| 23/10/2009 |
October 23, 2009
UNRWA official: Israeli refusal to allow stationary into Gaza illogical
Allied Strategy at Risk as Afghan Police Run Out of Recruits
Low Pay, Dangerous Conditions a Recipe Most Afghans Eager to Avoid
US efforts to dramatically expand Afghanistan’s domestic security forces are running into a brick wall as officials say they simply aren’t able to recruit enough people to meet the Western goals.
Perhaps even more worrisome is that about a third of the police force is quitting now in any given year, so the recruitment effort is having a hard enough time replacing the outgoing police, let alone adding to the force.
It’s not hard to see why. Afghan police make only $120 a month and are often placed on the front lines of the nation’s security, facing some of the most dangerous conditions possible. In the end only the desperate are willing to take such low paying jobs.
The low pay is likely also a source corruption, as $120 a month is only about half of what is required to support a family, and it is generally understood that recruits will make up the different with bribes. As one of the trainers put it “the best we can hope for is that if they are taking bribes, at least they know it’s wrong.”
But likely the ones who know it’s wrong are the ones leaving in droves, and those remaining are either those incapable of doing any better or those that have found ways to supplant their meager income in one of the most corrupt governments on earth. This is likely part of the reason why Western officials aren’t even willing to hazard a guess how much longer this war will take.
Barak Breaks the Israeli Silence on Iran Nuclear Deal
23/10/2009 A senior European Union official told Israeli officials this week that “Israel” is not privy to the details of the exchanges between Iran and the Western countries regarding its nuclear program. “You do not understand the extent to which you are not in the picture. You do not know how much you do not know and what is happening in Iran,” he said.
Accordingly, a number of senior Israeli officials backed the European official’s statements by saying that the release of the draft of an agreement with Iran caught Israel by surprise. However, a senior official in the U.S. administration told Haaretz Thursday that from the minute the talks began on a deal over the uranium enrichment program of Iran, Israel was updated on every detail by the United States, and was given detailed reports on the talks with the Iranians and the ongoing dialogue on a nearly daily basis.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Bureau refused to comment.
However, Defense Minister Ehud Barak broke Israel’s official silence on a draft plan under which most of its enriched uranium will be exported abroad for processing into a form usable in its research reactor, saying there was a need to halt all uranium enrichment on Iranian soil.
“Iran received legitimization for enriching uranium for civilian purposes on its soil, contrary to the understanding that those negotiating with it have about its real plans – obtaining nuclear [weapons] capability,” Barak said. He acknowledged that the deal, if signed, would significantly reduce Iran’s stock of enriched uranium, but said what is needed is a complete halt to its enrichment program.
“The talks [with Iran] must be of short, limited duration,” he added. “The principle we are recommending to all the players is not, under any circumstances, to remove any option from the table.”
Iran is slated to sign the agreement Friday, along with the United States, France, Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Many details of the agreement have not yet been published, but the bits released to the public call for Iran to transfer about 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium – about 75 percent of its known stock – to Russia. There, it will be enriched to a level of 20 percent and then transferred to France, where it will be processed into nuclear fuel and returned to Tehran for use in its research reactor, which makes medical isotopes. The entire process will take about 18 months.
Israeli army force international activists out of the groves during olive harvest in Kafr Qalil
International Solidarity Movement - 21 October 2009
On Wednesday, 21 October 2009, several international activists accompanied Kafr Qalil farmers for the olive harvest in their land. The olive fields of the village of Kafr Qalil, in the Nablus region, are close to the illegal Israeli settlements of Bracha and Yizhar. During the olive harvest there is a potential threat of settlers coming to the olive fields and harassing the farmers, so the farmers feel safer with an international presence.
Today, the soldiers presented documents written in Hebrew and Arabic which they claimed to be an order stating that the area was prohibited for internationals to enter. They said that they would call the police to come and arrest the activists if they did not leave the area. They also threatened to interrupt the harvest and force the farmers to leave their land if the activists came back, and said that this had been done in other areas in the past. When the activists questioned why internationals are not allowed to accompany the farmers on their land, they were told that their presence would bother the settlers. Considering the threats, two activists left the area at 8 am, only two hours after the harvesting started. Two other activists that were higher up on the hill were not approached by the soldiers and were able to remain until the end of the day.
The olive groves are in an area declared a closed military zone, so the farmers are not allowed to access their land without a permit. Yesterday, the Israeli military called the village of Kafr Qalil and told them that they will be permitted to access their land for four days during the olive harvest. Some of the farmers need a week to pick their olives.
The restricted access to the olive fields during the rest of the year results in thistles and weeds growing all over the olive fields. Normally, farmers would keep these away in order to improve the conditions for the trees and make the olive harvest easier.
The farmers said that they were attacked by settlers during the olive harvest last year, while the Israeli soldiers that were supposed to protect the farmers just observed without intervening. In the fields, there are a number of scorched olive trees that were set on fire by settlers two years ago.
Book review: Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People"
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Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century "[t]he national project was ... a fully conscious one ... It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation" (45).
Sand traces how Zionist ideology drove the project of Jewish nationalism by turning Judaism "into something hermetic, like the German Volk ..." (255). He argues that history and biology were enlisted "to bind together the frangible secular Jewish identity." Together, these engendered an "ethnonationalist historiography" which was typified by the mid-19th century German Jewish historian Heinricht Graetz and his friend Moses Hess, who "needed a good deal of racial theory to dream up the Jewish people" (256).
According to Sand, the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple in 70 AD left the indigenous Jewish population of Judea and Samaria in place. "[T]he Romans never deported entire peoples. It did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers" (130). Furthermore, at that time there were already Jewish communities numbering up to four million persons in Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor and elsewhere (145). Palestine's status as the unique "ancestral homeland" of the Jews collapses together with the myth of David and Solomon's imposing kingdom.
Against the ethno-biological concept of a Jewish people -- a "race" -- whose linear descendants returned from exile to (re)found today's Israel, Sand posits a religious community proliferating throughout and beyond the Mediterranean region by means of proselytism and conversion. He offers a detailed rebuttal of the conventional wisdom whereby "Judaism was never a proselytizing religion," a view disseminated by historian Martin Goodman and others (150, note 42).
Most importantly, he concentrates attention on Khazaria, that "Strange Empire" that flourished in the Caspian region between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. By the eighth century the Khazars had adopted Hebrew as their sacred and written tongue, and "[a]t some stage between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, the[y] ... adopted Jewish monotheism" (221). Sand speculates that this conversion was calculated to save them from absorption into either the Roman or the Islamic empires. The Khazars, he contends, engendered those Askhenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe who would later invent the myths of Zionism to justify their colonization of Palestine, a land to which they had no "ethnic" connection and where they remain the dominant elite.
So if the exile was a myth -- fomented, Sand writes, by the Christian church as an image of divine punishment ("The Wandering Jew") -- what happened to the indigenous Jews? Sand's answer: they converted to Islam and survive as today's disinherited Palestinians. This seemingly radical thesis was once shared by, among others, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister who in 1918 still believed that (in Sand's words) "the ancient Judean peasants converted to Islam ... for material reasons ... Indeed, by clinging to their soil they remained loyal to their homeland" (186).
Ultimately, the case against the Jewish state cannot be based on an unseemly tussle for genetic primacy, but on a discourse of fundamental political and human rights. Sand turns toward such a discussion in the final chapter, describing it as the raison d'etre of The Invention of the Jewish People, which he admits essentially contains nothing not already found in the work of other historians and archaeologists.
Today's Israel is not a democracy but a "liberal ethnocracy" (307) that assumes its "growing and strengthening" Arab minority "will always accept its exclusion from the political and cultural heart" (309). Ultimately we may see "an uprising in the Arab Galilee, followed by iron-fisted repression," which would constitute "a turning-point for the existence of Israel" in the region. Hence, Sand states that the ideal solution would be the creation of a democratic binational state.
Sadly, Sand hastily dismisses this "ideal project." In terms all too drearily reminiscent of Zionist apologetics he states that to "ask the Jewish Israeli people, after such a long and bloody conflict, and in view of the tragedy experienced by many of its immigrant founders in the twentieth century, to become overnight a minority in its own state may not be the smartest thing to do" (311-312). Instead, he falls back on a sequence of rhetorical questions: "[h]ow many Jews would be willing to forgo the privileges they enjoy in the Zionist state? ... will anyone dare to repeal the Law of Return ... ? To what extent is Jewish Israeli society willing to discard the ... image of the 'chosen people,' and to cease ... excluding the 'other' from its midst?"
What is behind this sorry post-Zionist anti-climax to a book that seemed to presage a heady anti-Zionist conclusion? In an interview Sand admitted that he "waited until [he] was a full professor" before publishing the book, adding that there "is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort." In providing the premises for radical conclusions without either drawing or excluding those conclusions, Sand has the best of both worlds with few if any consequences.
Ultimately, Shlomo Sand is a little like Moses, unable to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. The journey so far, however, is instructive, and very stylishly accomplished; one hopes that the "soldier dreaming of white lilies" may eventually be emboldened to complete it.
Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist (www.raymonddeane.com)
October 22, 2009
Whatever happened to the war for oil?
the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out."They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."
“Netanyahu’s Plan to Change Laws of War an Admission that Israel Violated Them”
22/10/2009 The chair of the International Institute for Criminal Investigation on Thursday morning warned that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s aspiration to change the laws of war is unrealistic, and said the initiative was “almost an admission” Israel had violated international law during Operation Cast Lead.
Netanyahu directed the relevant ministries on Tuesday to look into ways of launching an international initiative to change the laws of war to deal with the modern-day scourge of terrorism. This new initiative comes fast on the heels of the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes for its military operation in the Gaza Strip earlier this year.
“It’s one thing to claim that [the rules of war] should change, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to violate them until they’ve changed,” said William Schabas, professor of human rights law and the author of twenty-one books dealing with international human rights law, in an interview with Army Radio.
“I think the fact that Netanyahu says he wants to change the laws of war is almost an admission that Israel violated them,” Schabas claimed.
The world-renowned law professor went on to predict it was very unlikely the world would support the Israeli prime minister’s initiative. It is not realistic to say that the Geneva Conventions, which were intended to protect the lives of civilians in a military conflict, do not allow a state to handle terror threats, he said.
When Israel harmed civilians during Operation Cast Lead it broke laws based on ancient moral values, said Schabas.
One cannot change the rules by defining your enemy as cruel and vicious, Schabas stressed, adding, if you break the law, you are behaving like the terrorists against whom you are fighting.
Schabas, a supporter of the Goldstone Commission’s report, also said that the international community would probably not accept an Israeli army probe into the alleged war crimes. However, a committee of inquiry established by the government would be accepted, he assessed.
At a meeting of the Israeli security cabinet that focused on the Goldstone report and its ramifications on Tuesday, Netanyahu had said Israel’s challenge was “to delegitimize the continuous attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel.”
“In Lebanon, in Gaza and in other places, weapons are being piled up around us with the sole aim of firing them at the citizens of the State of Israel,” he claimed. “I want to make it clear to everyone: No one will undermine our ability and right to defend our children, our citizens and our communities.”
Leaving Waziristan
A force of 28,000 Pakistani army personnel is at the moment conducting an operation in South Waziristan. The operation was preceded by months of aerial bombing, and as the following Al Jazeera reports show the human cost in terms of lives lost, and displacement is high. A BBC crew earlier found the refugees so outraged with the Pakistani military’s operation that they were chanting slogans in support of Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and other TTP leaders.
Thousands flee Pakistan conflict – 22 Oct 09
Civilians caught up South Waziristan fighting – 20 Oct 09
Germany: Government to get special swine flu vaccine
Just a week after it emerged that the German armed forces was getting a different kind of A/H1N1 vaccine to the general population, Der Spiegel magazine reports that the government will also get special treatment.
The general population will be offered the GlaxoSmithKline vaccine, called Pandemrix, which contains a new booster element, or adjuvant, as well as a preservative containing mercury.
Controversy has grown around the rapid licensing of the GSK vaccine – and a similar one being made by Novartis. Critics said not enough testing had been conducted before European licensing authorities rushed an approval.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, her cabinet members and ministry civil servants as well as those working for other agencies will get Celvapan, produced by US firm Baxter, which does not have the adjuvant or the preservative, according to Der Spiegel.
It is thought the adjuvant may lead to a stronger reaction in the patient – which to a certain degree is the point, meaning the vaccine can contain less of the virus yet still provoke the crucial immune system reaction.
But this is also what some say is the additional risk – and has led to stocks of the traditional kind of vaccine being bought in for pregnant women and young children.
Celvapan does not contain the adjuvant or the preservative. Rather, it contains entire dead viruses rather than the pieces which are in the traditional vaccine. The Baxter version is the one being given to the armed forces, as well as being made available for pregnant women and children.
It seems now that ministers and civil servants are to be included in that category.
“We have bought 200,000 doses of the non-adjuvanted vaccine Celvapan from the company Baxter,” Christoph Hübner, spokesman for the Interior Ministry confirmed to Der Spiegel.
It will be used for "state servants responsible for the maintenance of public order," the magazine reported. Next to members of the cabinet and civil servants, this includes staff of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which took the decision to order the new vaccine from GSK for the rest of the country. No explicit reason was offered as to why they should get the Baxter vaccine rather than the GSK version.
Chairman of the German Medical Association’s Drug Commission Wolf-Dieter Ludwig said the situation was a scandal. “We are unhappy about this vaccination campaign,” he said. The point of it was unknown, he suggested. “The health authorities have succumbed to a campaign by the pharma companies, which simply want to earn money from a supposed threat.”
Meanwhile some medical associations are advising their members not to administer the new vaccine. President of the German Association of General and Family Medicine, Michael Kochen, has called on German general doctors not to give it to patients. “The risks outweigh the benefits,” he said.
Wolfram Hartmann, president of the Association of Paediatricians, accused the government of making false scientific statements. He said children under the age of three should not be given the shots.
“The vaccine has not been tested on them, thus the risk is simply too great for it to be used,” he said, adding that children’s immune systems tend to overreact, which could be exacerbated by the adjuvants. He also criticised the use of mercury-containing preservatives. “One has deliberately kept this stuff out of vaccines for small children,” he said.
The Local (news@thelocal.de)
Source
Cold Hearts, Blind Eyes, Israeli High Court Justices VS. 10 year old Abir Aramin
A freak cold front blew through Florida last Saturday night and the thermometer on my porch read 54 degrees, but what chilled me to the bone on Sunday morning was reading Nurit Peled Elhanan's report of the cold hearted Israeli High Court Justices when "members of the Combatants for Peace movement, women of Mahsom [Hebrew for checkpoint] Watch, members of the Forum of Bereaved Families for Peace attended a hearing [on October 14] at the High Court of Justice on the matter of the killing of ten-year-old Abir Aramin." [1]
On January 16, 2007, 10 year old Abir Aramin was walking home from school with her sister and two friends, but instead of having milk and cookies that afternoon; she was shot in the head with a rubber bullet by the Israeli Border Police and after three days on life support Abir's struggle ended- but not the struggle for justice her parents have been seeking ever since.
In 2007, I reported that Avichay Sharon, of Combatants for Peace stated, "Over the past 2 years, the Israeli Border Police and IDF forces have been creating provocations near the school district of Anata [which] has become a part of the daily routine for the children. Ever since construction started on the separation barrier surrounding Anata, the jeeps have been roaming the streets especially near the schools and shooting grenades and tear gas along with rubber bullets.
"Many children have been injured in the past by these brutal actions of the soldiers and on January 16th it became deadly. As in many other cases the police replied that the soldiers were shooting in response to stones thrown at them by children. Even though all the evidence and witnesses stated that no stones were thrown that day" the prosecution dismissed the Aramin family's case, claiming lack of evidence.
Bassam Aramin, Abir's father and co-founder of Combatants for Peace said, "I'm not going to lose my common sense, my direction, only because I've lost my heart, my child. I will do all I can to protect her friends, both Palestinian and Israeli. They are all our children."
When Bassam Aramin was 17 he was sentenced to 7 years in an Israeli prison for belonging to the then-outlawed Fatah movement. Although he had been beaten by soldiers in prison, he decided that he would not become a prisoner of hatred.
The "Combatants for Peace" are Palestinians and Israelis, who had all been involved in perpetuating the cycle of violence; Israelis as soldiers in the Israeli army (IDF) and Palestinians as part of the violent struggle for Palestinian freedom. All decided to put down their guns and work together in the good fight for peace through nonviolent actions and by raising voices of conscience as they seek to create political pressure on both Governments to end the violence and end the military occupation of Palestine.
Elhanan wryly reported that Abir's parents "live under a cruel occupation and they have experienced all it has to offer: exile, imprisonment and the killing of their small daughter Abir by a rubber bullet that was allegedly fired from the rifle of a Border Guard soldier who was sitting in an armoured jeep and thrust the barrel of his rifle through the opening that was designed for that purpose and allegedly aimed and fired at the head of the girl who was standing beside her sister at a kiosk, allegedly buying candy during the break between the first class and the second.
"The projectile was removed from under the girl’s body and transferred to the authorities. The eyewitnesses, as well as the Border Guard soldiers, testified that there was no alleged danger to their lives and that the shooting was done – if it was done – in contravention of instructions. Two pathologists testified that it was probable that the fracture in Abir’s little skull could have been caused by a rubber bullet. The attending physician at the Hadassah hospital said that it was not a live bullet. The video of the reconstruction of the incident was not given to the defence counsel or to the court, because the soldiers who allegedly carried out the shooting, that is, who thrust the barrel of the rifle through the opening that had been made especially for that purpose, aimed and fired at the head of the girl Abir, were featured in the recording.
"Counsel for the State, stammering, unprepared and unkempt, stood like a platoon commander in charge of new recruits with her back to the public and refuted the allegations: So they found a projectile. So what? Who knows how long it had been lying there? So people gave testimony, so what? They (those Arabs) can say anything, does that make it testimony? So nobody was throwing stones at that spot, so what? On a nearby street stones were thrown. If you were in my place, she laughingly says to Michael Sfard, Aramin's attorney you would have made morsels of them by now.
"Judge Beinish reminds Sfard – twice – that there have been such incidents in the past and that soldiers have rarely been put on trial or even indicted, so it would be best to just forget it…But Salwa and Bassam Aramin have no choice but to seek justice in an Israeli court. They demand that the truth come to light in a court of the occupiers – of the killers.
"I nearly shouted for the drowsy judges – Beinish, Arbel, Frocaccia – to find a spark of humanity, of motherly feelings, within themselves and to look into the eyes of Salwa, who never stopped crying, and at Bassam’s ashen face, and to say: the High Court of Justice sympathizes with you over the death of little Abir. They didn't."
Elhanan also noted that Jean-François Lyotard wrote that the perfect crime is not only the killing but also the suppression of the testimony and the silencing of the voices of the victims. And the greatest injustice is to compel the victims to seek justice in the court of their tormentors.
In March of 2006, I visited Anata refugee camp and have been tormented by my memories ever since.
Israel erected their thirty foot high concrete apartheid Wall at the boys high school where 780 Palestinian adolescents, share a slab of cement about the square footage of a basket ball court; their only 'playground'.
A resident refugee informed me that on a daily basis, "The Israeli Occupation Forces show up when the children gather in the morning or after classes. They throw percussion bombs or gas bombs into the school nearly every day! The world is sleeping; the world is hibernating and is allowing this misery to continue."
A moment later, a teenage boy approached me as I was taking photos and asked me my name and where I was from. I cringed admitting I was American, for "financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile, the Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families' sole livelihood for generations." [Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Jan/Feb. 2007]
On July 9, 2004, the International Court of Justice/ICJ, ruled 14-1 that The Wall was illegal and it must come down and also that compensation should be paid to all who had been affected.
The ICJ Judges also decided 13-2 that signatories to the Geneva Convention were obliged to enforce "compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law" and the U.N. General Assembly also passed a resolution 150-6 supporting the ICJ’s call to dismantle the wall." [Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2009]
Less than five minutes by car from Anata, one can enter into the Orwellian Disney Land of lush green grounds called the Pizgat Ze'ev settlement.
All the settlements/colonies in the West Bank are illegal under international law.
I was sick at heart as I traveled through the colony and counted three playgrounds and a swimming pool.
I wondered how many USA tax dollars helped to build them, and outraged over the injustices of Walls and military occupation that American money provides against the indigenous people of that land.
Within fifteen minutes after leaving Anata, as I stood next to a playground in Pizgat Ze'ev, a barrage of gunshots issued from the refugee camp and my guide informed me that the Israeli soldiers were showering the refugees with gun fire and terror- another normal daily occurrence for them.
You can read more here:
ABIR ARAMIN'S LAST MORNING AT HOME
Spinning Sorrow: Abir Aramin's Death
Facilitating Genocide:The Reporting of Abir Aramin's Death
THE GREENING OF PALESTINE~~ A SPECIAL POST... A SPECIAL APPEAL
Learn more about Abir and the Combatants for Peace:
http://www.rebuildingalliance.org/campaignAbirsGarden.php
1. http://www.creative-i.info/?p=10966
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Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world again."-Tom Paine
By Eileen Fleming, Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
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