Why Israelis pick Tarantino over Spielberg

By Matt Beynon Rees
November 23, 2009

Quentin Tarantino’s "Inglourious Basterds" is the definitive Israeli movie.

The bloodthirsty revenge fantasy of Jewish soldiers crushing German skulls with baseball bats and scalping dying Nazis has been a big hit here since its release in mid-September and, unusually, has been reviewed in every big newspaper or magazine. But that’s not just because Israelis, like audiences elsewhere in the world, seem to enjoy seeing Hitler’s henchmen meet grisly pulp fiction ends.

There’s something deeper at work in Israelis’ responses. It’s tied to the way their country has dealt with the very concept of the Holocaust. More particularly, the way Jews died in the Holocaust.

The response of critics has been almost uniformly positive. One of Israel’s most respected and thoughtful critics, Uri Klein, wrote in the leading newspaper Ha'aretz that "what Tarantino does in 'Inglourious Basterds' seems to me more valid and more decent than what Spielberg did in 'Schindler's List.'"

Instead of trying to recreate the horror that was the Holocaust as Spielberg did, Klein wrote, Tarantino simply made up an alternative reality, dealing with Jews and the Nazis on his own terms. That, in fact, is what Israel did, too.

In that context, the most revealing review was by Avner Shavit in Achbar Ha’Ir, a Tel Aviv weekly. “The truth is that [Tarantino] is on our side. … Like a typical Yankee who has been raised on stories about Ari Ben-Canaan, Moshe Dayan and other Mossad agents, he describes the Jew as the only one capable of kicking the bad guy's ass for humanity's sake.”

In other words, Shavit believes Tarantino’s portrayal of Jewish fighters during World War II is determined by the image created of Israel since then. Ari Ben-Canaan was the hero of Leon Uris’ “Exodus,” which is set during Israel’s founding struggle. Moshe Dayan was Israel’s army chief and the country’s Defense Minister during the victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Mossad agents crop up in almost every popular thriller with inside information and a magical ability to rub out the bad guy.

But what appeals to Israelis about Tarantino’s portrayal of these fantastical Jewish avengers is that they bear little relation to the great bulk of Jews who died in Hitler’s camps without making any attempt to resist.

That gets at the heart of the issue, because the Israeli establishment is, in many ways, still ashamed that so many Jews went to their deaths without a fight. The implication is that Israel created a new breed of Jews who’d have stood up to the Nazis, rather than being herded onto cattle cars.

Israel commemorates the victims of Hitler’s depredations with Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day — the relatively few “heroes” of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising get as much prominence in the naming of that memorial day as the millions of “martyrs.”

After World War II, Israel’s founders didn’t want to acknowledge that most Jews had gone powerless to their deaths. They lauded those “heroes” who fought back, no matter how hopelessly, over those who simply survived. The survivors never overcame that taint in the eyes of those who had arrived in Israel before the war. Many survivors have told me they were called “soaps” when they came to what was then Palestine — a callous reference to the rumor that the Nazis used the bodies of their victims to make soap.

Israel’s founders built a myth around the Holocaust. But the myth was like the repression that an individual places upon the unthinkable moments buried within his own subconscious.

Even to be recognized as a survivor in Israel requires a long battle with red tape. Then the government does its best to hold onto money that’s due to the survivors. New allegations emerged this week that lawyers hired to wrest that cash from the bureaucrats continue to take extortionate commissions from survivors, in violation of recent laws forbidding it.

Of 240,000 survivors in Israel, 20,000 receive compensation from Germany, and 40,000 get an Israeli stipend of less than $300 a month. The rest have nothing but their scarred memories. About 80,000 survivors live below the poverty line in Israel. The worst place in the developed world to be a Holocaust survivor is Israel.

So cheering Tarantino’s bloodcurdling re-imagining of history is an easy way out.

It’s also something which casts an unpleasant light on current Israeli politics.

On the Israelity blog, leading Israeli cultural writer David Brinn described how the crowd at the theater where he watched Tarantino’s movie cheered the demise of each German. In a reference to a banned political party that advocates the forced expulsion of Palestinians and has a reputation for violence, Brinn wrote that it “felt like I was at a Kach rally.”

“On the one hand, it was liberating to be the avengers of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis,” Brinn wrote, “but on the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t have been so happy about it.”

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Israeli Soldiers Admit to War Crimes During Gaza War

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Climate change champion and sceptic both call for inquiry into leaked emails

By Leo Hickman - The Guardian - November 23, 2009

Prominent voices on both sides of the climate change debate today called for an independent inquiry into claims of collusion between climate scientists after it emerged last week that hundreds of their emails and documents had been leaked that allegedly manipulated data and destroyed evidence for Freedom of Information Act requests.

Writing in the Times, Lord Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor and long-time climate change sceptic, said: "The integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay."

Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said: "Once appropriate action has been taken over the hacking, there has to be some process to assess the substance of the email messages as well. The selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages has created the impression of impropriety, and the only way of clearing the air now would be through a rigorous investigation. I have sympathy for the climate researchers at the University of East Anglia and other institutions who have been the target of an aggressive campaign by so-called 'sceptics' over a number of years. But I fear that only a thorough investigation could now clear their names."

He added: "There needs to be an assurance that these email messages have not revealed inappropriate conduct in the preparation of journal articles and in dealing with requests from other researchers for access to data. This will probably require investigations both by the host institutions and by the relevant journals. There may also be a role for the UK Research Integrity Office to advise on any investigation."

A spokesperson for Nature, the science journal mentioned by name in one of the alleged emails that sceptics say provides evidence of data manipulation and collusion, declined to comment.

Full article

Report: GMOs Causing Massive Pesticide Pollution

Andrew Kimbrell
Center for Food Safety
November 21, 2009

There is one fact about genetically engineered foods that there is no debate about: no one wakes up in the morning eager to buy gene-altered food. There's good reason for this. Genetically modified foods do nothing for the "eating public". They provide no extra nutrition, flavor, safety or any other trait that people actually want. Instead, these food products only offer risks, which include potential toxicity, allergenecity, and lower nutritional value.

This presents a tough problem for the Monsantos of the world, who are pushing these GM foods. How can you sell something to the public that offers no benefits to them? And, because of their lobbying power, the biotech companies have ensured that their products are not labeled. So Monsanto's real request of the public is "be unknowing guinea pigs for foods that make us a lot of money and offer you nothing but risk."

Obviously this message is a PR nightmare, so Monsanto has come up with a spin that is old as public relations itself: "accept and buy our products because they will help the world." More particularly, their ads displayed in mass transit systems around the country and regularly on NPR claim that GM foods "will feed a hungry world" and "reduce the load of pesticides" used in agriculture.

Not surprisingly, both these claims turn out to be self-serving myths. Earlier this year the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a detailed report entitled "Failure to Yield". The report's findings were straightforward and incontrovertible. After 21 years of research, billions of dollars of investments in public and private funds, and more than 13 years of commercialization, GM crops have done nothing to significantly increase yield: so much for the "feeding the world's hungry" spin.

Now, a new report from The Organic Center, "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years", exposes the "less pesticide" myth. The report, which was released on Tuesday, was authored by Dr. Charles Benbrook, a leading agricultural scientist. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should also mention that Center for Food Safety helped fund the report.

It turns out that far from reducing pesticides, GM crops are a major reason for the massive expansion of pesticide use in recent years. This should not be a surprise. The majority of GE crops are "Roundup Ready," designed to survive heavy and repeated spraying with Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller. Roundup Ready crops have dramatically increased Roundup use, and spawned a growing epidemic of Roundup-resistant weeds, which now infest millions of acres of American cropland. Killing resistant weeds requires more herbicides. How much more? Dr. Benbrook's study - based on official USDA data - shows that GE crops have increased the overall use of weedkillers in the U.S. by a massive 383 million pounds since 1996.

Sometimes even more chemicals won't do the trick. In the South, cotton farmers are reverting to the pre-industrial practice of "chopping cotton," or manual hoeing, to rid their fields of Roundup-resistant pigweed.

Never fear, the biotech industry has "killer" solutions to the Roundup-resistant weed epidemic - you guessed it, new crops resistant to different and multiple herbicides. Dr. Benbrook describes these "next-generation" GE crops, which are the true pesticide-promoting future of agricultural biotechnology.

For instance, Dow Agrosciences will soon bring us GE corn, resistant to 2,4-D, one of the weedkillers in Agent Orange - the dioxin-laced defoliant used during the Vietnam War. 2,4-D-resistant corn will undoubtedly increase use of this dangerous weedkiller, which has been banned in Sweden, Norway and Denmark due to its links to cancer and reproductive disorders. Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer and Syngenta all have their own new "herbicide-tolerant" crops in the works, some resistant to two and even three herbicides each. The inevitable result will be continuing increases in the use of toxic chemicals to kill "next-generation" weeds resistant to multiple weedkillers.

In the face of all this, many farmers are becoming disillusioned with GE crops. In many states, demand for conventional seed, especially soybeans, is outstripping supply. Among the reasons given by farmers for this historic switch are dramatic price hikes for biotech seeds, increased pesticide costs due to resistant weeds, premiums for non-GM supplies, and importantly, the ability to save and replant conventional seeds, which is illegal with Monsanto's patented GE seeds.

Thanks then to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Organic Center for debunking the myths about GM crops and foods. In terms of timing, the two reports released this year couldn't have come at a more crucial moment. Through careful scientific analysis they expose the false advertising that biotechnology companies are using in print and on our public radio airways.

We should all know what Monsanto and other companies are selling, and its not a solution to world hunger or a cleanser for the environment. What they are really selling is what they make best: chemicals. The biotech giants - Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow - are, without exception, major pesticide manufacturers. They have each bought up sizeable chunks of the world's seed supply, and are using biotechnology to make those seeds sell their pesticides for them.

It may be good for their bottom line, but its bad for us, the safety of our food, and the health of our environment.

Source

Iran, Brazil sign 8 deals

Press TV - November 24, 2009 00:21:04 GMT

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (R) and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L)

Iran and Brazil signed eight cooperation deals in Brasilia on Monday after talks between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

On the second leg of his five-nation tour of South America and Africa, Ahmadinejad arrived in Brazil on Monday with the goal of strengthening ties between the two countries.

The new deals will pave the way for Iran and Brazil to enhance their cooperation in the areas of commerce, energy, and agricultural research and to lift the visa regime between the two countries.

After Ahmadinejad's arrival, the Brazilian president expressed support for Iran's right to access peaceful nuclear energy and called for a “just solution” to be found in the dispute between Iran and the West over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

Lula stated that Brazil backed Iran's plans to make use of “peaceful nuclear energy, in full respect of international accords.”

He also advised Iran to “continue contacts with interested countries to find a just solution to the nuclear issue.”

Brazil has repeatedly voiced its support for Iran's nuclear program and has always opposed calls to impose sanctions on the country.

Ahmadinejad was in Gambia on Sunday.

After his one-day visit to Brazil, the Iranian president will travel to Venezuela, Bolivia, and Senegal.

How the financial "Big Players" gained their power

Not Sylvia Night
November 23, 2009

The international financial elites wield enormous power over governments both in developing and developed industrial countries.

Legislation in many parliaments favors large corporations and puts ordinary citizens and small businesses at a disadvantage. Wealth is being systematically transferred from the middle classes to the super-rich. The poor are getting poorer and are joined in by more and more former members of the middle-classes.

Large banks, which had brought themselves and the whole world economy to the verge of bankruptcy by their fraudulent speculations, are being bailed out with tax-payer money, while small banks with honest business practices are being swallowed by those just bailed out.

The power by which the financial elite create these processes is the power they have over the money issuing process of nations and over the world's resources.

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws" said Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the first international banking empire, about 200 years ago.

With the invention of fractional reserve banking, private bankers became the de facto money-issuing entities which now controls the money supply of all capitalist nations.

With the establishment of private, or semi-private, central banks, like the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, or the European Central Bank, the largest private banking establishments became interconnected cartels with monopoly powers.

The history of money creation and the consequences of the process today are explained in the videos; Money as Debt, and with more details on the influence of interest payments in, Money as Debt II.

Today this ever more consolidated banking cartel, which has pushed most independent banks out of the market, controls and issues not only the money of individual nations, but also the money transfer lines between nations all over the globe. It also controls through speculation with exotic financial instruments the price of all internationally traded resources, as well as most services and manufactured goods and even the value of real estate.

In order to control prices and availability of vital resources, the financial elites do not actually need to own those very resources. It is far more efficient for them to gain control over the trade of raw-materials among nations.

In gaining trade-control the physical transit lines; using ships, pipelines, rail, trucks or airfreight, are relatively unimportant. What actually counts in international trade nowadays are the money-transfer lines.

When in October 2008 the Icelandic banking system crashed, the most important physical industry of Iceland, the fishing industry, was still doing well. Fish, the principle source of income for the Icelandic economy, was still being caught, processed and transported to retail markets abroad.

However, the whole western financial industry had in one accord put a full stop to money transfers to and from Iceland. The buyers abroad could no longer pay for the Icelandic fish they bought and transfer the money to the accounts of the Icelandic fishing-companies and processing plants.

Normally the foreign money would then have been exchanged by the exporters into Icelandic currency at the central bank. Icelandic retailers could in return have bought those foreign currencies from there to pay for their imports. These are the basics of international trade, the balances of exports and imports. And due to the boycott, the western financial elites had declared on money-transfers to and from Iceland, this was now no longer possible, to the detriment of Icelanders and their customers abroad. And so, in one stroke the Icelandic government had lost all sovereignty over it´s financial policies.

Practically every every Icelandic politician was initially opposed to allowing the IMF, the representative of the international banking-consortium, to dictate Icelandic policies. And still the Icelandic government, both the one driven out of office by the people, as well as the newly elected one, eventually saw no other option, but to surrender control over the nation´s financial policies to the IMF and obey it´s dictates, knowing full well, it would hurt the population and the domestic industry.

To be sure, Iceland is a country with a tiny population, and therefor rather helpless against the pressure from more powerful actors. But as we can see in US politics today, even the largest economies and military powers on earth have to bow down to those financial powers, against the interests of their own peoples and their own industries.

But the power of "big finance" goes far beyond purely financial policies. As is being confirmed by more and more scientific evidence, the burning of oil, natural gas and coal as energy sources does not have a catastrophic influence on our climate, but still laws are being prepared for the energy consumers of the world to have to pay carbon-taxes and trade in carbon offsetts, a trade, which soon will be controlled by the international financial markets. We also have seen it becoming more accepted by the scientific community that those hydrocarbon fuels are not really scarce resources either. We will not run out of them any time soon, and still there are reoccurring price hikes under the pretense of present or soon to come scarcity.

The financial elites with the help of pseudo-scientists nurtured those myths into existence in order to gain even more control over the world´s the energy markets and a free hand in manipulating prices.

Most prices consumers pay nowadays for the goods they purchase or the energy they use or the rent or mortgage payments they have to make, have nothing whatsoever to do with supply and demand, or production costs or the level of wages or the costs of extracting the needed raw material. The financial markets determine the prices by their speculative financial instruments and the phoney scarcity paradigm quiets any potential public discontent.

Both rising as well as falling prices will produce profits for the "Big Players" of these markets.
To see how much and in what way consumer energy prices are shaped by speculation let´s take the example of crude oil and refined gasoline:

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the official US government source,

in 2006, average production costs (or lifting costs - the cost to bring a barrel of oil to the surface) ranged from
* about $4 per barrel (excluding taxes) in Africa
* to about $8.30 per barrel in Canada;
* the average for the U.S. was $6.83/barrel...

In 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the refining costs of gasoline was calculated with about 10 cents per gallon (or per 4 liters).

The next question, of course, is how many gallons of gasoline can be produced through the refining process from one barrel of crude oil?

The website "Fat Knowledge" explains, that a barrel of crude oil containing 42 gallons or about 158 liters, can be turned - using the most modern refining technology - into just as many gallons or liters of gasoline.

Using these figures we can now estimate that the combined costs of oil extraction and refining and transport, minus energy loss (about 18%) in the process, is for American-produced gasoline roughly 30 cents per gallon or 7.5 cents per liter.

Quite a bit of a difference between consumer prices and production costs, isn´t it?

Of course, some of the prices are taxes, which are supposed to be used for creating and upholding the traffic infrastructure like streets, roads and bridges. Does the rest go to the oil-companies or the oil-producing countries? A percentage of it, yes, but the real profits are being made on the financial markets.

In a November 2009 article stockbroker and financial expert Philip R. Davis writes:
The Global Oil Scam: 50 Times Bigger than Madoff

$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of the global oil scam...
Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BP (BP), Total (TOT), Shell (RDS.A), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Societe Generale (SCGLY.PK) founded the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2000.

ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate "dark pool" trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.....

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. " Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple....

How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades?...

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were “round-trip” trades... Duke Energy (DUK) disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were “round-trip” since 1999 [of course these trades gained strategic leverage on broader price levels]....

There is NO shortage of oil. OPEC alone has 6-7 Million barrels a day of spare capacity, more than the total disruption of any single country and any two countries other than Saudi Arabia could offset. Additionally, ICE partners Total and JPM are part of the cartel that is totally skewing the global demand picture by storing 125M barrels of oil in offshore tankers...

Goldman Sachs issues bullish opinions on oil and builds large positions in oil, while it is the cartel’s job to hide oil in offshore tankers, and then sell forward all the oil, with futures contracts, locking in the high price....

Richard Freeman and John Hoefle describe in a June 2004 article the history and the technical process of oil speculations:

The key to the ability of the financiers behind the oil cartel to manipulate prices in the oil market, is the shift which occurred during the oil crises of 1974 and 1979, in which long-term contracts—frequently for 24 or 36 months—at stable prices were replaced with the spot market and then the futures markets...

The oil spot market was created in 1969 by the Lazard/Rothschild-allied Philipp Brothers, then the world's largest metals trader. Philipp Brothers, largely in the person of their top trader Marc Rich, began by selling small quantities of Iranian crude oil to independent refiners.

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, which were orchestrated by the financier oligarchy under the cover of the OPEC oil embargo and the fall of the Shah in Iran, resulted in a shift in oil pricing away from long-term contracts toward the Rotterdam-based spot market.

By "spot" is meant, that one buys the oil at a market only 24-48 hours before one takes physical (spot) delivery, as opposed to buying it 12 or more months in advance. In effect, the spot market inserted a financial middleman into the oil-patch income stream in much the same way that deregulation would later do for electricity.

Today, the oil price is largely set in the futures markets. The two principal locales which dominate oil futures trading are the London-based International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), established in 1980, and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), which is more than a century old, but also first started trading oil futures in 1983. Traders call futures contracts "paper oil": the contracts are a paper claim against oil, which is far in excess of the volume of oil produced and actually delivered at oil terminals on behalf of those contracts.

The traders transact a large volume of derivatives bets. Speculators purchase on the IPE and NYMEX exchanges, futures contracts; each single contract is a bet on 1,000 barrels of oil. More than 100 million of these oil derivatives contracts were traded on these exchanges in 2003, representing 100 billion barrels of oil. In a year 2000 study, EIR showed that on the IPE, for every 570 "paper barrels of oil"—that is futures derivatives covering 570 barrels—traded each year, there was only one underlying physical barrel of oil. The 570 paper oil contracts pull the price of the underlying barrel of oil, manipulating the oil price. If the speculators bet long—that the price will rise—the mountain of bets pulls up the underlying price.

But worse, there is a second layer of leverage. At the London IPE, the speculator can buy a futures contract on a margin of 3.8%. That is, were the speculator to buy a single futures contract, representing 1,000 barrels of oil at, say, an oil price of $40 per barrel, then the contract represents $40,000. However, the speculator pays only $1,520 for the premium of the contract—or 3.8% of the $40,000—which gives him control over the contract. Through an investment of $1,520, the speculator controls 1,000 barrels of oil. A small group of speculators, through leverage, control the world oil price.

A NYMEX document, "How the Exchange Works," boasts that it has nothing to do with oil production. "Yet the buying and selling on the Exchange occurs amid the winding streets of the oldest section of New York, with nary an oil well or copper mine in sight. In fact, many thousands of transactions conducted on the Exchange each day are accomplished without the participants ever seeing a gallon of heating oil."...

As for London's (IPE), it has reported that its trade with Brent Crude oil contracts reached 375 million barrels in open-interest contracts on May 14, the highest level ever. This is about five times the total daily production of all sorts of oil worldwide....

The money that is being drawn out of the real world economy by these speculative practices is then being used to keep the international financial markets afloat, enticing even more real economy money into the speculative realm, creating in the process a shortage of liquid capital for ordinary consumer lending and end user purchasing, causing economic deflation in some countries, while at the same time depreciating the value of national currencies across the world.

The funds are also being used to buy up real resources and agricultural lands all over the world as well as bribing politicians and putting pressure on governments and nations to sell out their industries, public services and public lands to multi-national corporations, which are majority owned by those same financial "big players".

Today´s financial markets and their "big players" are totally disconnected from economic reality and any public good. They have become pure predators on the whole world´s population. They are destructive of the real economy. And if they ever contributed anything useful in the past, they certainly don´t any more.

The author is a frequent contributor to Aletho News and a human rights activist based in Iceland. An archive of previous articles is available at her blog. She deals with subjects like Zionism and the war against the Palestinian people, Western Islamophobia and the myths used to justify wars in the Middle East, imperialism in general, pseudo-scientific myths, falsification of history, the influence of religion on political philosophies, the human mind and how it is influenced by organized propaganda.

After ceasefire declaration by Hamas, Israel launches air strikes in Gaza

Israeli airstrike on Gaza

November 22, 2009 21:19
By Saed Bannoura - IMEMC News

Early Sunday morning, the Israeli airforce launched a series of missiles into the central, northern and southern Gaza Strip, wounding seven Palestinians. The air strikes follow a Saturday night declaration by the Hamas leadership in Gaza (the elected leadership of the Palestinian people) that they had managed to convince the armed factions in Gaza to cease firing homemade shells across the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The pattern of Israeli air strikes following Palestinian cease-fire declarations is one that has become common over the years, particularly in 2008, when Hamas declared a six-month ceasefire, but Israeli forces refused to recognize or participate in that ceasefire, instead launching numerous attacks on Palestinian fishermen, extrajudicial assassinations of suspected fighters, and air strikes on civilian areas. One of the most egregious examples of this pattern was on July 21, 2002, when, just hours after Hamas announced the conclusion of a delicate negotiation with all armed groups which resulted in the declaration of a unilateral ceasefire, Israeli forces launched a massive airstrike on an apartment building in Gaza City, killing 22 civilians, 14 of whom were children. The ceasefire eroded after that attack.

In Sunday's attack, Israeli forces hit a metal foundry in central Gaza, a trailer home in northern Gaza, and smuggling tunnels in the south used by Palestinians to sneak in much-needed food and medical supplies that are banned from entry into the Gaza Strip by the Israeli siege.

The Israeli military said that the air strikes were in response to a shell that had been fired by Palestinian fighters early Saturday morning, causing no injuries or damage. The Israeli military gave no response to the fact that later on Saturday, Hamas officials had announced a ceasefire that they had negotiated with all of the fighting factions in Gaza.

According to Israeli sources, almost 270 shells have been fired by Palestinian fighters into Israel since January, causing no injuries and very little damage (the Palestinian homemade shells are small, crude and impossible to aim). The Israeli sources added that this is a significant decrease from 2008, when they claim that nearly 3,300 shells and other small projectiles were shot over the border.

In the last year, Israeli forces have killed over 1500 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority of whom are civilians. In the same time period, Palestinian fighters have killed 5 Israeli civilians.

Gaza water unfit for human consumption: Palestinians

Nov 21, 2009

GAZA CITY (AFP) – Water in the Gaza Strip is so salty that it is unfit for human consumption, a Palestinian official in charge of water supplies inside the besieged coastal territory said on Saturday.

"The water is no longer fit for human consumption, with analysis and international studies showing that just 10 percent of water in the Gaza Strip is usable... threatening the lives of Palestinians," Munzir Shiblak warned.

He called in a statement for "the necessary measures to be taken to end the problem of salinity in Gaza water supplies, a problem that is getting worse."

Shiblak called the water situation "critical."

He said the amount taken from underground aquifers last year to supply 1.5 million people with drinking water and for agriculture was 160 million cubic metres, but that natural replenishment was 80-90 million cubic metres.

"The ground water deficit rose to more than 80 million cubic metres last year, and if this situation continues reserves could collapse in the next few years," Shiblak said.

In September the UN Environment Programme also said Gaza's underground water supplies are "in danger of collapse" following years of overuse and the devastating war Israel waged in the territory at the turn of the year.

"Unless the trend is reversed now, damage could take centuries to reverse. Since the aquifer is a continuum with Israel and Egypt, such action must be coordinated with these countries," UNEP said in a report.

Israel and Egypt have sealed off the impoverished enclave to all but basic goods since the Islamist Hamas movement seized control in June 2007, severely hampering the upkeep of basic infrastructure.

The sewage system has been particularly hard-hit, as Israel does not allow the import of virtually any pipes or other metal equipment that it fears could be used by Palestinian militants to make improvised rockets.

UNEP estimated that restoring the aquifer beneath Gaza could require 1.5 billion dollars (a billion euros) over 20 years, including the construction of desalination plants to ease the pressure on underground sources.

The report said over-extraction was causing seawater to seep into the freshwater aquifer, sending salinity levels above the 250 milligrammes per litre considered safe by the World Health Organisation.

Israeli spies ‘infiltrate’ Johannesburg airport

By JONATHAN COOK - The National

NAZARETH, Israel // South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.

The move by the South African government followed an investigation by local TV showing an undercover reporter being illegally interrogated by an official with El Al, Israel’s national carrier, in a public area of Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport.

The programme also featured testimony from Jonathan Garb, a former El Al guard, who claimed that the airline company had been a front for the Shin Bet in South Africa for many years.

Of the footage of the undercover reporter’s questioning, he commented: "Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa. We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing."

The Israeli foreign ministry is reported to have sent a team to South Africa to try to defuse the diplomatic crisis after the government in Johannesburg threatened to deport all of El Al’s security staff.

Mr Garb’s accusations have been supported by an investigation by the regulator for South Africa’s private security industries.

They have also been confirmed by human rights groups in Israel, which report that Israeli security staff are carrying out racial profiling at many airports around the world, apparently out of sight of local authorities.

Concern in South Africa about the activities of El Al staff has been growing since August, when South Africa’s leading investigative news show, Carte Blanche, went undercover to test Mr Garb’s allegations.

A hidden camera captured an El Al official in the departure hall claiming to be from "airport security" and demanding that the undercover reporter hand over his passport or ID as part of "airport regulations". When the reporter protested that he was not flying but waiting for a friend, El Al’s security manager, identified as Golan Rice, arrived to interrogate him further. Mr Rice then warned him that he was in a restricted area and must leave.

Mr Garb commented on the show: "What we are trained is to look for the immediate threat – the Muslim guy. You can think he is a suicide bomber, he is collecting information. The crazy thing is that we are profiling people racially, ethnically and even on religious grounds … This is what we do."

Mr Garb and two other fired workers have told the South African media that Shin Bet agents routinely detain Muslim and black passengers, a claim that has ignited controversy in a society still suffering with the legacy of decades of apartheid rule.

Suspect individuals, the former workers say, are held in an annex room, where they are interrogated, often on matters unrelated to airport security, and can be subjected to strip searches while their luggage is taken apart. Clandestine searches of their belongings and laptops are also carried out to identify useful documents and information.

All of this is done in violation of South African law, which authorises only the police, armed forces or personnel appointed by the transport minister to carry out searches.

The former staff also accuse El Al of smuggling weapons – licensed to the local Israeli embassy – into the airport for use by the secret agents.

Mr Garb went public after he was dismissed over a campaign he led for better pay and medical benefits for El Al staff.

A South African Jew, he said he was recruited 19 years ago by the Shin Bet. "We were trained at a secret camp [in Israel] where they train Israeli special forces and they train you how to use handguns, submachine guns and in unarmed combat."

Mr Garb claimed to have profiled 40,000 people for Israel over the past 20 years, including recently Virginia Tilley, a Middle East expert who is the chief researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council. The think tank recently published a report accusing Israel of apartheid and colonialism in the Palestinian territories.

"The decision was she should be checked in the harshest way because of her connections," Mr Garb said.

Ms Tilley confirmed that she had been detained at the airport by El Al staff and separated from her luggage. Mr Garb said that during this period an agent "photo-copied all [her] documentation and then he forwarded it on to Israel" – Mr Garb believes for use by the Shin Bet.

Israeli officials have refused to comment on the allegations. A letter produced by Mr Garb – signed by Roz Bukris, El Al’s general manager in South Africa – suggests that he was employed by the Shin Bet rather than the airline. Ms Bukris, according to the programme, refused to confirm or deny the letter’s validity.

The Israeli Embassy in South Africa declined to discuss evidence that it, rather than El Al, had licensed guns issued to the airline’s security managers. Questioned last week by Ynet, Israel’s largest news website, about the deportation of the airline official, Yossi Levy, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said he could not "comment on security matters".

A report published in 2007 by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Nazareth-based Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism, found that Israeli airline staff used racial profiling at most major airports around the world, subjecting Arab and Muslim passengers to discriminatory and degrading treatment in violation both of international law and the host country’s laws.

"Our research showed that the checks conducted by El Al at foreign airports had all the hallmarks of Shin Bet interrogations," said Mohammed Zeidan, the director of the Human Rights Association. "Usually the questions were less about the safety of the flight and more aimed at gathering information on the political activities or sympathies of the passengers."

The human rights groups approached four international airports – in New York, Paris, Vienna and Geneva – where passengers said they had been subjected to discriminatory treatment, to ask under what authority the Israeli security services were operating. The first two airports refused to respond, while Vienna and Geneva said it was not possible to oversee El Al’s procedures.

- jcook@thenational.ae