‘The Palestine Cables’: Obama administration killed off independent U.N. investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza

This post, part of the “Palestine Cables” feature I write, originally appeared in Mondoweiss:

It was a shocking event in a twenty-two day assault filled with them:  the Israeli military shelled a United Nations compound in Gaza City January 15, where humanitarian aid like fuel and water pumping stations were stationed as well as hundreds of Palestinians displaced by the Israeli bombardment.  John Ging, the Gaza Director of Operations of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) described the scene on Democracy Now!

This morning, there were three rounds of white phosphorus which landed in our compound in Gaza. That set ablaze the main warehouse and the big workshop we have there for vehicles. At the time, there were 700, also, people displaced from the fighting. There were full fuel tankers there. The Israeli army have been given all the coordinates of all our facilities, including this one. They also knew that there were fuel tankers laden with fuel in the compound, and they would have known that there were hundreds of people who had taken refuge.

It was one of a number of incidents during “Operation Cast Lead” where the Israeli military attacked United Nations facilities.  But the possibility of an further inquiry that would investigate violations of international law during these attacks was killed following intense U.S. lobbying, according to newly published State Department cables released by WikiLeaks and reported on by Foreign Policy‘s Colum Lynch.  The efforts by the Obama administration to scuttle any investigation is similar to their efforts on the Goldstone report, and shows in detail how the U.S. uses its muscle in international forums to protect Israel.

A report was published in May 2009 on nine incidents where U.N. facilities were attacked by Israel.  The full report was never published, although a summary of the U.N. report stated that the “Government of Israel is responsible for the deaths and injuries that occurred within the United Nations premises” in seven of the nine incidents investigated.

A number of recommendations were made for further follow-up, which included seeking compensation from Israel and seeking public statements from Israel that allegations of Palestinian fighters firing from within UNRWA facilities were unfounded.  The most controversial recommendation included in the report was the call for an “impartial inquiry” into violations of international humanitarian law.  But the possibility of that inquiry was quashed in the cover letter to the summary of the report, written by Ki-Moon.  “As for the Board’s recommendations numbers 10 and 11 [which called for further inquiries], which relate to matters that did not largely fall within the Board of Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, I do not plan any further Inquiry,” Ki-Moon wrote.

And despite Moon’s insistence at a press conference that the work of the board of inquiry was “completely independent,” State Department cables tell a much different story of U.S. pressure on Moon to kill off the possibility of an independent investigation.

Lynch reports:

The most controversial part of the probe involved recommendations by Martin that the U.N. conduct a far-reaching investigation into violations of international humanitarian law by Israeli forces, Hamas, and other Palestinian militants. On May 4, 2009, the day before Martin’s findings were presented to the media, Rice caught wind of the recommendations and phoned Ban to complain that the inquiry had gone beyond the scope of its mandate by recommending a sweeping investigation.

“Given that those recommendations were outside the scope of the Board’s terms of reference, she asked that those two recommendations not be included in the summary of the report that would be transmitted to the membership,” according to an account contained in the May 4 cable. Ban initially resisted. “The Secretary-General said he was constrained in what he could do since the Board of Inquiry is independent; it was their report and recommendations and he could not alter them, he said,” according to the cable.

But Rice persisted, insisting in a subsequent call that Ban should at least “make clear in his cover letter when he transmits the summary to the Security Council that those recommendations exceeded the scope of the terms of reference and no further action is needed.” Ban offered no initial promise. She subsequently drove the point home again, underlining the “importance of having a strong cover letter that made clear that no further action was needed and would close out this issue.”

Ban began to relent, assuring Rice that “his staff was working with an Israeli delegation on the text of the cover letter.”

After completing the cover letter, Ban phoned back Rice to report that he believed “they had arrived at a satisfactory cover letter. Rice thanked the Secretary-General for his exceptional efforts on such a sensitive issue.”

At the following day’s news conference, Ban flat-out rejected Martin’s recommendation for an investigation. While underscoring the board’s independent nature, he made it clear that “it is not my intention to establish any further inquiry.” Although he acknowledged publicly that he had consulted with Israel on the findings, he did not say it had been involved in the preparation of the cover letter killing off the call for an investigation. Instead, he only made a request to the Israelis to pay the U.N. more than $11 million in financial compensation for the damage done to U.N. facilities.

U.S. Congress gets the facts wrong on Goldstone (the sequel)

A Congressional resolution being circulated in response to Judge Richard Goldstone’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post distorts the reality of the report and Goldstone’s article.  That’s no surprise, considering the resolution the House of Representatives passed in 2009 in response to publication of the report.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has the story:

A Senate resolution, introduced April 8 by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and James Risch (R-Idaho), calls on the U.N. Human Rights Council to “reflect the author’s repudiation of the Goldstone report’s central findings, rescind the report, and reconsider further Council actions with respect to the report’s findings…”

In the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is circulating a letter asking colleagues to join her in sponsoring a U.N. accountability act to include language demanding the revocation of the Goldstone report, and withhold the U.S. portion of funds spent on Goldstone’s investigation and its follow-on consequences.

Goldstone’s article did not “repudiate” the report’s “central findings.”  The only change was Goldstone’s claim that, after reviewing “investigations published by the Israeli military,” Israel did not intentionally target civilians, which was only one finding of many made in the U.N. report.  As Goldstone himself told the Associated Press recently, besides the change enunciated in the Post Op-Ed, he has “no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time.”  The other authors of the report have also insisted that the report still stands.

There were similar half-truths propagated in response to the publication of the report in November 2009.  In response to the numerous factual errors in the resolution, Judge Goldstone rightly denounced the legislation as “sweeping,” “unfair” and “devoid of truth.”  Congress, though, will only listen to Goldstone when his words confirm their Israel lobby dictated worldview.  The facts matter little.

 

Israeli spin on Goldstone Op-Ed doesn’t hold up

It is dizzying to watch the Israeli government and its supporters spin the substance of Judge Richard Goldstone’s column in the Washington Post yesterday.  A closer look at the column, and the Goldstone report itself, shows that the propaganda being churned out by the Netanyahu government is self-serving, misleading and patently false.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, thinks that Goldstone should retract the entire report.  Likewise, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to launch an “international campaign to persuade the United Nations to retract the Goldstone Commission’s damning report,” according to Haaretz. Noah Pollak, the executive director of the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel, writes on Twitter that Goldstone has “retracted much of his report.”  Jonathan Tobin at Commentary comments that “the former judge admitted that his report was wrong.”

These claims don’t come anywhere close to what Judge Goldstone actually wrote in his column.  The main point of recantation occurs when Goldstone writes (my emphasis):

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

The Israeli military investigations have led Goldstone to say that “if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

So yes, Goldstone’s Op-Ed in the Post recants a central, and damning, claim that his report made:  that “Israeli armed forces had carried out direct intentional strikes against civilians” in incidents examined in detail by his team.  But nowhere in his column does he imply that his entire report should be refuted–exactly the claim Israel’s propagandists are now making.

The full scope of his report is no less damning then the “intentionality” allegation Goldstone is now backtracking on.  Here are some of the most important findings in the U.N. report that Goldstone did not recant:

-The aim of the destruction of the el-Bader flour mill was to “destroy the local capacity to produce flour…From the facts ascertained by it, the Mission finds that the destruction of the mill was carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population, which is a violation of customary international law as reflected in article 54 (2) of Additional Protocol I and may constitute a war crime” (page 199).

-The “Israeli armed forces launched direct attacks against residential houses, destroying them,” and “the conduct of the Israeli armed forces in these cases amounted to the grave breach of ‘extensive destruction… of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly’ under article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention” (pages 212, 214).

-”The systematic destruction of food production, water services and construction industries was related to the overall policy of disproportionate destruction of a significant part of Gaza’s infrastructure” (page 218).

-”The Mission finds that Messrs. Majdi Abd Rabbo, Abbas Ahmad Ibrahim Halawa, Mahmoud Abd Rabbo al-Ajrami and AD/03 were captured by the Israeli armed forces while they were in their homes, in some cases together with their families, and were then forced at gunpoint to search houses together with the Israeli armed forces. The Mission also finds on the basis of those facts that they were all subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment during their captivity…The Mission also finds that the intentional use as human shields of those whose accounts are presented above qualifies as inhuman treatment of and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention. As such, the Mission considers the conduct of the Israeli armed forces in relation to such persons to amount to grave breaches of the
said Convention. The use of human shields is also a war crime under article 8 (2) (b) (xxiii) of the Rome Statute” (pages 229, 232).

-”The Mission considers that the severe beatings, constant humiliating and degrading treatment and detention in foul conditions allegedly suffered by individuals in the Gaza Strip under the control of the Israelis and in detention in Israel, would constitute torture, and a grave breach under article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a violation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Such violations also constitute war crimes” (page 249).

-”The restrictions imposed by Israel on the imports to and exports from the Gaza Strip through the border crossings as well as the naval and airspace blockade have had a severe impact on the availability and accessibility of a whole range of goods and services necessary for the people of Gaza to enjoy their human rights. Their already eroded ability to access and buy basic goods was compounded by the effects of the four-week Israeli military campaign, which further restricted access to those essential items and destroyed goods, land, facilities and infrastructure vital for the enjoyment of their fundamental rights. In conjunction, the blockade and the military hostilities have created a situation in which most people are destitute. Women and children have been particularly affected. The current situation has been described as a crisis of human dignity…

The facts ascertained by the Mission, the conditions resulting from the deliberate actions of the Israeli armed forces and the declared policies of the Israeli Government – as they were presented by its authorized representatives – with regard to the Gaza Strip before, during and after the military operation, cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip. The Mission, therefore, finds a violation of the provisions of article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention” (pages 259, 283).

Goldstone’s entire report matters deeply, and represents a thorough documentation of Israeli, and Palestinian, war crimes and the context in which they occurred.  That is why there is a desperate attempt to use Goldstone’s article as an full exoneration of the Israeli military’s conduct during the war.

For those crowing about a “refutation” of the entire report and the need for the judge to retract it, a full reading of the document is in order.

The documented record still stands: Israel intentionally targets civilians and civilian infrastructure

Judge Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa in the Washington Post today is indeed “confusing and potentially damaging,” as Adam Horowitz writes.

Key findings in the U.N. fact-finding report–that “Israeli armed forces had carried out direct intentional strikes against civilians” in eleven incidents examined in detail and that Israel destroyed civilian infrastructure like the Sawafeary chicken farm in a systematic and deliberate fashion–is muddied up by Goldstone’s claim that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

Even granting the claim that the incidents his team investigated, now with the circumstances “explained” through Israeli military investigations,  do not indicate that civilians were targeted, there is a documented history of Israel doing just that.  And it wasn’t just during the Gaza assault.

The so-called “Dahiya doctrine” was used during the 2006 war on Lebanon.  In a February 2009 report, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel explained:

In the beginning of October 2008, the Commanding Officer of the IDF’s Northern Command, Maj. General Gadi Eisenkott, gave an interview to Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, in which he unveiled what he called the “Dahiye Doctrine”:  ‘What happened in the Dahiye Quarter of Beirut in 2006, will happen in every village from which shots are fired on Israel. We will use disproportionate force against it and we will cause immense damage and destruction. From our point of view these are not civilian villages but military bases.

This is not a recommendation, this is the plan, and it has already been authorized.’

According the Dahiye Doctrine, Israel will achieve deterrence not by attacking individual rocket launchers, but rather by using disproportionate force which will influence the behaviour of its opponents…

According to the doctrine, massive destruction is a necessary element for creating deterrence. The damage must be done not only to military installations, or explained by concrete military necessity, but must include civilian infrastructure so that reconstruction will be expensive and time consuming

This deliberate doctrine leads to the deaths of civilians and civilian infrastructure.  The Lebanon war “resulted in at least 1,109 Lebanese deaths, the vast majority of whom were civilians, 4,399 injured, and an estimated 1 million displaced,” according to a Human Rights Watch report. Various other reports–this Human Rights Watch report, testimonies from Breaking the Silence and many others–document Israel’s policy of targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure.

In the Gaza Strip, civilians are routinely shot at and sometimes killed if they step into the so-called “buffer zone,” which constitutes some 35 percent of the Strip’s arable land.  An October 2010 report by Defense of Children International states:

Between 26 March and 14 October 2010, DCI-Palestine documented 14 cases of children shot whilst collecting building gravel near the border fence between Gaza Strip and Israel. Due to a severe lack of job opportunities and a shortage of construction material entering Gaza from Israel, hundreds of men and boys scavenge for building gravel amongst the destroyed buildings close to the border fence. The gravel is collected into sacks, loaded onto donkey drawn carts and sold to builders for use in concrete. Children can earn up to 50 shekels (US $13) per day which is used to help support their families. Reports indicate that Israeli soldiers on duty in the observation towers which line the border between Gaza and Israel frequently fire warning shots to scare workers away from the border region. Reports also indicate that these soldiers sometimes shoot and kill the donkeys used by the workers, and also target the workers, usually, but not always, shooting at their legs. In the cases documented by DCI-Palestine, the children report being shot whilst working between 50 to 800 metres from the border fence.

A separate U.N. study on the “buffer zone” reports:

Since the end of the “Cast Lead” offensive in January 2009, the Israeli army has also killed a total of 22 civilians and injured another 146 in these circumstances.

The examples are endless, but what they make clear is that the Israeli persecution of Palestinians documented in the Goldstone report and numerous other sources was not confined to “Operation Cast Lead.”  Goldstone’s “reconsideration” in the Post today doesn’t change the documented history.

 

 

Is another ‘Cast Lead’ in the offing?

Are we witnessing the stirrings of a new, large-scale Israeli military operation?  Haaretz today reports that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Wednesday that the Israel Defense Forces would continue to use ‘firm determination and assaults’ on Gaza…[Netanyahu said:] ‘It could take the form of exchanges of fire, it could continue for a particular length of time.’”

Indeed, the stars seem to be aligning for another brutal Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip two years after “Operation Cast Lead” killed some 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, and completely destroyed 3,000 homes in what Judge Richard Goldstone termed a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

Eerie parallels between the period leading up to “Cast Lead” and the situation now exist, and there’s nothing to stop Israel from launching another assault, given that the United States has sent the world the message that Israeli war crimes will go unpunished.

First, the parallels.  In the months leading up to the 2008-09 assault on Gaza, a tenuous truce held between Hamas and Israel as Hamas stopped firing rockets at Israeli communities and attempted to reign in other armed groups in Gaza from doing so.  An August 2008 WikiLeaks cable that describes a visit by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Egypt reports:

Regarding the Tahdiya ["calm" in Arabic], Hacham said Barak stressed that while it was not permanent, for the time being it was holding. There have been a number of violations of the ceasefire on the Gaza side, but Palestinian factions other than Hamas were responsible. Hacham said the Israelis assess that Hamas is making a serious effort to convince the other factions not to launch rockets or mortars. Israel remains concerned by Hamas’ ongoing efforts to use the Tahdiya to increase their strength, and at some point, military action will have to be put back on the table. The Israelis reluctantly admit that the Tahdiya has served to further consolidate Hamas’ grip on Gaza, but it has brought a large measure of peace and quiet to Israeli communities near Gaza.

Despite this “peace,” Israel decisively broke the truce on November 4, 2008 when they raided Gaza and killed six members of Hamas, leading to an increase in Hamas and other armed groups’ rocket attacks on Israel.  According to a January 2009 report by investigative journalist Gareth Porter, Israel rejected a Hamas ceasefire offer in December 2008.

After the assault ended in January 2009, a tenuous lull, punctuated by sporadic violence on the Gaza-Israel border, has held.  In January 2011, Hamas again attempted to reign in other armed groups from firing at Israeli communities.

But now this lull seems to be breaking down.  The Israeli daily Haaretz reports on what has occurred in the last week:

The current tensions began exactly a week ago when Israel launched an air attack on a Hamas base in the ruins of the settlement of Netzarim, killing two Hamas men. That attack came in response to a Qassam fired from Gaza that landed in an open area. Hamas then responded with a barrage of 50 mortars on communities south of the Gaza Strip.

Israeli attacks on Gaza over the last few days have left eight people dead, including five civilians, and another twelve civilians have been wounded.  The air strikes came after Hamas offered a truce--events that bear a striking resemblance to what occurred in the run-up to “Operation Cast Lead.”

What makes a renewed assault seem more possible is the fact that strident warnings are coming from Israeli leaders.  Tzipi Livni, the head of the opposition party Kadima and who was the foreign minister during the 08-09 Gaza assault, recently said that “the right way to contend with [the recent rocket attacks] is through force, as Israel did during Operation Cast Lead and after it.”  Both the Vice Premier and and the culture minister have voiced similar warnings.

The frightening warnings and attacks on Gazan civilians could stop if the international community would pressure Israel.  But what’s to stop Israel if they have U.S.-guaranteed impunity?  The Goldstone report recommended that proceedings against Israelis and Palestinians who committed war crimes occur if domestic systems do not uphold international law.  No high-level officials, on the Palestinian or Israeli side, have been held accountable.  The U.S. has ensured that Israeli leaders who committed war crimes will get off free.

A promise of law is that the deterrent effect of punishment may prevent future crimes.  That promise goes out the window if there is no punishment–exactly what happened after the publication of the Goldstone report.

 

 

 

Buy Nation Books’ The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict

I am proud to announce that the book I was a researcher for has been released.  The Goldstone Report is a must-read document for all of those concerned with justice, peace and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.  Now, you can read an edited version of the report in book form, alongside commentary and analysis from a list of amazing people.

I learned a ton doing work for the book, and I’m sure reading it will be even more fruitful.

Check out the book’s website.  Go here for Mondoweiss’ rundown of the book, and go here for how to purchase it.

‘The Palestine Cables’: WikiLeaks expose European chill on Israel after Cast Lead, and Lebanese advice on defeating Hezbollah

I’ve begun writing a weekly column over at the Nation Institute’s Mondoweiss, where I’ll be looking at what the WikiLeaks State Department cables say about Israel/Palestine.  This is the first installment in “The Palestine Cables”:

The revelations from the classified State Department cables being published by WikiLeaks and news organizations keep coming, and there’s no shortage of items concerning Israel/Palestine.

The cables have included interesting revelations about European countries’ relations with Israel–and how much the Goldstone report has mattered, thought not enough–as well as what seems to be a Lebanese official passing on advice to the Israeli government on how to defeat Hezbollah in a new conflict.

One cable, dated September 5, 2006 and sent from the U.S. embassy in Dublin, reports that the Irish government “has informally begun to place constraints on U.S. operations at the facility, mainly in response to public sensitivities
over U.S. actions in the Middle East.”  Specifically, the cable states that the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs decided to “forbid U.S. military transits carrying munitions to Israel” because of “the Irish public’s overwhelming opposition to Israeli military actions in Lebanon.”

Another cable dated October 29, 2009 from the U.S. embassy in France reports that, days before France and Israel were set to hold a “strategic dialogue,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and suggested that Israel “establish an independent investigation into the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza conflict.”  Sarkozy said that “such a step would decrease pressure on Israel and its allies stemming from the Goldstone Report, but Netanyahu responded briskly: ‘No way.’”  In addition, the cable notes that “European countries stopped selling Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) parts to Israel” after the 2008-09 assault on Gaza, although France had continued to sell UAV parts to Israel.

There was also the November 10, 2009 suggestion–two weeks out from when Israel first “froze” settlements–from Germany that the U.S. force Israel to agree to a settlement freeze or else risk the U.S. withdrawing pledges to block U.N. Security Council votes on the Goldstone report.  The U.S. said no, calling the proposal “counterproductive.”

Compared to the U.S.’s routine practice of groveling before Israel, the European countries’ attitude towards Israel seems remarkable.  But that’s not the full story–Europe remains deeply complicit in the Israeli occupation.

I reached out to David Cronin, the author of the soon-to-be-released book Europe’s Alliance with Israel:  Aiding the Occupation, to get his reaction to the WikiLeaks revelations about Europe-Israel relations:

It is correct that the Dublin government has felt an obligation to respond to the widespread public revulsion in Ireland at Israel’s barbaric treatment of the Palestinian people, as well as Israel’s 2006 war against Lebanon. It is also true that Micheal Martin, the Irish foreign minister, has been more critical of Israel than any of his counterparts in the EU.

Yet his criticisms have been largely tokenistic. When evidence emerged that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, had used counterfeit passports so that its agents could pose as Irish citizens when assassinating a leading member of Hamas in January, Ireland expelled an Israeli diplomat from the country. The Irish government had an opportunity to make its displeasure known in more strident terms in May, when Israel’s application to join the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was under discussion. Yet Ireland took no concrete steps to block Israel’s membership of this elite capitalist club, a move that was rightly seen as a major diplomatic and political victory for the Israeli government…

France and Germany both have governments that have acted as an apologist for Israel on many occasions in recent years. Indications or reports that they have been unhappy with some aspects of the occupation do not alter this general picture. Neither France nor was prepared to support the Goldstone report, which documented how Israel had committed crimes against humanity in Gaza in 2008 and 2009. (Germany voted against the report at the United Nations last year, while France abstained).

To a significant degree, the EU’s foreign policy is determined by its largest member states. All four of its largest countries – France, Germany, Britain and Italy – have right-leaning governments that consistently defend Israel, albeit with the occasional expression of concern when Israel is perceived to have gone “too far” (e.g. with the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla). It is almost as if these governments are competing with each other to see which one can be the most pro-Israel.

In Lebanon, the WikiLeaks State Dept. cables are fueling tensions.  A March 2008 conversation revealed that “Lebanon’s Defense Minister Elias Murr told Americans the army would stay out of the way if Israel tried to wipe out Hezbollah,” according to a Los Angeles Times report.  The cables were published by the left-wing Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

In an e-mail, As’ad Abu Khalil, a Middle East analyst who blogs at the Angry Arab, commented that “Al-Murr was basically (like other Arab leaders–although he is no leader) trying to get close to the US by showing his goodwill toward Israel.”

These cables from WikiLeaks follow a growing sense of unease in Lebanon ahead of the expected indictments of Hezbollah members for the 2005 killing of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and Hezbollah’s vows to resist the indictments.

For more news and analysis on the WikiLeaks State Dept. cables and Israel/Palestine, see:

Josh Ruebner, the Huffington Post: WikiLeaks: Israel’s Security Concerns Often Clash With U.S. Interests

Ian Black, the Guardian:  WikiLeaks cables: Sudan warned to block Iranian arms bound for Gaza

Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian: WikiLeaks cables: Saudis proposed Arab force to invade Lebanon

Marc Lynch, Foreign Policy:  What the WikiLeaks cables really say about Arabs and Iran

Yousef Munayyer, the Palestine Center’s Permission to Narrate blog:  Top 10 Wikileaks Palestine Nuggets

Yousef Munayyer, the Palestine Center’s Permission to Narrate blog:  Who Remembered Gaza in Wikileaks?

Stuart Littlewood, the Palestine Chronicle:  Wikileaks: Did Abbas Know about the War on Gaza?

Physical Attack on Jewish Voice for Peace Indicates Israeli Intimidation of Jewish Dissidents Comes Home

Under the reign of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, dissident Israelis have been under attack (not to mention the continuing assault on the human rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank.)

Now, attacks on Jews working in solidarity with the Palestinian people in the U.S. are increasingly occurring.

In Israel, there was the organized attack by the group Im Tirzu on the New Israel Fund for the liberal group’s funding of organizations that cooperated with Richard Goldstone’s team investigating war crimes committed during the 2008-09 assault on Gaza.  There’s the anti-boycott legislation currently in the Israeli Knesset that would effectively criminalize Israelis supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. And in the most recent manifestation of Israel’s turn towards proto-fascism and the shutting down of internal dissent, the Israeli government has taken to threatening the cutting off of money to artists who are urging the boycott of a cultural center in the illegal West Bank settlement of Ariel.

It has officially come to the U.S. Jewish community.  Stand With Us, the thuggish pro-Israel organization whose members have called Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) activists “kapos,” “Nazis,” and wished for the activists to be sunk in the next flotilla, has reportedly attacked a JVP meeting with pepper spray in the Bay Area.

This follows another disturbing event in California, which occurred when the home of Rabbi Michael Lerner, the progressive Jewish activist and editor of the magazine Tikkun, was attacked by right-wing Zionists last May.

Here’s the disturbing news from Jewish Voice for Peace:

Last night, up to a dozen members of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs, a right-wing Israeli advocacy group with a documented track record of aggressively taunting and intimidating grassroots peace activists (http://bit.ly/SWUThreats), attended a Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace community meeting at a South Berkeley Senior Center with the intention of disrupting, intimidating and possibly assaulting Jewish Voice for Peace members. Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest U.S. Jewish peace group dedicated to a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on democracy and full equality — the Bay Area chapter is the founding chapter of the organization. Approximately 50 to 60 people were at the meeting, and numerous witnesses are available to corroborate the events.

Eyewitness testimonies are here (http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/eyewitness-testimony-jvp-member-about-stand-us-swu-attacks) and here (http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/eyewitness-report-stand-us-attacks-jvp-meeting)

Wrapped in an Israeli flag, San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs (SFVI/SWU) member Robin Dubner, an Oakland based attorney, pepper-sprayed two JVP members in the eyes and face after they attempted to nonviolently block her ability to aggressively videotape the faces of JVP meeting attendees against their will. The members, Alexei Folger and Glen Hauer, were careful to make no physical contact with her or her camera prior to the attack.

Folger said, “I did not see it coming and all of a sudden there was gooey stuff all over my head and hand. I have never been pepper-sprayed before, my whole head felt like it was on fire.”

Gaza’s Ongoing Crisis Is Not News: Routine killing, hunger off TV’s agenda

The following article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of Extra!, the monthly magazine of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.  The trend highlighted in the article of corporate media completely ignoring the crisis in Gaza unless there are headline grabbing events like the raid on the Gaza aid flotilla continues to hold steady.

Since the Islamist movement Hamas won democratic elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, Israel has been waging what it has referred to as “economic warfare” (McClatchy, 6/9/10) to collectively punish Gazans for their choice. The economic sanctions increased after Hamas’ June 2006 capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit; a full-blown air, land and sea blockade was imposed by Israel (and Egypt) in June 2007 after Hamas routed an attempted coup by the rival, U.S.-backed Fatah party and took control in the Gaza Strip.

The blockade against the coastal strip has had devastating consequences for the one-and-a-half million Palestinians living in Gaza, including near-total economic collapse, and has been repeatedly condemned by international bodies (e.g., International Committee of the Red Cross, 6/14/10), but corporate media in the United States have largely ignored it. While Gaza gained some attention when Israel was pummeling the Strip in its 2008–09 assault, and again in the wake of the deadly Israeli raid on the Gaza aid flotilla in May 2010, the dire situation there got scant coverage in the period between those headline-grabbing events.

Despite Israel’s recent claim of “easing” the siege (6/10/10), the civilian population, over half of whom are children, remains trapped in what NBC reporter Tom Aspell (6/8/10), in a rare critical take, referred to as “a 140-square-mile prison.” Freedom of movement for Gazans is severely restricted, people still can’t export goods and the naval blockade remains in place. A May 2010 report on Gaza from the UN Development Program paints a disturbing picture: 75 percent of infrastructure damaged during the 2008–09 Israeli invasion remains unrepaired due to the near-total ban on imports of construction materials, more than 90 percent of Gaza’s drinking water is unfit for consumption, over 40 percent of people are unemployed and over a million Gazans depend on food aid.

Between February 2009 and May 2010—from just after the 2008–09 Gaza conflict until shortly before the Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla—there were 43 on-the-ground news reports related to the situation in Palestine from the television news outlets ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. Only eight stories dealt specifically with the humanitarian crisis and the effects of war in Gaza: four on CNN, three on ABC and one on NBC.

The rest largely focused on the Israeli/Palestinian “peace process” and the short-lived U.S./Israeli tensions over illegal Israeli settlements. CNN also aired three reports critical of what it portrayed as Islamist indoctrination of Gazan children, depicting summer camps and children’s TV as promoting suicide bombing and terrorism. None of these segments mentioned the nearly 1,000 Gazan children killed by Israel in the past 10 years, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, as a possible motivation for violent resistance.

None of the outlets ran a report on the UN’s Goldstone report, which accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the 2008–09 conflict. Nor did these outlets mention any of the 67 Israeli killings in Gaza counted by B’Tselem during this time period—including 23 civilians, eight of whom were children.

Despite the sparse coverage, there was no lack of compelling stories in this 14-month period—like that of Ahmad Suliman Salem Deeb, the 19-year-old Gaza City resident who was killed by Israeli soldiers during a non-violent demonstration against the Israeli “buffer zone” that prevents 30 percent of Gaza’s arable land from being farmed (International Solidarity Movement, 4/28/10). Or Mutassim Dalloul, whose dairy factory in Gaza was blown up not once but twice by U.S.-funded Israeli bombs—first during the Israeli invasion and again on April 1–2, 2010 (Electronic Intifada, 4/5/10)–continuing the targeting of Gaza’s means of sustenance that the Goldstone report deemed illegal.

Had such stories showing the blockade’s human effects been told, had Gazans been given names and faces, the commentary after the Israeli raid on the aid flotilla trying to break the blockade might have sounded much different. With so little attention paid to the humanitarian situation there, though, it’s unsurprising that one commentator after another (Extra!, 7/10) could contend, like Monica Crowley on Fox Business News (6/2/10), “There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza at all!”

Meet Eric Cantor: On Israel/Palestine, Contempt for International Law and Justice

With the Republican Party set to take the House of Representatives tomorrow, it’s worth taking a look at the new potential majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia and the only Jewish Republican in the House, and his positions on Israel/Palestine, an area that he is “particularly active on.” As Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy writes, “GOP lawmakers stand to play a huge role” in a variety of foreign policy areas, and their impact will be even greater if they are the majority party in the House.

Cantor’s positions on Israel are no different than most Democratic and Republican officials, but his actions and words could play a large role if he becomes the next majority leader.

I’ve done some research–by no means exhaustive–over the past day or so on Cantor’s positions and statements on Israel.  Here’s some of what I found:

-Cantor “supported Israel’s handling of the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem.”  The area in question here is the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which has become a flash point in East Jerusalem and the site of weekly protests by Israeli leftists and Palestinians against the evictions.  The evictions of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah is but one manifestation of the ongoing attempts to kick Palestinians out of their homes to make way for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.  Read more about the situation in Sheikh Jarrah here and here.

-In regards to Jerusalem as a whole, Cantor expressed anger when the White House condemned the announcement of the building of 1,600 housing units in occupied East Jerusalem last March.  He wrote, “Could the White House truly be this offended by an Israeli decision to build 1,600 homes years from now in a part of its capital city that everyone understands will remain a part of Israel in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians?”  Further underscoring his contempt for international law, Cantor said, in July 2009, that the “insistence that Israel return lands it has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day war and accept a ‘right of return’ of Palestinians who fled their homes in what is now Israel ‘is just like saying you don’t accept the historical right of Israel to exist.’”  International law is clear on the status of East Jerusalem, the occupied territories as a whole and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

-After the flotilla massacre on May 31, 2010, in which Israeli naval commandos rappelled onto the Turkish Mavi Marmara ship that was part of an effort to break the blockade of Gaza and killed nine people (including an American citizen), Cantor “pressured President Barack Obama to veto any ‘biased’ U.N. resolutions in response to an Israeli military attack on a flotilla.”  The naval raid was characterized by a U.N. fact-finding mission as resulting in a  “series of violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law.”  Out of the 9 victims, 6 were found to be killed in what “can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions.”

-Cantor regularly paints Palestinian “culture” as being defined solely by violence.  In conservative publications like the National Review, Cantor opines that “Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, last year best summed up the prevailing Palestinian culture by quoting from Hitler’s Mein Kampf: ‘If you want adults to be killers, teach the youth hate.’”

-Cantor and his House colleague Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) took to the pages of the Washington Times in January 2009 to defend the Israeli assault on Gaza, an attack that Amnesty International called “22 days of death and destruction.” The definitive United Nations report on the 2008-09 Gaza war, authored by respected South African jurist Richard Goldstone, found the assault to be “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”