Toxic and carcinogenic metals, able to produce genetic mutations, have been found in the tissues of people wounded in Gaza during Israeli military operations of 2006 and 2009. The research has been carried out on wounds provoked by weapons that did not leave fragments in the bodies of the victims, a peculiarity that was pointed out repeatedly by doctors in Gaza. This shows that experimental weapons, whose effects are still to be assessed, were used.
International Law
Dershowitz accused anarchist Jewish linguist Noam Chomsky of creating a hostile atmosphere among many groups in the United States and in its academic campuses. They are creating a narrative which always presents Israel as a Nazi occupier, he said, while shutting their eyes to facts contradicting those same claims, like the ties between Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during World War II.
IOA Editor: At no time did Noam Chomsky refer to Israel as a “Nazi occupier.” As the record amply shows, “Israeli occupier” is sufficiently cruel. Linking the Jerusalem Mufti to Hitler does not logically contradict any characterization of the Israeli occupation. On the Mufti-Hitler issue, see Gilbert Achcar: Israel’s Propaganda War – Blame the Grand Mufti.
Dershowitz’ desperately warped arguments are interesting: “legal terror,” for example. As a prominent lawyer, one would expect him to appreciate that “terrorism” is generally understood to mean “violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for an ideological goal… and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians)” (Wikipedia). This definition is sufficiently broad to cover both the bombing of Gaza residential neighborhoods and the blowing up of Tel Aviv buses. On the other hand, legal challenges, unpleasant as they might be to the receiving party, are designed to be countered and resolved, in a civilized manner, in a court of law – something which an army of Israeli lawyers, and international supporters like Dershowitz, are working hard to block.
On “Delegitimization:” Conveniently, Israel’s ‘supporters’ equate criticism of Israeli actions — mostly, directly connected to the Occupation, and the Occupation itself — with denial of its right to exist. This is an old Hasbara trick: You criticize us, you’re really saying Israel has no right to exist. Left out of the discussion is “The right to exist as what?” As an occupying state? An Apartheid state? The term “delegitimization” is actually turned on its head: It is the Israelis who are attempting to delegitimize their critics by calling them “delegitimizers,” trying to blur the distinctions between “delegitimizers” and anti-Semites, consistent with old Israeli propaganda practices: If you criticize us, you’re either an anti-Semite — and Dershowitz’ reference to Nazism is designed to do just that — or you’re a sick, “self-hating” Jew. Chomsky, Finkelstein, and this writer, born to Jewish mothers, must be the latter.
For more on the important question of legitimacy of the state, and how it applies to Israel and other nation-states, see Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar: On the Legitimacy of the State. More on “Delegitimization“
John Ging, head of the United Nation’s Relief and Work Agency “UNRWA”, demanded the international community to lift the siege on the Gaza Strip through the provision of a sea route and sending ships to break the siege… “We recommend the world to send ships to the shores of Gaza, and we believe that Israel would not stop these vessels because the sea is open…”
It happened in London last December: Police officers raided a hotel in the British capital to arrest Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni for alleged war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. Luckily for her, she was not even in the city. The details of the dramatic affair… could have sparked a wide-scale diplomatic incident and possibly put Israel and Britain’s relations in danger.
Cairo – Egyptian opposition groups on Sunday called for arresting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on “war crimes” when he visits Egypt this week. Representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Kifaya (Enough) coalition, along with a number of independent politicians filed a report to state prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud demanding the immediate arrest of Netanyahu when he arrives in Egypt Monday for talks with President Hosny Mubarak.
Defining a Palestinian with a Gaza Strip address as a punishable infiltrator if he is found in the West Bank – as implied by a military order that has now gone into effect – is one more link in a chain of steps that Israel has taken, whose cumulative effect is to sever the Strip from Palestinian society as a whole.
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Finkelstein concludes that Gaza was not a war but a massacre, “like shooting fish in a barrel”. Israel maintained undisputed control of the air, carrying out 3,000 sorties virtually unhindered. Amnesty International could not find cases where civilians were caught up in crossfire, because there wasn’t a single battle during the 22-day assault: “‘Most of the time it was boring,’ one soldier confirmed to Amnesty, ‘there was supposed to be a tiny resistance force upon entry, but there just wasn’t’”.
Issa Qaraqi, PA minister of prisoner affairs: “It is inhumane what they are doing. He has no connection to Gaza, no relatives there, nothing,” claim[ing] Israel was implementing a new set of military orders that critics fear could lead to mass deportations from the occupied West Bank.
A 2007 report on racial profiling by Israeli carriers… concluded: “it is hard to find any Arab citizen who travels abroad by air and who has not experienced a discriminatory security check at least once”… [This] incident follows on the heels of a diplomatic crisis between Israel and South Africa over revelations that spies posing as El Al staff have been operating at Johannesburg airport, gathering information on non-Jewish passengers visiting Israel.
Richard Falk: “a wide range of violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law could be linked to actions carried out by the Government of Israel under these Orders, with particular gravity in the event that young persons become victims of their application.”
While public deportation which are contrary to the Geneva Conventions had stopped in 1992, a much more sinister plan appears to have been implemented. The new undeclared policy is called by some “the transfer policy,” whereby Palestinians are “encouraged” to leave and not return by use of various administrative orders, such as this latest order.
IOA Editor: Mr. Kuttab may be referring to “deportation” to other countries. However, expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank to Gaza not only did not stop, but has picked up momentum in recent months, even before the reports on Order 1650. Read Amira Hass’ High Court: Gaza student cannot complete studies in West Bank.
Gaza-born Palestinian living on WB: ‘The Israeli order will destroy our lives. We will live as if we live in a huge prison even if we are not deported to Gaza. No one would dare to leave the city or to go from town to town afraid of the Israeli checkpoints. Who would keep his/her job in this unstable situation’.
More than 200 people took part in a silent protest this afternoon outside Sproul Hall to protest a veto of the UC Berkeley Israel divestment bill which urges the university to withdraw funding from two companies providing military weapons to the Israeli Army.
So if someone says that it offends “the Jews” to oppose the occupation, then you have to consider how many Jews are already against the occupation, and whether you want to be with them or against them. If someone says that “Jews” have one voice on this matter, you might consider whether there is something wrong with imagining Jews as a single force, with one view, undivided. It is not true.
I have… criticized Israel for punishing the population of Gaza by imposing a blockade that restricts the flow of food, medicine, and fuel to subsistence levels, or worse. Such a blockade is a flagrant form of collective punishment prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. I believe that Hamas should be treated as a political actor, that the blockade should be terminated immediately, and that the UN should insist on the end to the blockade as a condition of Israel’s normal participation in the activities of the Organization.
Implementing this new military order is not only likely to spark a new conflagration in the territories, it is liable to give the world clear-cut proof that Israel’s aim is a mass deportation of Palestinians from the West Bank.
IOA Editor: Indeed. Is there any reasonable explanation for this move other than ethnic cleansing?
Amira Hass: A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years. When the order comes into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.
IOA Editor: “Infiltration,” an Orwellian term invented by the Occupier, is designed to treat certain Palestinians as having no rights to be present at a given area without special permission that is unlikely to be granted by the IDF. Reminiscent of the Present Absentees (internally displaced Palestinians – IDPs), a post-1948 Israeli classification, this, too, is an attempt to segregate and dispose of elements of the Palestinian people that the Occupation authorities wish to remove — based on political, geographic, or any other criteria, however arbitrary. This newly-formalized authority serves as yet another tool at the hands of the IDF in the long-term process of ethnic cleansing — the removal of the Palestinian people from their land — that Israel has been carrying out since 1948.
Noam Chomsky: I don’t think that the notion of legitimacy of a state means very much. Is the United States a legitimate state? It’s based on genocide; it conquered half of Mexico. What makes it legitimate? The way the international system is set up, states have certain rights; that has nothing to do with their legitimacy. Every state you can think of is based on violence, repression, expulsion, and all sorts of crimes. And the state system itself has no inherent legitimacy. It’s just an institutional form that developed and that was imposed with plenty of violence. The question of legitimacy just doesn’t arise. There is an international order in which it is essentially agreed that states have certain rights, but that provides them with no legitimacy, Israel or anyone else.
IOA Editor: An illuminating exchange between Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar on the important question of the legitimacy of the state, and how it applies to Israel and other nation-states. Presented in the context of the current wave of accusations that critics of the Israeli occupation, and of Israel’s systematic and ongoing violations of international law, are “delegitimizers” — a recently coined term created by Israeli propaganda experts to “delegitimize the delegitimizers.”
WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
IOA Editor:
Clearly, Israeli helicopter crews aren’t the only trigger-happy assassins. Here’s an example of America’s finest, on video, executing Iraqi civilians, including targeting the evacuation of their one visibly helpless, remaining victim who is a threat to no one, and injuring children as well. And then there is a cover up. Sounds familiar? It is. It’s called Murder, Inc. – nowadays a popular school of foreign policy, exercised by the leading World Democracies.
The Anat Kamm affair raises serious suspicions that the law enforcement agencies in question – the Israel Defense Force’s information security unit, the Shin Bet, Israel Police and the State Prosecutor’s Office – are good at coming down hard on the powerless, while overlooking similar suspicions when attributed to senior officials. It’s the “sentinel syndrome”: the weak are persecuted and dealt with a heavy hand, while the deeds of the strong are slighted.
IOA Editor: Melman is the primary reporter covering the Israeli secret service agencies for Haaretz. As always, his is an Israeli-centered focus. This article is important because it covers the mode of operation of Israel’s various “security” agencies, and how they deal with those Israeli-Jews they deem to be their enemies.
“I cannot imagine what my factory has to do with the ongoing situation,” Dalloul said. “Can you see a homemade rocket? Can you see a single bullet? Can you see a gun? Why did they attack my dairy?”
IOA Editor: Indeed, the factory has a great deal to do with the “ongoing situation:” As Richard Goldstone commented in some detail, Israel has consistently targeted Gaza food production centers. Israel’s war is not with the few Palestinians launching primitive rockets; rather, it is with Palestine – the future State of Palestine, however theoretical a concept it is today – and its people. Dairy and other food plants nourish the people of Palestine, especially the children who are the future of Palestine. The less nourishing, the lesser is the future of Palestine.
Richard Falk argues that a Palestinian victory in the legitimacy war with Israel would not necessarily produce the desired political results and that it is vital that the Palestinians exercise “patience, resolve, leadership and vision, as well as sufficient pressure” if they are to win their just rights.
Richard Silverstein: “In what kind of country does a journalist simply disappear with other journalists and news outlets having no recourse to publish about it? China? Cuba? Vietnam? Iran? North Korea? Is that what Israel is aiming for? To be no better than countries ruled by despots?”
IOA Editor: When even neoconservative darling Judith Miller runs a story on Israeli censorship, you know Israel is in trouble. The media interest in Israeli censorship is legitimate, and almost commendable. However, what is glaringly missing is a direct condemnation of Israel’s assassination practices, as revealed in this only-most-recent example – both “domestically,” in the Occupied Territories, and abroad where it is an essential “foreign policy” component: murder as an alternative to peacemaking, which is entirely possible but would involve “painful sacrifices” — e.g., compliance with international law and UN resolutions — that no Israeli leader (“Left” or “Right”) is prepared to accept.
MORE: Richard Silverstein’s Tikun Olam blog story
UPDATE: The IOA welcomes the many new readers from “The Only Democracy in the Middle East” who cannot read this story in local media due to Israeli censorship. Please come back to read more about the Occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (6 April 2010)
A cross-party group of MPs will call today for a review of the way arms sales are approved after the government admitted British equipment was “almost certainly” used in the assault on Gaza last year… Amnesty International called on the government to act swiftly to close loopholes allowing “brass-plate” companies registered in the UK to trade arms to countries where human rights violations were committed.
Norman Finkelstein: “Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal… which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes. You don’t just get to walk into the sunset and look beautiful. They can’t believe it. They are genuinely shocked. ‘Aren’t our tears consequences enough?’ Aren’t our long eyes and broken hearts consequences enough?’ ‘No,” he said, ‘you have to go to the criminal court.’”
IOA Editor: Read Chris Hedges’ Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’?
MI6 suspects that airline staff working for Mossad may have copied passports of Britons flying to Israel, News of the World reports, adding authorities also concerned about security searches carried out on British officials attending terrorism conference in country last September.
IOA Editor: More on Israeli security services and Israeli airlines cooperation: Israeli spies ‘infiltrate’ Johannesburg airport
Both events in London and Washington are the marks of an arrogant nation that has overreached itself. The forging of British passports is the work of a country which believes it can act with impunity when planning the murder of its enemies, while simultaneously claiming to share the values of a law-based state. Mr Netanyahu’s statements in Washington, made as he was preparing to meet Barack Obama, are the mark of a leader who thinks he can openly defy the will of Israel’s closest military ally.
The detection of phosphorus in the tissue of bomb victims in Gaza Jørgen L.Thomsen, DMSc, FRCPath, DMJ(Path)* Martin Worm-Leonhard, MSc, Forensic Toxicologist*
TORTURE Volume 20, Number 1, 2010
MK Eldad… said that a British diplomat should be expelled in response, “maybe the military attaché”. British media has been covering the crisis since Tuesday morning. “I think the British are being hypocritical and I do not wish to insult dogs here, since some dogs show true loyalty. Who gave the British the right to judge us on the war on terror?”
The foreign secretary confirmed that Britain had demanded the withdrawal of an Israeli diplomat following the “intolerable” use of 12 forged British passports by a hit squad that killed the founder of Hamas’s military wing in Dubai. Miliband attacked the “profound disregard” for UK sovereignty and said the apparent involvement of a friendly nation “added insult to injury”.
Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. Israel denies their right to return to their homes and land – a right recognised by UN resolution 194, the Geneva convention, and the universal declaration of human rights. Further, “an occupier may not forcibly deport protected persons… or transfer parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory” (article 49).
“I thought they would kill me. I became very scared and wet my pants. I could not shout or say anything because I was too afraid… He pushed me towards the small corridor in front of the bathrooms. He began shouting at me and speaking a language I did not understand… There were two bags in front of me. I grabbed the first one as he stood one and a half meters away. I opened the bag as he pointed his weapon directly at me. I emptied the bag on the floor. It contained money and papers. I looked at him and he was laughing. I grabbed the second bag to open it but I could not. I tried many times but it was useless, so he shouted at me. He grabbed my hair and slapped me very hard across the face.”
IOA Editor: No matter how this indictment turns out, or whether the IDF finds it politically convenient to sacrifice two soldiers for the sake of international propaganda — “the most moral army in the world,” etc. — this is a testimony to the IDF’s actual behavior: one of thousands of rarely told stories that emerges more than a year after the crimes were committed.
Reut says the campaign is the work of a worldwide network of private individuals and organizations. They have no hierarchy or overall commander, but work together based on a joint ideology – portraying Israel as a pariah state and denying its right to exist.
IOA Editor: Conveniently, Israel’s ‘experts’ equate criticism of Israeli actions — mostly, directly connected to the Occupation, and the Occupation itself — for which Israel has deservedly earned the title “pariah state,” with denial of its right to exist. This is an old Hasbara trick: You criticize us, you’re really saying Israel has no right to exist. Left out of the discussion is “The right to exist as what?” As an occupying state? An Apartheid state? The term “delegitimization campaign” is actually turned on its head: It is the Israelis who are attempting to delegitimize their critics by calling them “delegitimizers,” trying to blur the distinctions between “delegitimizers” and anti-Semites, consistent with old Israeli propaganda practices: If you criticize us, and you’re not Jewish, you’re an anti-Semite. (And if you are Jewish, you’re sick – afflicted by “self-hate,” etc. See Ur Shlonsky’s recent email exchange on the Academic Boycott.) Those of us old enough have heard this some four decades ago.
The IOA is proud to be a very small part of the “worldwide network… [having] no hierarchy or overall commander…” We steadfastly reject the Occupation and strongly criticize Israel’s long record of violations of international law.
“Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to assassinate [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai. We will issue an arrest warrant against him.”
According to Yossi Melman, Israel’s Mossad assassinated Mabhouh. See: Mossad killing of terror chiefs has little impact on Israel-Hamas war.
Sharvit-Baruch… was concerned by the Goldstone report’s negative effect on Israel’s legitimacy in the global arena, and that Israel could potentially turn into “a kind of South Africa or Serbia” or a “criminal” or “racist” state in international opinion…. [S]he added, “We are now in a situation in which we need to give our friends – who don’t want to see lawsuits filed against us in their own courts – the tools to do away such claims, along with other charges against us,” she said. “If they need a commission of inquiry then that’s what we’ll give them,” she added.
IOA Editor: Israel is clearly very concerned about damage to its image in the aftermath of the Goldstone report. Yet, if there is any ‘regret’ here, it is strictly a tactical PR and legal issue: Let’s help our friends help us get out of the legal mess our own Gaza war-crimes put us in.
UN team find remains of aircraft-dropped bombs, contradicting Israeli report on military conduct during three-week conflict.
IOA Editor: UN evidence vs. Israeli propaganda. Who’s going to win?
