, let’s go back to 2016 for a moment because I wanted to get your opinion about the British government’s decision to ban a boycott. We’ll get into, did they have the right to do so, in just a moment. But I wanted to get your take as to why they took this extraordinary step to put this down on paper.

Ben Jamal: Yeah. Well, I think, and we said this at the time, we had to really understand the government’s move as part of the global campaign that’s been going on for many years and which is right with the support of friendly allies amongst Western government, has sought to use what’s defined as law [inaudible 00:02:31] seeking to introduce laws that effectively criminalize BDS.

So we’ve seen laws introduced in the United States, I think more than 20 States have such laws. We’ve seen them introduced in France, we’ve seen them introduced in Germany, is part of the wider campaign to de-legitimize the Palestine Solidarity Movement and de-legitimized activism for Palestine. And these regulations that the government introduced in the UK in 2016 with the first serious attempt we’d seen in the UK to do something similar and to attempt to prohibit action that was effectively… People making decisions not to invest money in companies that were complicit in Israel’s violations of international law to attempt to prohibit that sort of activity.

Kim Brown: So talk to us a little bit about the appeal. What exactly did PCS argue in front of the UK Supreme court and how did the government defend its decision to impose a ban on BDS, on local governments?

Ben Jamal: Well, our argument was framed around… First of all, the obligation as we saw it of public bodies not to be complicit in having their money invested, having the money of their pension scheme holders invested in companies that we’re complicit in international law violations complicit in the violation of human rights, it was about the rights of pension holders on how their money was going to be spent. That if they said, “I don’t want my pension invested in a company that’s helping build illegal settlements”, they should have that right.

The grounds on which we had to fight the case were narrower. So the grounds on which we fought it and on which we won, were an argument about the fact that the government actually did not have the legal right to do what it was doing because pension law did not allow it to do that.

And also your question about how did the government justify what it was doing, I mean the regulations actually didn’t mention Israel or Palestine at all. They were framed in a way that said local government pension schemes cannot choose to divest in support of boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns in any situation where the UK government itself has not imposed sanction. So didn’t specifically mention Israel, but in the whole of the rhetoric around the regulations, the government may clear this was about stopping BDS that was targeted, a company’s complicit in Israel’s violation of Palestinian human rights. When the regulations were announced, they were actually announced, if I recall correctly in a press conference in Tel Aviv, so the minister responsible nine districts in Tel Aviv and make clear that these were part of their view about the illegitimacy of boycott and the way they framed that, why did they say that boycott was illegitimate? Because they use the line that, without stating it boldly, that boycott is inherently antisemitic, they used the line, “The boycott campaigns damage community cohesion.”

In other words, that boycott campaigns are in some way targeted at the Jewish community, which is inherently untrue. The BDS movement is run on anti-racist principles. It targets complicity and not identity. It targets companies and institutions and organizations that are directly supporting Israel’s violation of human rights.

Kim Brown: There’s a lot of conflation between criticism of the state of Israel and antisemitism, but the court ruled in favor of PCS. What reasons did they give behind their decision?

Ben Jamal: So as I said, we made the argument and the thrust of our campaign obviously was the ethical position, but we had to fight it. And the reason we took the cases, we were advised that we had good legal grounds and that the most likely chance of success was the government didn’t have the power. There’s a principle in UK law relies on a Latin phrase called ultra vires. It means you’re acting outside the boundaries of the powers you have. So the argument that was used in that one was the pension regulations, the pension law to which the government attached these regulations puts obligations upon pension companies to make decisions that are always in the benefit of their members to enhance proper investment decisions, et cetera. And the argument in that one was the government did not have the right to attach conditions to how they invest money.

That had nothing to do with any of those considerations. I thought they were to do with foreign policy positions. So that’s the basis on which we won. So it’s a very important victory. Obviously the legal principle was narrow, but as a line in the sand against the government attempts to introduce anti-bias law is very important. But we do have another battle on our hands because the government in the recent Queen’s Speech, so that’s the statement that a new government makes when it’s elected, about what laws it intends to bring in over the next parliament over the next five years. The government has announced that intends to introduce another law that would ban all public bodies from supporting BDS campaign. So we know I have to take the fuel from this victory and build the coalition, which we’re in the process of doing to oppose the next law that the government is trying to bring in.

Kim Brown: The court’s decision is important and interesting, not just for people in the UK, but really all over the world and here in the US various politicians such as New York governor Andrew Cuomo has said that they can’t control what people buy or choose not to buy, but state institutions can nevertheless ban BDS activities and choose to boycott any company or organization that practices BDS. So in a way, if it’s a public institutions don’t belong to the people, but are the private tools of politicians to promote a pro-Israel agenda, do you think that the decision of the UK Supreme Court will have an impact beyond the Britain’s borders?

Ben Jamal: I mean, I hope it does in two ways. One, I think it encourages campaigners across with huge numbers of messages coming into us from fellow solidarity activists around the world. We’ve had messages, numerous messages from Palestine. One that stuck with me is someone who described it as a historic day and I spoke to them and said, “Look, you might be able to play in this, anti-semitism is a narrow vitreous and important victory.” They said, “No”, they don’t understand. I’m a Palestinian myself, so I did understand we Palestinians don’t win many victories against the UK government. And of course there’s a whole history going back to the boat for a declaration that informs that statement. And they also said to us, we’re all walking foot taller today. So it’s important as an act of solidarity, is important as encouraging others, we can fight back against these laws where we have legal tools available to us.

They are something we should use as part of our campaigning as well as making the political case. They’re also though important in other ways. We hope the more victories we win like this is an international solidarity movement, the more we send a message to those trying to introduce these punishers laws that they will be opposed and that we can build political campaigns and public support and use the law ourselves where it’s available to us to oppose these attempts.

 They’re really about suppressing the Palestinian peoples rights to call for action by the international community to oppose their oppression. But individual’s rights to say, “Well, I wish to show solidarity for the Palestinian people and I want to take action to ensure that my country, my institutions, my local authority, my university is not complicit in supporting this injustice in how it spends its money, particularly where that money might belong to me. It might be my money. So they’re choosing to invest in illegal and immoral activities.”

Kim Brown: A major decision announced by the UK Supreme Court and a big victory for the BDS movement. Today we’ve been speaking with Ben Jamal. Ben is the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He’s been joining us today from London. Ben, we appreciate your time in speaking with us. Thank you so much.

Ben Jamal: Nice to be here Kim.

Kim Brown: And thank you for watching The Real News Network.