Is the End Near for the Right-Wing's Vice Grip on U.S. Israeli Policy?

J-Street, vilified by the right and the Right Wing-Nut Christian dominionists who are trying to provoke Armageddon, the peace and reconciliation focused lobby for younger moderate to progressive American Jews goes center stage with Obama's National Security Advisor giving the keynote. Yes, things not the same in the relationship between Israel and the US today. No more Israeli and Iranian spies sneaking around the White House.

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This week, retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones, Barack Obama's national security adviser, will keynote the inaugural J Street Conference, billed as a gathering of "progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace" activists.

The event marks the emergence of the moderate Jewish advocacy group that aspires to be a counterweight to the voices of the traditionally hawkish "pro-Israel" lobby in Washington.

The White House's decision last week to send Jones to address the event was a small move that might have a significant impact on the overheated politics of the Middle East.

In the months before, a full-throated "swift boat" campaign had been launched against J Street in an attempt to vilify and delegitimize the group as belonging to the fringe, despite its advocacy of a moderate, or at most slightly left-of center, approach to U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The conservative media offered a steady drumbeat of dubious charges, and a campaign had been under way to warn members of Congress away from the event. And it appeared to be having some impact as several members of Congress pulled out of the conference in the weeks leading up to the event (a total of 10 reportedly dropped out, according to reports, but not all in response to outside pressure).

It was an attempt to nip J Street in the bud and preserve the hegemony established lobbying groups like American Israel Public Affairs Committee have long enjoyed in the halls of Congress.

At stake was not only the definition of what it means to be "pro-Israel" -- long synonymous with supporting the more hawkish end of Israel's political spectrum (despite American Jews' general tendency to lean left) -- but also, and more importantly, the ability of established lobbying groups to claim to speak for the American Jewish community as a whole.

More via Is the End Near for the Right-Wing's Vice Grip on U.S. Israeli Policy? | | AlterNet.

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Palestinian leaders warn of 'third intifada' over Jerusalem

The racist Likud government of Israel has signaled it will annex Jerusalem and continue to steal other land on the West Bank. They may be able to argue that they abandoned Gaza and got a war, but now the Palestinians fear past proposals to split East Jerusalem off to allow both to have a piece is now dead. Fatah makes peace and loses East Jerusalem and much of the West Bank, what recourse do they have?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Palestinian leaders on Thursday called for a one-day general strike and warned of more street protests over Jerusalem, but Israel played down the risk of an uprising despite two weeks of tension in the occupied city. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction made the call for the strike on Friday in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, and Palestinian leaders warned of the likelihood of a battle ahead of Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The compound housing the mosque is a holy place for both Muslims and Jews, and has often been a flashpoint. Israeli security forces control access to the area and regularly prohibit young Muslim men from entering the holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City, citing security grounds.

Tensions rose two weeks ago when police and protesters clashed near Al-Aqsa Mosque on the eve of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. What triggered the incident remains unclear, but the dispute over access to the holy site was at the root of it.

A beefed-up Israeli police presence, and a relatively small turnout of Palestinian protesters, has kept violence under control in ensuing clashes since late September.

Palestinians in senior positions have warned of the risk of a “third intifada,” or general uprising. But Israel has tried to avoid getting involved in any war of words over Jerusalem.

[..] King Abdullah of Jordan, who plays a key part in management of Al-Aqsa, said in an interview with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that Jerusalem was “a tinderbox” that could explode with reverberations felt throughout the Muslim world. 

Mohammad Dahlan, a leader in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction charged that Israel “has opened the battle of Jerusalem.” Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Israel of “lighting matches in the hope of sparking a fire.”

via The Daily Star - Politics - Palestinian leaders warn of 'third intifada' over Jerusalem.

An Israeli police source said intelligence assessments showed the commotion in East Jerusalem would not escalate.

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Goldstone Report Finds Israeli Military Guilty of War Crimes in Gaza

Juan Cole has a rather optimistic point of view regarding the documentation of war crimes by Israel and Hamas. He thinks the prospects of economic sanctions may reign in the Israelis who continue to steal land in the West Bank. Ultimately, what Obama decides will make the final case. EU's response to this report could be muted at best if Obama continues Bush's policy towards Israel. So far, he has done nothing different except signal that all is not well in American Israeli relations because of West Bank settlements. The call for a freeze has been a political stalling tactic for American presidents for decades. We'll see what that means soon.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Independent reports that a United Nations fact-finding inquiry has found that Israel committed war crimes during its attack on Gaza last winter, as did the Palestinian Hamas. The lion's share of blame in the report, however, falls on Israeli forces, which stand accused of planning out a disproportionate use of force, the punishing of a civilian population, and reckless disregard for civilian lives-- all of which are war crimes in international law. The report suggests that some Israeli actions may have gone beyond being mere war crimes to being crimes against humanity. The report will go to the UN Human Rights Commission, which will likely accept it. The findings could in theory drag Israeli officials before the World Court in the Hague, though in practice this outcome is highly unlikely.

Both the Israeli government and Hamas rejected the report as biased, which is a pretty good indication that it is even-handed.

Aljazeera English has video.

Both rightwing Israeli news sources and Aljazeera English are convinced that the report is so many words on paper and that it will have no effect.

I disagree. Amnesty International has endorsed and defended the conclusions of the report, and Human Rights Watch has also been a supporter of Justice Goldstone. Even the British House of Lords debate on this issue last May displayed a determination that there be no double standard and that Israel be held accountable for any crimes it committed-- likewise Hamas.

Israel's continued inhumane blockade of the people of Gaza and its drive to further colonize the Palestinian West Bank, as well as its tendency to launch wars at the drop of a hat, are increasingly making it an international pariah and impelling a boycott movement, especially in Europe but also Canada. The recent World Council of Churches resolution in favor of some boycotts is also a bellwether. (Nor can such boycotts be avoided by Jewish nationalists' attacks on the academic freedom of boycott proponents such as Neve Gordon; or by Stern Gang character assassination tactics deployed against US academics who protest the policies of the Israeli rightwing.)

Israel is deeply dependent on trade and technological sharing with Europe, and the Goldstone report will give a fillip to the boycott movement. It will also cast a long shadow on future Israeli wars on its neighbors and how they are perceived, as Aluf Benn argues in Haaretz.

The report will color how Israeli politicians' demands for a military attack on Iran are viewed internationally, and it weakens the position of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is defying President Barack Obama by committing to build more Israeli housing on Palestinian land in the West Bank at a time when the US has called for a settlement freeze in preparation for restarting peace talks.'

More at Informed Comment.

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Krane: American Nuclear Reactors for Dubai, Iran’s Best Friend

Dubai is "the diplomatic equivalent of the bar scene in the first Star Wars", complete with Arabs, Israelis, Shia, Sunni, traders and traitors  including the likes of nuclear smuggler Kahn.

And Obama wants to sell them nuclear energy?

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The contrast is startling. Dubai is Iran’s window through the US embargo, one of its largest trading partners, and an offshore Mecca for Iranian business. “Dubai is the most important city on earth to the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the exception of Tehran,” says Saeed Leylaz, the editor of Tehran’s Sarmayeh financial newspaper.

And now Dubai – through the United Arab Emirates federal government – wants American nuclear technology to bolster its overtaxed electric grid.

That a country so central to Iran’s well-being could host American nukes strikes many people as worrying. The US Congress is right to be concerned – but perhaps not for the obvious reasons. Members of Congress now have the chance, albeit unlikely, to scuttle President Obama’s nuclear deal. But they should approve it, with a few amendments.

It isn’t just Iranians who hang around Dubai. The city is the diplomatic equivalent of the bar scene in the first Star Wars. Its array of trading partners and business interests is a gallery of strange bedfellows. Dubai is a major Arab beachhead for Israeli business, especially Tel Aviv diamond dealers tapping into the huge Saudi market. Dubai may have withheld a visa in February from Israeli tennis star Shahar Peer, but the real story is the number of Israelis who do get visas, despite the lack of diplomatic relations.

It gets murkier still. Dubai’s first brush with atomic energy was as the logistics center for the smuggling ring of wayward Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. It’s a place where Afghan opium producers launder their profits, and, along with neighboring Sharjah, where former KGB arms smuggler Victor Bout once organized cargo shipments. Dubai airport, which offers direct flights to Kandahar, Mogadishu and Baghdad, welcomes all sorts of interesting visitors. One was USS Cole bombing mastermind Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was detained on arrival and handed to the CIA for waterboarding and threats with a power drill.

Dubai also happens to be a close US ally. It is the US Navy’s No. 1 overseas port, the only Gulf harbor that can berth a carrier or offer shore leave to American sailors. The US consulate in Dubai hosts a lucrative CIA collection operation on Iran, which I detail in my book. And, although Dubai’s ruler allowed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to hold a giant anti-American rally in a soccer stadium, he closed the main roads in the city and declared a mandatory holiday for the visit of US President Bush.

via Informed Comment: Krane: American Nuclear Reactors for Dubai, Iran’s Best Friend.

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Where does the hatred come from?

It would appear that Homeland Security is promoting Islamo-phobia in it's recommended training for US Law Enforcement! Where is Obama? Is he just pretending to be Bush lite?

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This fall, U.S. law enforcement personnel will have their final chance to take advantage of a rare opportunity. Participants will travel to Israel to receive “homeland security training,” but the counterterrorism briefings and martial arts practice sessions are only one part of the package. The program also includes visits to Christian religious sites in the Holy Land — an aspect likely to be especially attractive to Christian Zionists — along with other sites such as the Knesset and the Israeli “security fence”.

The Israel program is run by Security Solutions International (SSI), a group that has attracted controversy due to its ties to Islamophobic propaganda groups — as well as its apparent view that indoctrinating first responders with alarmist information about Islam is an essential part of counterterrorism training.

Most striking of all, the SSI Israel trip is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. DHS’s funding of this venture is a concrete illustration of the ways that Islamophobic fringe groups have exploited the “global war on terror” for their own purposes.[..]So what does this training involve? In addition to martial arts demonstrations including “how to take down an armed suicide bomber”, meetings with Israeli security personnel, and a three-hour presentation on “suicide terror,” the itinerary also includes more tourist-oriented activities. Tourist excursions are both political visits to the Knesset, the West Bank “security barrier,” and southern Israeli towns that have been the target of rocket attacks from Gaza, and religious trips to Jerusalem’s Old City and to “some of Christianity’s holiest sites”.While this DHS-funded trip might already seem a bit odd — especially the emphasis on Christian religious sites during what is ostensibly a counterterrorism training program — things take a turn towards the bizarre in the section of the website advertising SSI’s two day presentations on “The Islamic Jihadist Threat”.

via LobeLog.com

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Israeli soldiers 'used human shields' in Gaza

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Times Online

A group of Israeli soldiers who fought in the recent war in Gaza have testified that the military allowed them to use reckless force.
The 26 soldiers published their anonymous accounts in a booklet compiled by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli soldiers' organisation.
They describe the Israeli army's use of human shields and deliberate targeting of civilian structures.
The soldiers' descriptions confirm information first published by The Times during the offensive that soldiers were given orders to shoot first and ask questions later.
In one typical account, a soldier said that in pre-invasion briefings his officers said it was better to hit an innocent than hesitate to attack an enemy. "If you're not sure, kill. Fire power was insane."
"You felt like a child playing around with a magnifying glass, burning up ants," another Israeli soldier said. "A 20-year-old kid should not be doing such things to people."
Several Israeli soldiers adescribed the use of white phosphorus in Gaza. One soldier described walking on the beach in Gaza and discovering an area covered in glazed sand from a white phosphorous bomb.
He said it was upsetting because "in training you learn that white phosphorus is not used, and you're taught that it's not humane".
A soldier from the Golani brigade said: "Sometimes a force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian's shoulder, advancing into a house and using him as a human shield."
Another soldier related an incident in which he was ordered not to fire warning shots at a man approaching their position from some dozen yards away.
When they asked their commander why he told them not to fire warning shots, he said: "It's night time and this is a terrorist."
Israel has blamed Palestinian militant groups for the high death toll in Gaza, stating that they hid explosives in schools, hospitals, and other civilian structures.
They said that Palestinian militants often dressed as civilians and attempted to get close to forces before launching an attack.
More than 1,400 Palestinians died in the three-week offensive. Gaza health officials say 900 of those killed were civilians but Israel says that figure is closer to 300.
Thirteen Israelis were killed, including three civilians who died from rocket fire.
A military spokesman accused the group of "defaming and slandering the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] and its commanders" but said that he would investigate formal complaints of military misconduct.

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Israeli settlers evicting Palestinians from Jerusalem

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The Daily Star

Israeli settlers are waging court battles to evict dozens of Palestinians from homes in an Occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood, a move threatening to widen Israel's rift with US President Barack Obama over settlements. They are trying to reclaim plots of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood which they say were owned by Jews before Israel's creation in 1948. They have already won property rights to six Arab homes, whose residents were subsequently evicted.
Palestinians and an Israeli rights group say settlers are trying to evict a further 27 Arab families from 28 buildings.
"Stop ethnic cleansing," reads a sign erected outside the home of Maher Hanun, a 51-year-old father of three, who faces a July 19 deadline to evacuate the structure in Sheikh Jarrah, near the walled Old City of Occupied Jerusalem.
Such acts could cloud Israel's relations with its main ally, the United States.
Obama, who is to address the Muslim world in a speech in Egypt on Thursday, renewed a call for a halt to settlement activity during talks last week with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Settlers have moved into six Arab buildings in Sheikh Jarrah, home to consulates and trendy restaurants. Armed men guard the buildings where settlers have hoisted Israeli flags to assert Jewish dominance.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to accept limits on building of Jewish enclaves within Occupied Jerusalem, including the Arab east. He has also rebuffed US calls for a full settlement freeze in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Abbas has said Occupied East Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Palestinian state he wants to establish alongside Israel in the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War and has occupied the area in contravention of international law ever since.
"Why should we be evicted from homes in which we and our children were born, only to give way to more Jewish settlements?" asked Hanun, whose family has been living in the house since 1956.
Settlers have unsuccessfully sought permission from Israel's Occupied Jerusalem municipality to raze 28 Palestinian homes in the area surrounding Hanun's house, to make way for 200 housing units and a public garden, the municipality's online archives show.
But they are winning legal battles in Israeli courts which recognize documents from the Ottoman and British mandate eras showing that Jews owned plots of land in Occupied East Jerusalem where Arabs built homes.
An Arab family was evicted in November and the Hanuns and their neighbors have until July 19 to leave or face eviction and hefty fines.
"These developments strengthen Israeli control of this area and thwart the feasibility of future agreed-upon borders for [Occupied] Jerusalem," the Israeli Ir Amim, or City of Nations, rights group, founded in 2004 to advocate equality in Occupied Jerusalem, said in a report.
It said that Israeli courts do not accept similar Arab claims to land and property in Jewish West Jerusalem. The high-end neighborhood of Talbieh is abundant with old white-stone houses whose Palestinian owners fled or were forced to leave during the 1948 war over Israel's creation.
Some 260,000 Arabs, most of them Muslim, live in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. They carry Israeli identity cards, giving them access to welfare and health services, and freedom of movement denied to Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank. But few have taken up the possibility of full Israeli citizenship.
They say Israel's policies toward Arabs in the city as well as a barrier it is building in and around Occupied East Jerusalem are designed to drive them out. - With The Daily Star

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What's Not Being Said About the Obama-Netanyahu Talks

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Haaretz Via The LA Progressive

Ever since East Jerusalem was annexed to the State of Israel, Jerusalem Day, which is celebrated today, has turned into a festival of clichéd slogans - such as 'the united capital of Israel for all eternity.''From year to year, the gap between the flowery words of the politicians and the sad reality in the divided city widens. The day after the festival, officials return to supporting discrimination against the Palestinian minority, who make up a third of the city's population. Forty-two years after Israel declared that Jerusalem had been reunited, it is simple to draw a clear line between the two peoples who have been compelled to live under one national and municipal roof. According to data gathered by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, two-thirds of the Palestinians in the city live below the poverty line; more than one-third of their lands have been expropriated since 1967; since there are no approved plans, 160,000 of them are living in homes that were built without permits, and can expect demolition and eviction orders; tens of thousands live without proper sewage systems or regular water supplies; their sanitation conditions are inferior; and there are too few social workers to care for them and too many Border Policemen.
Half of the Palestinian children of school-going age do not have a place in the state educational system, and some 9,000 of them do not receive any education at all. At the same time the separation fence pushes the Palestinians out of the city limits, the Israeli establishment is abetting the extreme right-wing organizations that take up residence in the Arab neighborhoods, sow discord and bring about the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes.
It is not conceivable that there will be a peace agreement that will leave Israel with total sovereignty over Muslim holy places," the editorial continued. "Without a final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, the countries of the world will not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and they will continue to keep their embassies elsewhere. Unless the Muslim world is made a partner to sovereignty on the Temple Mount, there is no point in discussing normal relations between Israel and its neighbors.
Now, as U.S. President Barack Obama prepares to launch his peace plan, it would be wise for Israel's leaders to exchange their empty slogans for practical plans for a logical and just arrangement for Jerusalem.

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The Hush-Hush Story: Why They Tortured

The LA Progressive

The US Senate Armed Services Committee report, issued April 21, on the interrogation techniques employed against detainees following the September 11 terrorist attack, wrote Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times, "reads like deja vu all over again: the US establishment under Bush was a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. And it all started even before a single 'high-profile al-Qaeda detainee' was captured.
What Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assorted little inquisitors wanted was above all to prove the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, the better to justify a pre-emptive, illegal war planned by the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. The torture memos were just a cog in the imperial machine."
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman mentioned it in his column April 24, writing, "For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract 'confessions' that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way." Krugman was more explicit in his blog, titled "Grand Unified Scandal" appearing the previous day, after the Senate report came out. "Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link," he wrote. "There's a word for this: it's evil."
The impetus for the comment by Krugman and Escobar was a story carried April 21 in the McClatchy Newspapers by Jonathan S. Landay The story has made the rounds on the internet and in some of the foreign press but as of this writing has been ignored or obscured by most of the major U.S. media.
"The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist," wrote Landay. "Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
"The use of abusive interrogation - widely considered torture - as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them."
Landay went on to quote "A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue" saying former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 'demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.'
"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," Landay was told. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Few dare call Ahmed Chalabi what he is, an Iranian intelligence agent, who along with AIPAC officials, Israeli Intelligence agents duped Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal into invading Iraq.
And now the Israeli spies will get away with it because the truth of the huge security hole in the Bush Administration will become obvious to all.
Reuters

"Given the diminished likelihood the government will prevail at trial under the additional intent requirements imposed by the court and the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment," Dana Boente, acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement.

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Israeli Physician's Group Condemns Ethics of IDF

Al Jazeera English

Israel's army violated codes of ethics and international law during the war in Gaza by attacking medics and refusing to allow the treatment of wounded, a human-rights group says.
In a report published on Monday, the group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) calls for an independent body to investigate the military's conduct during its 22-day war on Gaza, which ended on January 18. The actions reflect a "demonisation of Palestinians [which] bears a heavy price for Israeli society".
In its defence, the Israeli army said it had not yet concluded its investigation, but that fighters from Gaza's ruling Hamas had fought under the cover of ambulances and medical facilities.
'Indiscriminate attacks'
Among the offences listed by PHR are "attacks on medical personnel; damage to medical facilities and indiscriminate attacks on civilians not involved in the fighting". The report further says: "Israel placed numerous obstacles in the course of the operation that impeded emergency medical evacuation of the sick and wounded and also caused families to be trapped for days without food, water and medications.
"The actions ... violate directives of international law which forbid attacks on medical centres and medical teams during fighting" and "blatantly violated codes of ethics."
The PHR report is the latest in a string of accusations relating to the conduct of the Israeli army during the Gaza offensive. Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel's army chief of staff, dismissed on Monday allegations that civilians were killed during the assault, based on soldiers' testimonies published last week. "I do not believe that IDF troops hurt Palestinian civilians in cold blood," he said in a speech. We will wait the outcome of an investigation, but my impression is that the IDF acted morally and if such cases did take place they were isolated."
Family tragedy
During the offensive, Israeli fire killed 16 Palestinian medical personnel and wounded 25 others while eight hospitals and 26 primary care clinics were attacked, according to figures from the United Nations and the PHR. Among the specific incidents cited by the PHR report is that of a "Mr Shurrab" whose two sons were shot by Israeli forces while they drove towards the southern city of Khan Younis on January 16.
"One of the sons died immediately, the other bled to death for 12 hours," PHR said. "All that time the Israeli soldiers were within a short distance from the Shurrabs but did not provide any assistance despite the father's repeated requests."
PHR condemned the Israeli army, which it said "flaunts its morality", for "declining to help evacuate injured civilians and trapped families, when soldiers acted in a trigger-happy manner as they opened fire on ambulances, medical installations and medical personnel".
Dani Filc Chairman, Physicians for Human Rights, an Israel NGO said: "We have noticed a stark decline in IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] morals concerning the Palestinian population of Gaza, which in reality amounts to a contempt for Palestinian lives. It is critical that the investigation of Operation Cast Lead is completed by a neutral, external investigator without ties to the IDF."
The Israeli army said it is investigating the claims in a "thorough" manner. It insisted that soldiers were instructed to "act with the utmost caution in order not to cause harm to medical vehicles and medical facilities".
Hamas blamed
In a statement, the Israeli army blamed Hamas for putting health personnel and medical facilities in harm's way.
"Throughout the fighting, Hamas methodically made use of medical vehicles, facilities and uniforms in order to conceal and camouflage terrorist activity, and in general used ambulances to carry terror activists and weapons," it said. "Hamas used ambulances to "rescue" terror activists from the battlefield and used hospitals and medical facilities as hiding places". Such actions "greatly complicated the co-ordination of rescue and medical evacuation", the army said. "It must be emphasised that under international law, the protections afforded to medical teams or "protected institutions" ... cease to exist when these medical teams or institutions are not used for humanitarian purposes rather for carrying out actions intended to harm the state of Israel".

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Lieberman and Wiping Countries off the face of the Map

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Informed Comment

Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan night club bouncer, is now foreign minister of Israel. The world has had a lot of fun laughing at the pronouncements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who stands falsely accused of threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map. But Ahmadinejad has protested that it would be wrong to kill large numbers of civilians.
Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan night club bouncer, is now foreign minister of Israel. The world has had a lot of fun laughing at the pronouncements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who stands falsely accused of threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map. But Ahmadinejad has protested that it would be wrong to kill large numbers of civilians.
In contrast, Lieberman has threatened to wipe at least two countries, Egypt and Palestine, off the map. Monstrously, he suggested bombing the Aswan Dam, which would have the effect of murdering all 80 million Egyptians and sweeping them into the Mediterranean in a vast continental African tsunami.
Lieberman promptly announced on assuming office that the Mideast peace process is dead. Well, at least we have an outbreak of frankness.
Whereas Ahmadinejad was humiliated by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger on his visit to that university, which provoked public protests, Lieberman's acceptance into the Israeli government has been greeted mildly and he was allowed to come to the Brookings Institution and meet with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Lieberman is a Central/Eastern European ultra-nationalist in the mold of Slobodan Milosevic and Jorg Haider, and it is shameful that he was allowed into the government and more shameful that this travesty has passed without a peep in the civilized world.
The Electronic Intifada lists "Some of Avigdor Lieberman's infamous statements":
' # In 1998, Lieberman called for the flooding of Egypt by bombing the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Egyptian support for Yasser Arafat.
# In 2001, as Minister of National Infrastructure, Lieberman proposed that the West Bank be divided into four cantons, with no central Palestinian government and no possibility for Palestinians to travel between the cantons.
# In 2002, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Lieberman in a Cabinet meeting saying that the Palestinians should be given an ultimatum that "At 8am we'll bomb all the commercial centers ... at noon we'll bomb their gas stations ... at two we'll bomb their banks ..."
# In 2003, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Lieberman called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide the buses to take them there.
# In May 2004, Lieberman proposed a plan that called for the transfer of Israeli territory with Palestinian populations to the Palestinian Authority. Likewise, Israel would annex the major Jewish settlement blocs on the Palestinian West Bank. If applied, his plan would strip roughly one-third of Israel's Palestinian citizens of their citizenship. A "loyalty test" would be applied to those who desired to remain in Israel. This plan to trade territory with the Palestinian Authority is a revision of Lieberman's earlier calls for the forcible transfer of Palestinian citizens of Israel from their land. Lieberman stated in April 2002 that there was "nothing undemocratic about transfer."
# Also in May 2004, he said that 90 percent of Israel's 1.2 million Palestinian citizens would "have to find a new Arab entity" in which to live beyond Israel's borders. "They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost," he said.
# In May 2006, Lieberman called for the killing of Arab members of Knesset who meet with members of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.'
Nice.

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Israel army 'used human shields'

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

BBC NEWS

United Nations investigators have accused the Israeli army of using an 11-year-old boy as a human shield during its recent Gaza offensive.
Their report says troops ordered the boy to walk in front of them for several hours under fire, entering buildings and opening suspect packages.
The UN team responsible for protection of children in war zones says it found "hundreds" of similar violations.
Israel has denied the charges, saying morals are "paramount" in its army.
Israel's ambassador to the UN criticised the report as "unable or perhaps unwilling" to address attacks against its civilians by Palestinian militants.
The lead investigator, Sri Lankan lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy, said the incident with the boy in the Gaza neighbourhood of Tel al-Hawa on 15 January was a violation of Israeli and international law.
Her report also accuses Israeli soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier.
She cited the case of one family where the father was ordered out of his home and shot. Soldiers then fired on the family inside, killing one child and wounding the mother and three children.
She added that her report contained "just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents" that had been verified by UN officials in the Gaza Strip.
Ethic standards
An Israeli military spokesman dismissed the UN findings as inaccurate and politically motivated.
"We are an army to which morals and high ethical standards are paramount," Capt Elie Isaacson said.
"The report claims to examine Israel's actions while it wilfully ignores and downplays the terrorist and other threats we face," Ambassador Aharon Leshno Yaar told the UN's 47-nation Human Rights Council.
Ms Coomaraswamy, who is the secretary-general's special envoy for protecting children in armed conflict, said the UN is also investigating claims the Palestinian militant group Hamas used human shields during the three-week Gaza conflict.
Israel's military last week ordered an inquiry after some soldiers admitted killing unarmed Palestinian civilians during the operation which ended on 18 January.
Medical authorities say more than 1,300 Palestinians died in the Israeli offensive. It is not known how many of them were combatants belonging to militant groups.
The dead including some 440 children, 110 women, and dozens of elderly people. Israel has blamed Hamas for using civilians as human shields, which Hamas has denied.

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Israel army 'used human shields'

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

BBC NEWS

United Nations investigators have accused the Israeli army of using an 11-year-old boy as a human shield during its recent Gaza offensive.
Their report says troops ordered the boy to walk in front of them for several hours under fire, entering buildings and opening suspect packages.
The UN team responsible for protection of children in war zones says it found "hundreds" of similar violations.
Israel has denied the charges, saying morals are "paramount" in its army.
Israel's ambassador to the UN criticised the report as "unable or perhaps unwilling" to address attacks against its civilians by Palestinian militants.
The lead investigator, Sri Lankan lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy, said the incident with the boy in the Gaza neighbourhood of Tel al-Hawa on 15 January was a violation of Israeli and international law.
Her report also accuses Israeli soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier.
She cited the case of one family where the father was ordered out of his home and shot. Soldiers then fired on the family inside, killing one child and wounding the mother and three children.
She added that her report contained "just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents" that had been verified by UN officials in the Gaza Strip.
Ethic standards
An Israeli military spokesman dismissed the UN findings as inaccurate and politically motivated.
"We are an army to which morals and high ethical standards are paramount," Capt Elie Isaacson said.
"The report claims to examine Israel's actions while it wilfully ignores and downplays the terrorist and other threats we face," Ambassador Aharon Leshno Yaar told the UN's 47-nation Human Rights Council.
Ms Coomaraswamy, who is the secretary-general's special envoy for protecting children in armed conflict, said the UN is also investigating claims the Palestinian militant group Hamas used human shields during the three-week Gaza conflict.
Israel's military last week ordered an inquiry after some soldiers admitted killing unarmed Palestinian civilians during the operation which ended on 18 January.
Medical authorities say more than 1,300 Palestinians died in the Israeli offensive. It is not known how many of them were combatants belonging to militant groups.
The dead including some 440 children, 110 women, and dozens of elderly people. Israel has blamed Hamas for using civilians as human shields, which Hamas has denied.

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A Religious War in Israel's Army

Image via Wikipedia

NYTimes.com

The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting highlights a debate here about the rules of war. But it also exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.
Several of the testimonies, published by an institute that runs a premilitary course and is affiliated with the left-leaning secular kibbutz movement, showed a distinct impatience with religious soldiers, portraying them as self-appointed holy warriors.
A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, "the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war."
Dany Zamir, the director of the one-year premilitary course who solicited the testimonies and then leaked them, leading to a promise by the military to investigate, is quoted in the transcripts as expressing anguish over the growing religious nationalist elements of the military.
"If clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren't representative of the whole spectrum of the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population, what can we expect?" he said. "To whom do we complain?"
For the first four decades of Israel's existence, the army -- like many of the country's institutions -- was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated. In the past decade or two, religious nationalists, including many from the settler movement in the West Bank, have moved into more and more positions of military responsibility. (In Israeli society, they are a growing force, distinct from, and more modern than, the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox, who are excused from military service.)
In many cases, the religious nationalists have ascended to command positions from precisely the kind of premilitary college course that Mr. Zamir runs -- but theirs are run by the religious movements rather than his secular one, meaning that the competition between him and them is both ideological and careerist.
"The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies," noted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor who co-wrote the military code of ethics and who is himself religiously observant but politically liberal. "The religious right is trying to have an impact on Israeli society through the army."
For Mr. Halbertal, like for the vast majority of Israelis, the army is an especially sensitive institution because it has always functioned as a social cauldron, throwing together people from all walks of life and scores of ethnic and national backgrounds, and helping form them into a cohesive society with social networks that carry on throughout their lives.
Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military's chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.
He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: "He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful."
A controversy then arose when a booklet handed out to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy. The Defense Ministry reprimanded the rabbi.
At the time, in January, Avshalom Vilan, then a leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having "turned the Israeli military's activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war."
Immediately after Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 and then from several West Bank settlements, there was a call to disband certain religious programs in the army because some soldiers in them said they would refuse to obey future orders to disband settlements. After the rise of Hamas in Gaza and the increase in rocket attacks on Israel, that discussion died down.
But Yaron Ezrahi, a leftist political scientist at Hebrew University who has been lecturing to military commanders, said that the call to close those programs should now be revived because what was evident in Gaza was that the humanistic tradition from which a code of ethics is derived was not being sufficiently observed there.
The dispute over control of the army is not only ideological. It is also personal, as all politics is in this small, intimate country. Those who disagree with the chief rabbi have vilified him. Those who are unhappy with what Mr. Zamir did by leaking the transcript of the Gaza soldiers' testimonies last week have spread word that he is a leftist ideologue out to harm Israel.
In 1990, Mr. Zamir, then a parachute company commander in the reserves, was sentenced to prison for refusing to guard a ceremony involving religious Jews visiting the West Bank city of Nablus. For some, that refusal is a badge of honor; for others it is an act of insubordination and treason. A quiet campaign began on Thursday regarding Mr. Zamir's leftist sympathies, to discredit the transcript he publicized.
At the same time, Rabbi Rontzki's numerous sayings and writings have been making the rounds among leftist intellectuals. He has written, for example, that what others call "humanistic values" are simply subjective feelings that should be subordinate to following the law of the Torah.
He has also said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath, when work is prohibited but treating the sick and injured is expected, is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.
Mr. Halbertal, the Jewish philosopher who opposes the attitude of Rabbi Rontzki, said the divide that is growing in Israel is not only between religious and secular Jews but among the religious themselves. The debate is over three issues -- the sanctity of land versus life; the relationship between messianism and Zionism; and the place of non-Jews in a sovereign Jewish state.
The religious left argues that the right has made a fetish of the land of Israel instead of letting life take precedence, he said. The religious left also rejects the messianic nature of the right's Zionist discourse, and it argues that Jewish tradition values all life, not primarily Jewish life.
"The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism," he said. "They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all."
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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A Religious War in Israel's Army

Image via Wikipedia

NYTimes.com

The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting highlights a debate here about the rules of war. But it also exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.
Several of the testimonies, published by an institute that runs a premilitary course and is affiliated with the left-leaning secular kibbutz movement, showed a distinct impatience with religious soldiers, portraying them as self-appointed holy warriors.
A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, "the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war."
Dany Zamir, the director of the one-year premilitary course who solicited the testimonies and then leaked them, leading to a promise by the military to investigate, is quoted in the transcripts as expressing anguish over the growing religious nationalist elements of the military.
"If clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren't representative of the whole spectrum of the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population, what can we expect?" he said. "To whom do we complain?"
For the first four decades of Israel's existence, the army -- like many of the country's institutions -- was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated. In the past decade or two, religious nationalists, including many from the settler movement in the West Bank, have moved into more and more positions of military responsibility. (In Israeli society, they are a growing force, distinct from, and more modern than, the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox, who are excused from military service.)
In many cases, the religious nationalists have ascended to command positions from precisely the kind of premilitary college course that Mr. Zamir runs -- but theirs are run by the religious movements rather than his secular one, meaning that the competition between him and them is both ideological and careerist.
"The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies," noted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor who co-wrote the military code of ethics and who is himself religiously observant but politically liberal. "The religious right is trying to have an impact on Israeli society through the army."
For Mr. Halbertal, like for the vast majority of Israelis, the army is an especially sensitive institution because it has always functioned as a social cauldron, throwing together people from all walks of life and scores of ethnic and national backgrounds, and helping form them into a cohesive society with social networks that carry on throughout their lives.
Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military's chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.
He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: "He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful."
A controversy then arose when a booklet handed out to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy. The Defense Ministry reprimanded the rabbi.
At the time, in January, Avshalom Vilan, then a leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having "turned the Israeli military's activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war."
Immediately after Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 and then from several West Bank settlements, there was a call to disband certain religious programs in the army because some soldiers in them said they would refuse to obey future orders to disband settlements. After the rise of Hamas in Gaza and the increase in rocket attacks on Israel, that discussion died down.
But Yaron Ezrahi, a leftist political scientist at Hebrew University who has been lecturing to military commanders, said that the call to close those programs should now be revived because what was evident in Gaza was that the humanistic tradition from which a code of ethics is derived was not being sufficiently observed there.
The dispute over control of the army is not only ideological. It is also personal, as all politics is in this small, intimate country. Those who disagree with the chief rabbi have vilified him. Those who are unhappy with what Mr. Zamir did by leaking the transcript of the Gaza soldiers' testimonies last week have spread word that he is a leftist ideologue out to harm Israel.
In 1990, Mr. Zamir, then a parachute company commander in the reserves, was sentenced to prison for refusing to guard a ceremony involving religious Jews visiting the West Bank city of Nablus. For some, that refusal is a badge of honor; for others it is an act of insubordination and treason. A quiet campaign began on Thursday regarding Mr. Zamir's leftist sympathies, to discredit the transcript he publicized.
At the same time, Rabbi Rontzki's numerous sayings and writings have been making the rounds among leftist intellectuals. He has written, for example, that what others call "humanistic values" are simply subjective feelings that should be subordinate to following the law of the Torah.
He has also said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath, when work is prohibited but treating the sick and injured is expected, is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.
Mr. Halbertal, the Jewish philosopher who opposes the attitude of Rabbi Rontzki, said the divide that is growing in Israel is not only between religious and secular Jews but among the religious themselves. The debate is over three issues -- the sanctity of land versus life; the relationship between messianism and Zionism; and the place of non-Jews in a sovereign Jewish state.
The religious left argues that the right has made a fetish of the land of Israel instead of letting life take precedence, he said. The religious left also rejects the messianic nature of the right's Zionist discourse, and it argues that Jewish tradition values all life, not primarily Jewish life.
"The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism," he said. "They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all."
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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