In the second piece below, Israeli activist Nurit Peled-Elhanan comments on the recent appointment of a new Deputy Chief of Staff, Yair Naveh, who orchestrated (at least some of) Israel’s summary executions widely wordwashed as “targeted assassinations.” Peled-Elhanan claims the appointment is, in fact, apt and fitting to the deeds and spirit of Israel’s army. In response to these and to the appointment, she says, it is the parents and educators of Israel who bear responsibility for taking action.

She writes,

We must gather up our courage and teach our children to refuse. Refuse to take part in an organization that is led by war criminals, murderers of children. An organization like that cannot be anything but a crime organization. … There are so many possibilities, children, to contribute to society, to the state if you will … And those possibilities do not include the uniform of the IDF, nor its guns, nor its bombs or its commanders the model and paragon of whom is Yair Naveh, one of many whose orders you should never obey.”

Peled-Elhanan is one of a group of activists who, along with the Yesh Gvul human rights NGO, has petitioned the High Court of Justice to disallow Naveh’s appointment. The opening piece below is Yesh Gvul’s December 4th press release announcing the petition.

The blogger Richard Silverstein has described Naveh as having the distinction

..of being responsible for the Palestinian targeted killings which Anat Kamm leaked to Haaretz journalist, Uri Blau. These West Bank murders completely contravened Supreme Court rulings which directed that such assassinations be avoided if there were civilians present and likely to be harmed; or if there were non-violent means available to apprehend the suspects.”

Naveh, however, when questioned on the contradiction reportedly commented, ”Stop bothering me with the rulings of the Supreme Court. I don’t know when they apply and when they don’t. I do know that targeted killings work and prevent terror attacks. I take my orders from the operations command.”

Rela Mazali

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From: YeshGvul@yahoogroups.com [mailto:YeshGvul@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of yesh gvul
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 1:49 AM
To: yesh gvul – all
Subject: [Yesh-Gvul] Petition Against Appointment of IDF Deputy ChiefDear Friend,

Yesh Gvul and Israeli public figures have petitioned the High Court of Justice, against the appointment of Yair Naveh as the IDF’s Deputy Chief of General Staff (and the 2nd in command).

This petition follows our previous petition against the appointment of Yoav Galant as IDF Chief of General Staff.

The petitioners claim that Naveh acted in total contravention of Judge Aharon Barak’s instructions, given in his decision on the targeted assassinations case. Therefore, in addition to committing acts which may amount to war crimes, his behavior is also a blatant violation of the rule of law. We believe that a functioning democracy would have initiated legal proceures against Naveh.

Richard Silverstein has additional info on the Israeli rights activists’ complaint against the deputy chief.

Best Wishes
Yesh Gvul

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Nurit Peled Elhanan on the appointment of Yair Naveh as deputy chief of staff

The great wonderment with which the appointment of Yair Naveh has been greeted is itself to be wondered at. After all, who else could be appointed as the Deputy Chief of Staff if not Yair Naveh? Who else loves to immediately assassinate everyone who looks suspicious to him…? … The High Court of Justice does not interest him in the least (Uri Blau, thanks to information provided by ex-soldier Anat Kamm, Haaretz, 28 November 2008), he does not recognize human rights … What else is needed in a Deputy Chief of Staff of the Occupation army …

… it is not Yair Naveh but us – who have to resign from the role of creating soldiers, providing soldiers, giving birth to soldiers and educating future soldiers. We must gather up our courage and teach our children to refuse. Refuse to take part in an organization that is led by war criminals, murderers of children. An organization like that cannot be anything but a crime organization.

Two recently published items present what I see as telling, if limited and even evasive, probes into the extent and depth of Israel’s militarization, each revealing a different manifestation of it.

The first (truncated in the English version which omitted the passages of personal testimony from soldiers and police, included in the Hebrew original) looks at the confusing, contradictory maze of authorities in charge of the checkpoints that monitor the passage of West Bank Palestinians into Israel. Chaim Levinson erroneously calls these Green Line checkpoints, despite the placement of some of them inside the West Bank, as part of Israel’s ongoing drive to re-draw the Green Line to its convenience. These highly sensitive, loaded meeting points between Israeli authorities and the stateless, non-citizen Palestinians whom they control are, Levinson says, operated under an entangled-to-non-existent chain of accountability. He lays the blame with bureaucracy and extremely faulty administration.

These “checkpoints are … run by no fewer than six different agencies, and no single body coordinates their work. … Adding to the confusion … two different bodies are responsible for each checkpoint: One is in charge of operating it, while the other is responsible for security.”

Some of the bodies in question are no longer state agencies but, rather, privatized “security” contractors. Following detailed research on such contractors, [see Chapter 9],  I hold these private “security” firms, relatively new players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to represent a new phase of militarization. Precisely because they serve to sow confusion and dilute transparency, they make a key contribution towards dissolving the state’s accountability for deploying organized violence. Even without them, though, “Haaretz found that none of … [the relevant state] organizations were certain who has overall responsibility for these checkpoints.” Put more bluntly, no one is certain who is responsible therefore no one is responsible. While this may look like an exercise in logic, its practical implications have direct and horrific impacts on the thousands of lives and bodies being herded, literally, day by day, through these checkpoints. Rather than limiting or undermining the use of force wielded by the agencies in question, dissolved responsibility effectively gives them free or freer reign. Tangled bureaucracy, then, would seem to be a useful policy rather than “just” the result of inept administration.

Reign is indeed the key question arising from the second item. Whose is it? The “people’s” through our/their elected representatives? While journalist Ari Shavit insists that, “Even though Israel looks and acts like a banana republic, it is not a banana republic,” his item – in spite of itself – indicates the opposite; that militarization has already successfully destroyed the infrastructure of democracy in Israel.

More insinuation than information, more innuendo than fact, Shavit’s item sounds an apparently informed, “insider’s” opinion on what lays submerged under the iceberg-tip of a recent scandal concerning the appointment of Israel’s new Chief of Staff. By no means left-leaning, journalist Ari Shavit, writes that this scandal has revealed all of the following:

corruption was rampant in one of Israel’s most sensitive security establishments … some of the state’s most highly classified secrets were leaked in a reckless manner … The IDF’s arbitrary, tribal and unfair enforcement of moral norms has emptied them of content and deprived them of validity … Even when the chief of staff appeared before the General Staff at the moment of truth, he did not tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

He is discussing internal Israeli and organizational affairs. If all this is true within the confines of “the tribe,” what kind of conclusions are implied regarding the army’s corruption, recklessness, arbitrary tribal morality and lies in its dealings with Palestinians.

The whole truth, Shavit claims, has not yet emerged, intimating that he himself is privy to it or to parts of it. His piece, however, pointedly avoids disclosing it, while characterizing it as terrible enough to entail a series of very serious questions once it comes to light. Questions about “the media’s zealous protection of those in power” (which possibly includes his own evasiveness in the present piece), about the “powerful military-media combine [that] gained control of the public discourse by blocking and deflecting information.” About the High Commissioner of the Police who, Shavit hints, may be implicated. About the Attorney General and the military advocate general.

Shavit, who has criticized dissent at least as often if not more so than he has censured state policies, is presenting a very serious claim. His item describes a clandestine structure of deference to an exclusive group of high-ranking (ex-)soldiers on the part of all of Israel’s key democratic institutions and the best part of its mainstream media. A military regime or reign in all but name, this hasn’t even required a military coup to be put in place. It has been fully normalized and legitimized by Israel’s continuous militarization.

Works in Progress:

- The partition of Palestine (most recently into Gaza Strip; East Jerusalem; West Bank)
- The partition of Iraq

In Iraq, the occupation is attempting “ethnic” partition.

See: Statement issued this week (October 10, 2010) by the BRussels Tribunal, stating among other things, that,

From the first day of the US-UK occupation of Iraq, the occupation began to undertake a series of measures, directly or through its local allies, to destroy Iraq as a state and a nation and to partition it along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Today, the puppet government of the occupation and its Kurdish partners are trying to hold a population census in Kirkuk province whose aim is to give a permanent legal character to the criminal social engineering, ethnic cleansing and demographic changes that have been implemented under occupation.[1] This could unleash a full blown civil war across Iraq, and potentially lead to its partition and a consequent regional war.”

In Palestine/Israel, Israel’s security forces are now drilling the concentration, in camps, and mass deportation to the Palestinian Authority of Palestinian citizens of Israel: On Sunday, October 10, military affairs reporter, Carmela Menashe, reported (in Hebrew;) that a large scale drill simulated “extreme scenarios of violent protests in the Arab sector following accords with the Palestinian Authority on population exchange. A detention camp for Israeli Arabs will be set up at Golani junction to receive detainees. The large-scale drill was administered and led by the Prison Services and included the military Home Command, the Israel Police Force, the Military Police, fire fighting forces and others.” [Translation mine] Drills are scheduled for Tuesday in Jerusalem.

Secret police force drill for overtaking the Temple Mount, held last July

See: 1) Gush Shalom statement below (October 10, 2010); 2) Important analysis and discussion by journalist and blogger Dimi Reider, who writes,

“First, a drill involving so many forces is by definition following a plan hatched Israeli public servants and/or leaders. Second, bringing all those crowds costs enormous amounts of money in equipment, fuel, ammunition, and most importantly, important peoples’ time. Third, it’s worth noting that the other scenario practiced in the drill is that of a Hamas takeover of the West Bank – Israel’s number one conflict scenario in that region, one which the army and the politicians have been speaking about and preparing for to no end, ever since Hamas pulled off the Gaza coup. … if the top brass are taking the possibility of preparing for transfer as seriously as they take the risk of a Hamas takeover in the West Bank, it means that what Israelis call רוח המפקד must be blowing in that direction very hard indeed …”

Ofer Neiman commented:

“It could be added that the report serves to justify the wider scope of the BDS campaign. After all, an official Israeli scenario indicates that the oppression of Israel’s Palestinian citizens may even worsen as a result of political developments involving the dismantling of settlements.”

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Israeli security forces practice suppression and mass detention of Israel’s Arab citizens, in implementation of Lieberman’s “population exchange” program.

Gush Shalom: It seems Lieberman is Israel’s true Prime Minister

This week Israel’s security forces practiced the putting down of mass demonstrations and protests among Israel’s Arab citizens and their imprisonment in a large detention camp to be established at Golani Junction in Galilee. The exercise was based on a scenario of the riots being provoked by implementation of Avigdor Lieberman’s plan for “an exchange of populations”, i.e. massively depriving Arabs of their Israeli citizenship. A week ago Lieberman voiced this heinous idea on the podium of the UN Assembly General and Prime Minister Netanyahu murmured some weak reservations. Now it turns out that the security forces are already preparing to implement it in practice, under the responsibility of none other than Labor Party leader Ehud Barak – the Minister of Defence.

It goes without saying that in a country having any pretense to be a democracy it would be unacceptable and unthinkable for the security forces to practice waging war against the country’s own citizens. Together with the racist “Loyalty Oath Bill”
which gained the support of the government, and with the demonstrative resumption of settlement construction in the Occupied Territories, it increasingly seems that Lieberman is the true Prime Minister, and that the government follows on his path, leading the State of Israel in big and rapid strides into the abyss.

On May 8th, Jewish Peace News posted news of the arrest or, more precisely, abduction, of human rights defender Ameer Makhoul, “Director of Ittijah – The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations – … in the dead of night, while he and his family slept in their home in Haifa.” The arrest of this “Israeli citizen [and] … high-profile activist … [was] placed under a gag order … Israeli reporters, news outlets and even blogs” were forbidden from writing about it. On June 20th, JPN followed up with a letter from Makhoul, composed after he “had spent 3 weeks in prison without access to even pen and paper, not to speak of lawyers, family visits, due process, humane and legal conditions.”

Makhoul has been in prison for five months now. Amnesty International has described his imprisonment as: “pure harassment designed to hinder his human rights work.” His trial is viewed by many as “a message to Palestinian citizens of Israel … formulated by extreme right wing parties in the current Israeli government” that have targeted Makhoul as “a legal, legitimate, and effective voice of a politically disadvantaged group – Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens.” This, I might add, is the same government that is now poised to demand that applicants for citizenship (predominantly Palestinian ones) take an oath of loyalty to the “Jewish and democratic” state.

Click here for further background and details on Makhoul’s abduction, detention incommunicado, and on what the Committee for the Defense of Ameer Makhoul describes as his “tortuous interrogation” – deprived of sleep and crucial medical care.

For months now, Makhoul has been standing trial for alleged espionage, after being told in 2009 by Israel’s secret services that if he failed to tone down his political and human rights activism, they would “tailor a file for … [his] disappearance and prolonged separation from his family.” Trial sessions have been attended by representatives of the EU and the Netherlands.

The update below, from Janan Abdu, underlines the bogus nature of the charges against Makhoul, citing (among other things) the September 16th “testimony … of Yeshai Cohen, the expert police computer investigator who confirmed in court that he found no incriminating evidence against Ameer despite the fact that he had been under surveillance for one and a half years before his arrest including over thirty thousand phone calls.”

The Committee for the Defense of Ameer Makhoul is now “working to mobilize legal and medical international observers for the trial … and to raise funds to cover lawyer fees and related expenses.” Detailing how solidarity and painstaking work has crumbled the original gag order and successfully challenged aspects of Makhoul’s imprisonment and trial, they add, “We need your help to make our efforts even more effective … At this critical moment, we ask for your direct involvement in the campaign for his freedom. Ameer’s trial is scheduled to proceed Tuesday October 5th. The time is now for you to get involved.”

Rela Mazali
______________________________________

From: janan abdu
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2010 8:27 AM
To: Undisclosed recipients:

Subject: The Police has no positive evidence that connects Ameer to the accusations against him

Representatives of the EU and the Embassy of the Netherlands attend the court session to follow the proceedings closely

The last session of the case against Ameer Makhoul was held at the Haifa District Court on October 5, 2010. The testimony of the prosecutors’ witnesses heard in this session continued to put the core grave accusations against Ameer in doubt and to shake their foundation. None of the testimonies in this and in the previous session succeeded in any way to connect Ameer to any of the accusations against him. None of the five witnesses, Arab youth and university students who, according to the prosecutors’ claims were approached by Ameer to “enlist them in the service of Hizballah” had any hint of evidence that could possibly be interpreted as connecting Ameer to any of the accusations against him. Neither did the testimony of his family physician and his travel agent.

This is in addition to the failed testimony on September 16, 2010 of Yeshai Cohen, the expert police computer investigator who confirmed in court that he found no incriminating evidence against Ameer despite the fact that he had been under surveillance for one and a half years before his arrest including over thirty thousand phone calls from land lines and mobile phones at his home and office. Likewise, no positive evidence against Ameer was found in all the over ten desktop and mobile computers taken from Ameer’s home and office and which remain with the Police to this day.

Of special significance was the presence at the court of such public figures as Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh, head of the Public Committee for the Defense of Ameer Makhoul, Israeli Parliament member Dr. Ahmad Tibi and veteran labor leader Benjamin Gonin. This was in addition to representatives of the embassy of the Netherlands and of the European Union.

The next session of the court in this case was set for October 21, 2010.

–
“Ameer Makhoul is a key human rights defender, well-known for his civil society activism on behalf of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. His arrest and continued detention smacks of pure harassment, designed to hinder his human rights work. If this is the case, we would regard him as a prisoner of conscience call for his immediate and unconditional release.” Philip Luther, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

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The ongoing militarization of state (read: Jewish, non-orthodox) education in Israel has been among the major civic issues addressed by New Profile from the outset. Israel’s current minister of education, Gideon Sa’ar, provides an extremely blatant example of this ongoing process. Not hesitating in the least to openly defy democratic principles such as freedom of speech, he banned New Profile speakers from schools several months ago. This is and was part of his (pointedly headline producing) smear campaign terrorizing the young eighteen year olds legally exempted from military service, whom he systematically slanders as “shirkers”.

Now, Sa’ar is leading a witch hunt against university faculty who support international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a means for ending occupation and oppression. This week, anticipating an upcoming discussion by the legislature of “the limits of freedom of expression in schools,” he declared his express intent “to take action against Israeli professors who call for an academic boycott of Israel.” Several prominent mainstream figures have strongly condemned this emerging policy and the minister’s preferential treatment of a political group claiming to monitor on-campus fairness while harassing left-leaning professors. Commenting on a so-called report issued by this group, the rector of Haifa University, Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi, commented that, “‘It would behoove the education minister to ignore the report which emits an aroma of McCarthyism. I hope he will understand the gravity of the very fact of monitoring and informing on lecturers, and of whether he even needs to take seriously an organization like Im Tirtzu, which causes incitement.” Sa’ar however proceeds to make up and hunt out “enemies” of the educational system, preferring the more popular role of outpost commander to that of a minister in charge of a key civil society system.

In tandem, according to columnist Avirama Golan, Knesset Member Zevulun Orlev (of “Habayit Hayehudi,” party titled The Jewish Home), is turning the Knesset Education Committee from “a committee that is supposed to oversee the government’s activities in education … into a tribunal that summons everyone whose opinions and activities it does not like and brands them with moral turpitude.” It seems that the state educational administration in Israel is already emulating the McCarthy senate hearings and “investigating” allegedly un-Israeli activities. Committee members, says Golan, “have considered firing “leftist” school principals and have lashed out at university lecturers.” An exhibition in the town of Holon marking the anniversary of the Geneva Convention and showing Israeli soldiers harming Palestinian children, was accused by Orlev of anti-Semitic incitement.

Golan suggests that,

Orlev’s McCarthyist energy is a way for him to survive at the head of Habayit Hayehudi. But it means that the Knesset committee is not dealing with matters of education but rather is branding enemies of the people.

In this process it is making no distinctions between trends and views, but rather is adopting the deceptive dichotomy … between ‘loyal’ and ‘traitor,’ and between ‘Zionist’ and ‘anti-Zionist…[he] and his colleagues on the Knesset Education Committee [… have become] the vanguard leading the crushing of Israeli democracy.”

While all this, on one level, may seem ludicrous and laughable, the subscription by both Sa’ar and Orlev to the type of hate propaganda invented and distributed by organizations clearly operating along fascist lines should not be lightly dismissed and must be taken very seriously.

The letter from human rights defender, Ameer Makhoul, released and distributed by his family and friends, was written on May 30th, after Makhoul had spent 3 weeks in prison without access to even pen and paper, not to speak of lawyers, family visits, due process, humane and legal conditions. It made its way to his home by snailmail and then the original Arabic was translated into English.

I first met Ameer Makhoul through my own activism over twenty years ago. Ever since, I’ve remained aware of his distinctive, highly independent style as an activist and a civil society leader among Palestinian citizens of Israel. His singular persistence pointedly and continuously pushes the envelope of Israel’s declared commitment to democracy, exactly as effective and meaningful civic activism should. Accordingly, I wasn’t all that surprised to hear of his detention incommunicado and then of official claims (which I firmly disbelieve) that Makhoul has been serving as an enemy spy. After all, his is just the type of intelligently challenging voice that state authorities most wish, and indeed sometimes act, to silence. All the more so once these authorities have dropped any previous pretense to upholding democracy and are stepping up blatant repression.

Like many other citizens of Israel—both Jewish and Palestinian—I believe that that “Makhoul is being detained and severely harassed for exercising his right, under Israel’s Basic Laws, to free speech and political expression,” as the pseudonymous blogger “Moshe Yaroni” put it. Hundreds have held repeated protests throughout the country against Makhoul’s imprisonment, as well as that of activist Omar Said, denouncing as well the unconscionable interrogation to which both have been subjected. Amnesty International has called on Israeli authorities to stop Makhoul’s mistreatment.

As a long time activist, here in Israel, I am both dismayed and determined these days; Dismayed at how the state I share a stake in proceeds, with great speed, to discard remaining vestiges of democratic governance. Determined to continue resisting this process with all the means at the disposal of activists and civil society.

The US Congress has shamefully abdicated its oversight role in US foreign policy and has become an apologist for the worst policies of the Israeli Government, all the while sending Israel billions of dollars in aid. Fortunately activists are not waiting for the US Congress to act. They are staging their own investigation, a first of its kind event.

The Chicago Hearing is modeled after a Congressional hearing and will be webcast live from a link on the home page. The Chicago Hearing will bring together witnesses to tell seldom-heard stories from Israel-Palestine that raise critical questions about the effects of U.S. policies in the region. Does Israel’s explanation of security legitimize its violations of international law? Does the U.S. government condone Israeli policies and practices that would not be tolerated if replicated in America by the U.S. government?

The Hearing highlights voices of those on the other end of the pipeline of U.S. aid to Israel. Israeli, Palestinian and American witnesses will testify to lives lost, freedoms denied and property destroyed by Israeli policies buttressed by U.S. aid and support. The witnesses will testify to the collateral effects of U.S. policies toward Israel: military and financial aid that totaled over $3 billion in 2009 as well as unconditional diplomatic support for Israel in the United Nations”.

Yotam Amit, one of the organizers, asked New Profile, a feminist, anti-militarist movement in Israel, to provide background information  about the link between US aid and undemocratic aspects of Israeli society. The following piece is based on an ensuing exchange of emails between Amit, Rela Mazali, a founding and active New Profile member (and frequent contributor to The Only Democracy?) and co-editor Jesse Bacon, incorporating excerpts from a seminal study by Israeli sociologist  Shlomo Swirsky, “The Burden of Occupation,” which can be downloaded in full here.

For  years now, groups such as the US Campaign to End the Occupation have been trying to show how US aid reduces US social spending, New Profile works in Israel to make a somewhat analogous argument. While the $3 Billion in official US Aid is vastly more then we give any other country, the impact on Israeli’s spending is obviously much greater.

Based on various studies and, in particular, Shlomo Swirsky’s “The Cost of Occupation,” we suggest that the direct effect is not the repeated slashes in Israeli social spending, but rather a camouflaging of the fact that these slashes are the neoliberal policy of choice benefiting the economic and security elite, under the guise of necessary “security spending.” According to Swirsky,

It can be said that the American administration allowed Israel to conduct its military operations against the Palestinian Authority under highly favorable domestic political conditions. The government was not forced to strain the local capital market or to raise taxes, steps that would have distressed Israel’s more affluent stratum. This is the very stratum that, if faced with the threat of carrying a heavier financial burden, might have been able to press the government to consider changing its policy regarding the occupied Palestinian territories. As early as the first Intifada, the business community was reportedly ‘fed up with the devaluation of the benefits it derived from the occupation and with the increasing burden the occupation imposed on it’(Levy, 2003: 172). Notably, this is the same stratum whose children had evinced a ‘motivational crisis’ regarding their service in the I.D.F. during the first Intifada (see Chapter 6).” p.119

So Israeli’s elites are not being inconvenienced by the Occupation. How can we change that?

The 2003 request for loan guarantees was not the first time Israel had turned to the U.S. for this type of assistance. About a decade earlier, in 1992, during the Rabin administration, Israel asked for American guarantees to fund the absorption of thousands of new immigrants from CIS countries. Then, the American government stipulated that it would grant the request only if Israel froze its settlement activity in the Palestinian territories. In contrast, the guarantees requested in 2003 were not used to promote Israel’s society or economy; they were utilized to fund continuation of the occupation, and they enabled the Israeli government to exempt affluent citizens from picking up the tab.” p. 119.

The 1992 Loan Guarantees are infamous as a source of tension between the US and Israel, with then-president George Bush the Elder threatening to cut them off. Obviously no such threat was made in 2003.

Until the second Intifada … no Israeli government had taken such extreme measures as the Sharon governments, and under normal conditions, it is highly unlikely that any government would have considered recommending such measures, wrapped as packages to be delivered in a flurry to the Knesset for hasty approval. It is hard to imagine such far-reaching steps being taken without the prevailing atmosphere of the Intifada, particularly following the suicide bombings on buses and in restaurants and banquet halls. The combination of ‘military emergency’ and ‘danger of fiscal and financial collapse’ set the stage for the administration to take these drastic steps. … ‘even if we consider this military policy as a given, there were still other routes the government could have taken, such as increasing the capital gains tax; raising income tax for the upper income brackets – or at least not reducing it; imposing a war loan; cutting the salaries of senior government officials, local government officials, and high-ranking military officers; cutting the ‘fat’ in the military budget; or reducing government benefits to well-to-do sectors of the population, among them residents of the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. The option chosen was to make cuts whose main effect was to lower the standard of living of Israel’s middle and lower classes.” p.122

Indeed, a June 2003 article by Akiva Eldar suggested that the US directly interfered with Israeli elections through its loan guarantees supporting the incumbent government which went on to a big victory.

Less then three months ago the Israeli government fell apart over a dispute between Likud and Labor over how the budget pie should be divided on both sides of the Green Line.

(Past Labor Party Prime Minister) Shimon Peres said last week during a campaign speech in Ramat Gan that Israel spent no less than $60 billion on the settlements, which he called ‘fanning the flames of the conflict’ – the equivalent of 20 years American aid. Amram Miztna (Labor Party candidate)  is trying to persuade the voters that the key to their physical and economic security is to be found in disengagement from the territories and the return of most of the settlers to the state of Israel.

And now, less than three weeks before the decision is made on Election Day, the U.S. is telling the Israeli voter that the Likud can preserve security, deepen the occupation and get funding from Uncle Sam.

Before the first word has been spoken in the discussions scheduled for today in Washington about the special aid and loan guarantees, the Israeli public is getting the message that the leader of the free world is pleased with the policies of the Sharon-Eitam (Likud Party) government:”

To conclude, the ‘security threat’ actively perpetuated by successive Israeli governments–through their choices of continued occupation and repeated warfare–has provided an effective smoke screen allowing the extremely swift implementation of radically neoliberal economic policies.  Recurring severe slashes in social budgets result from these policies rather than the needs of ‘national security’. But the official, as well as media, focus on national fear and ‘national security’ has successfully stemmed social unrest and potential protest. Meanwhile, these budget cuts actually feed directly into tax breaks for the highest salaried employees and richest property owners in the market. And the oversize, well heeled ‘security’ apparatus stoking conflict while deflecting social resistance is bolstered annually both by a disproportionate slice of Israel’s own budget and by billions in US aid. These same billions also directly benefit a related interest group within the US, because 75 percent of the funds are earmarked for purchases from US industry. Consequently, it’s no wonder that the aid agreement between the U.S. and Israel has for some years now been changing the ratio of military to civilian aid, increasing the former while incrementally canceling the latter. As journalist Moti Bassok wrote in 2007,”Each year throughout the present agreement civilian aid was reduced by $120 million, while military aid grew $60 million. As of next year, annual U.S. aid will [… be] all military,” forming an integrated enabling component of Israel’s continuing and destructive militarization. It would seem that the economic and political elites of both the US and Israel have vested interests in continuing Israel’s militarization, occupation and choice of warfare. Personally, we believe that it’s left to us as citizens of both these countries to make maintaining those policies too costly for both regimes.

Here’s a short version of Swirski’s report:

Members of Isha L' Isha (Woman to Woman)

In an extensive, research-based 2009 position paper titled: On Nuclear Weapons: A Feminist Perspective, Edna Gorney and Hedva Eyal of the Isha L’Isha Haifa Feminist Center wrote, “the Israeli public remains excluded from the [nuclear] debate. The public does not ask questions, does not demand that the state takes responsibility, nor does it demand to be involved in decision making; it accepts and is content with the information or, more accurately, with the lack of information.”

This passive indifference to the nuclear weaponry widely believed to be in the public’s backyard is, in my view, a highly dangerous manifestation of Israel’s longtime and entrenched militarization. As Gorney and Eyal have put it, “Decision-making in all areas related to security is characterized by secrecy and vagueness, excluding anyone who does not belong to the security elite. … The secret functions both on the outside as well as on the inside. Denying information under the guise of maintaining secrecy is one of the common ways through which elites maintain their status. … [While o]ne of the ways they can attain legitimacy for their control and actions is to continuously disseminate and instill fear – real and imaginary – among the citizens of Israel. This fear justifies and, in turn, foments military power and its use against any security threat, as defined by this elite group.”

Meanwhile, Gorney and Eyal have noted, “We are flooded with information on the great threat Iran poses and on the necessity of military operations. The debate within the Israeli public discourse is almost devoid of the possibility of solution through diplomatic means.”

Outlining the severely undemocratic suppression of any public nuclear debate in Israel, the position paper lists a line of researchers, journalists, politicians, activists and ex-security personnel who’s critical voices have been stifled by the security establishment, using a broad range of tactics. This in addition to the constant dissemination of fear underpinning militarization in general and the unquestioning Israeli public acceptance of its governments’ nuclear armament in particular. Thus, the risks of such armament to this public itself, as well as the entire area or even the globe, go unexamined and undebated for decades on end.

Resisting this reality and reaching for an actual, participatory democracy, Gorney and Eyal explain, “As feminists we wish to expose the connections between the policy of opacity, concealment and fear, and the current perception of security. We want to take responsibility for our lives and for actions carried out in our name.”

In one of the rare public voices taking up these issues, the position paper concludes:
“We demand the removal of opacity surrounding the issue of nuclear weapons in Israel; We demand a public debate and the development of an alternative policy that will enable us to live in peace in the Middle East; We demand nuclear disarmament; We demand that the State of Israel join the International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

Click here to download the full 22 page position paper.

Another such public voice, sounded now for many years, is that of nuclear historian and analyst, Avner Cohen, whose work is one of main sources repeatedly referred to by the Isha L’Isha position paper. Cohen is equally critical of successive Israeli governments’ successful barring of nuclear debate and, in a recent op-ed, offers a series of serious arguments against what he views as the irresponsible and extremely dangerous possibility that Israel might launch a military attack against Iran in an attempt to quash its nuclear capacity.

Cohen’s op-ed, converging in part with some of the conclusions presented by the Isha L’Isha position paper, was published April 2nd in Haaretz and claims, among other things, that:

Instead of a public discussion [of a possible Israeli attack against Iran] there has been a belligerent press, which makes demagogic use of statements that intensify the message of the politics of fear. These include expressions such as ‘Iran is galloping toward a bomb’ and a ‘second Holocaust’ that Israel must prevent. Such discourse creates a feeling that if Iran is not attacked, and soon, we have no choice but to accept a nuclear Iran. [Meanwhile,] It’s doubtful whether the people making those statements are capable of giving them a precise (technical and political) interpretation.

[Israel's is] a culture of national security in which nuclear opacity has been exploited to the hilt to create a specific model of deterrence. The result is that when [… we Israelis] look at Iran we see ourselves: how we would behave in a similar situation. [… This] leads to systematic errors when making assessments.”

A comment regarding Avner Cohen, from Gideon Spiro:

Cohen’s recent op-ed in Haaretz was an important one as it supports the
claims of those who oppose the dangerous adventure of an Israeli military
strike against Iran. However, please make no mistake: Avner Cohen is no ally
of the struggle to dismantle Israel’s nuclear arsenal. He is a staunch
supporter of the Israeli nuclear bomb and his book “Israel and the Bomb” is
a hymn singing the praises of the nuclear program in Dimona. I have
personally confronted Cohen on several occasions, some of them public, most
recently several months ago on Al Jazira.”

Gideon Spiro is a Tel-Aviv based journalist and activist in various Israeli
and international peace and human rights movements, one of the founders of
the “Yesh Gvul” peace movement and the “Israeli Committee for Mordechai
Vanunu and for a Middle East Free of Atomic, Chemical and Biological
Weapons.

From the kindergarten homework of the child of TOD? Contributor Amir Terkel

In January 2010, an official UN body determined for the first time that the militarization of Israel’s government-run school system was in violation of the International Convention of the Rights of the Child and, in particular, of Israel’s implementation of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC), to which it is a signatory.

Unprecedented in an international legal document, this was one of the conclusions of a report submitted by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reviewing Israel’s adherence to and breaches of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol.

Part of the evidence collected by the review included a jointly authored report prepared by: Defense for Children International-Palestine Section, Defense for Children International-Israel Section and New Profile, with additional contributions of information by Adalah, Yesh Din, Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, UNICEF Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The sections authored by New Profile are based on the New Profile Report on Child Recruitment in Israel, 2004, which they update and expand. These sections were authored by Sergeiy Sandler and Albert Givol.

The item below, issued on 11 March 2010, by DCI-Palestine, announces the public release of the jointly authored document providing detailed answers to a list of questions posed by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The item provides links to the full text of the ‘List of Issues’ and to additional relevant documents.

DCI-Israel, DCI-Palestine and New Profile release today their answers to the ‘List of Issues’ recently prepared by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in connection with Israel’s implementation of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC).

This report, entitled NGO Answers to the List of Issues, compiles data provided by seven organisations* and was submitted to the Committee in December 2009, ahead of the review of Israel’s compliance with OPAC in January 2010. It includes thorough and up-to-date information on the recruitment practices of the Israeli state armed forces, and Palestinian and Israeli non-state actors. It also expands upon the militarisation of Israeli society at large.

[Read the full report] [Read the CRC Concluding Observations on Israel] [Also on the same topic: The New Profile Report on Child Recruitment in Israel, 2004]

More specifically, the 41-page report is based, inter alia, on: Adalah’s expertise on the legal and practical aspects of the Israeli military’s use of civilians as human shields; DCI-Palestine’s research and field documentation of the impact of Operation Cast Lead, and its experience of representing Palestinian children accused of security offences in Israeli military courts; New Profile’s expertise on Israel’s recruitment laws and practices, its knowledge about the administration of military schools in Israel, and its research on the militarisation of the Israeli education system; Yesh Din’s expertise on the Israeli military court system; and UNICEF’s perspective on the Israeli government’s support towards the implementation of the child rights monitoring and reporting mechanism set up by UN Security Council Resolution 1612.

On 19 January 2010, Israel’s OPAC implementation was reviewed by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Committee members probed the Israeli government delegation on the following topics, among others:

• Applicability of the Convention in the OPT
• Use of Palestinian children as human shields
• Detention of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities
• Israeli military juvenile courts
• Age of minimum recruitment in Israel
• Israeli military schools
• Operation Cast Lead
• Construction of the Wall in the West Bank
• Israeli landmines in the Golan.

On 29 January 2010, the Committee on the Rights of the Child issued its Concluding Observations to Israel.

*Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Right in Israel (Contributor); Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (Contributor); DCI-Israel – Defence for Children International-Israel Section (Author); DCI-Palestine – Defence for Children International-Palestine Section (Author); New Profile – Movement for the Civilization of Israeli Society (Author); UNICEF – United Nations Children’s Fund-OPT (Contributor); Yesh Din – Volunteers for Human Rights (Contributor).

BACKGROUND INFORMATION – OPAC Timeline

On 18 July 2005, Israel ratified the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC). As a State Party to OPAC, Israel was due to report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child – the body in charge of monitoring implementation of the Convention and its Protocols – two years after ratification.

In March 2008, Israel submitted its Initial State Party Report, one year late. The report made no mention of the situation of children – Palestinian or Israeli – living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).

In July 2009, DCI-Israel and DCI-Palestine submitted a joint Alternative Report to the Committee in order to provide Committee members with complementary information relating to implementation of OPAC in the OPT.

On 6 October 2009, at the end of its 52nd Session, the Committee held a pre-session meeting on Israel’s OPAC Initial State Party Report and invited representatives of DCI-Israel and DCI-Palestine to present the contents of their Alternative Report to them. The Committee had many questions on Israel’s child recruitment practices in the OPT.

On 15 October 2009, shortly after the pre-session meeting on Israel, the Committee sent its List of Issues (22 questions) to the Israeli government, expressing its concern and requesting further information on a range of issues, a majority of them connected to the OPT, over which the Committee considers that Israel has jurisdiction. The government was given until 19 November 2009 to send its responses in writing.

On 7 January 2010, Israel forwarded its Written Replies to the List of Issues to the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

On 28 December 2009, NGOs sent their own replies to the Committee. The List of Issues had also benn forwarded to NGOs in Israel and the OPT, to encourage them to submit updated and complementary information to the Committee. Expert contributions from Israeli, Palestinian, international and UN organisations were compiled in the NGO Answers to the List of Issues.

On 19 January 2010, from 3:00-6:00pm, an Israeli government delegation met members of the Committee in Geneva in order to answer questions on the implementation of OPAC in the territories over which Israel has jurisdiction.

On 29 January 2010, the Committee on the Rights of the Child issued its Concluding Observations.

Sergeiy Sandler has been radical peace activist since the early 1990s. Since 1999 he is active with the feminist antimilitarist movement New Profile, and since 2002 is an International Council member of the War Resisters’ International.

On January 28th 2010, New Profile, a feminist movement working to demilitarize society and state in Israel, dispatched a letter to a list of top U.N. officials urging the U.N. General Assembly and the U.N. Security Council to intervene to ensure implementation of the recommendations made by the U.N. Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.

“If the United Nations and wider international community are to meet their responsibilities in upholding the rule of law,” New Profile wrote the U.N. Secretary-General, among others, “then concerted, effective and prompt action must be taken at the highest level to end the impunity and ensure the accountability of the State of Israel.”

Based on its long years of research-based, oppositional praxis, New Profile stated in conclusion, that, “the militarized system in place in Israel renders the State of Israel incapable of conducting its own implementation of the U.N. Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.”

To read the entire analysis corroborating New Profile’s claim and first-hand information on recent silencing measures encountered by the movement, please see the full text of this collaboratively composed letter (PDF).

UPDATE: Despite early reports of furious lobbying against the bill, the European Parliament has voted to endorse the Goldstone Report, condemning Israel’s crimes during the Gaza War and echoing New Profile’s call.

The European Parliament passed a resolution that said European Union states should “demand the implementation of the Goldstone report’s recommendations.”

The resolution, which was approved Wednesday by a vote of 335-287, said that the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, should monitor the progress of the implementation of the U.N.-ordered report.

The parliament also expressed its concern about “pressure placed on NGOs involved in the document’s preparation” — a statement that apparently refers to the targeting of the New Israel Fund for supporting Israeli organizations that assisted South African judge Richard Goldstone’s committee in the preparation of his report.

The report accused Israel, as well as Hamas, of committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last winter.

Here’s a video of Judge Richard Goldstone’s appearance on Al Jazeera.