The Failures of Human Rights Watch

Please read Jonathan Cook's article in Ma'an. Its a scathing critique of Human Rights Watch.

I'd love to hear what you think!

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=17657

Once again, I think I've posted this picture I took at a flying checkpoint south of Jenin before. Thought it might be appropriate again.

Palestinian Land...

Jameela al-Shanti

Twice last week, CBC's nightly current affairs show "As It Happens" did interviews with Palestinian Member of Parliament Jameela al-Shanti. Once following the march and intervention she helped lead against the Israeli Invasion in Beit Hanoun, Gaza... and once following the Israeli destruction of her home a few nights later. Here is an article she wrote for The Guardian a few days ago.

The Guardian 11/09/06

We overcame our fear

The unarmed women of the Gaza Strip have taken the lead in resisting Israel's latest bloody assault

By Jameela al-Shanti in Beit Hanoun

Yesterday at dawn, the Israeli air force bombed and destroyed my home. I was the target, but instead the attack killed my sister-in-law, Nahla, a widow with eight children in her care. In the same raid Israel's artillery shelled a residential district in the town of Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, leaving19 dead and 40 injured, many killed in their beds. One family, the Athamnas, lost 16 members in the massacre: the oldest who died, Fatima, was 70; the youngest, Dima, was one; seven were children. The death toll in Beit Hanoun has passed 90 in one week.

This is Israel's tenth incursion into Beit Hanoun since it announced its withdrawal from Gaza. It has turned the town into a closed military zone, collectively punishing its 28,000 residents. For days, the town has beenen circled by Israeli tanks and troops and shelled. All water and electricity supplies were cut off and, as the death toll continued to mount, no ambulances were allowed in. Israeli soldiers raided houses, shut up the families and positioned their snipers on roofs, shooting at everything that moved. We still do not know what has become of our sons, husbands and brothers since all males over 15 years old were taken away last Thursday. They were ordered to strip to their underwear, handcuffed and led away.

It is not easy as a mother, sister or wife to watch those you love disappear before your eyes. Perhaps that was what helped me, and 1,500 other women, to overcome our fear and defy the Israeli curfew last Friday - and set about freeing some of our young men who were besieged in a mosque while defending us and our city against the Israeli military machine.

We faced the most powerful army in our region unarmed. The soldiers were loaded up with the latest weaponry, and we had nothing, except each other and our yearning for freedom. As we broke through the first barrier, we grew more confident, more determined to break the suffocating siege. The soldiers of Israel's so-called defence force did not hesitate to open fire on unarmed women. The sight of my close friends Ibtissam Yusuf abu Nada and Rajaa Ouda taking their last breaths, bathed in blood, will live with me for ever.

Later an Israeli plane shelled a bus taking children to a kindergarten. Two children were killed, along with their teacher. In the last week 30 children have died. As I go round the crowded hospital, it is deeply poignant to see the large number of small bodies with their scars and amputated limbs. We clutch our children tightly when we go to sleep, vainly hoping that we canshield them from Israel's tanks and warplanes.

But as though this occupation and collective punishment were not enough, we Palestinians find ourselves the targets of a systematic siege imposed by the so-called free world. We are being starved and suffocated as a punishment for daring to exercise our democratic right to choose who rules and represents us. Nothing undermines the west's claims to defend freedom and democracy more than what is happening in Palestine. Shortly after announcing his project to democratise the Middle East, President Bush did all he could to strangle our nascent democracy, arresting our ministers and MPs. I have yet to hear western condemnation that I, an elected MP, have had my home demolished and relatives killed by Israel's bombs. When the bodies of my friends and colleagues were torn apart there was not one word from those who claim to be defenders of women's rights on Capitol Hill and in 10 Downing Street.

Why should we Palestinians have to accept the theft of our land, the ethnic cleansing of our people, incarcerated in forsaken refugee camps, and the denial of our most basic human rights, without protesting and resisting?

The lesson the world should learn from Beit Hanoun last week is that Palestinians will never relinquish our land, towns and villages. We will not surrender our legitimate rights for a piece of bread or handful of rice. The women of Palestine will resist this monstrous occupation imposed on us at gunpoint, siege and starvation. Our rights and those of future generations are not open for negotiation.

Whoever wants peace in Palestine and the region must direct their words and sanctions to the occupier, not the occupied, the aggressor not the victim.The truth is that the solution lies with Israel, its army and allies -- not with Palestine's women and children.

• Jameela al-Shanti is an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council for Hamas. She led a women's protest against the siege of Beit Hanoun last Friday

Money and Leadership...

It has been reported today the Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh announced to attendees at a Gaza mosque for Friday prayers that he is willing to step down as Prime Minister to get International aide flowing back into Palestine. He said that the International Community (the so-called Quartet of Middle East peace brokers of the US, UN, EU and Russia) has put one condition on any new Palestinian Unity Government - that they replace Haniyeh as PM.

From CNN: "[They have] one condition, that the siege will not be lifted unless the prime minister is changed," Haniya said, according to Reuters. "When the issue is like this, the siege on one hand, the prime minister on the another ... I prefer the siege be lifted and the suffering ended."

It's amazing to me that the international community is so hypocritical. Let's go over a few facts and figures before I give you a recent article from the Globe and Mail about Avigdor Leiberman, the new Deputy Prime Minister of Israel...

According to a December 2002 report...

- Over 1/3 of total US aid to foreign countries goes to Israel.

- Between 1949 and 2002 US Aid to Israel: $134 Billion

- US Aid PER Israeli: $23,240

- Last year the US financed Israel to the tune of more than $7 Million A DAY.

- Israel ranks SECOND (after the US) in Economic inequality (between rich and poor) and guess who those poor Israelis are... Arab-Israelis and the non-Zionist Ultra Orthodox Jews.

And as for the Palestinians...

- HALF of the Palestinian population live on LESS than $2 a day.

- UN puts the poverty rate of Gazans at 80%.

So what does this have to do with Haniyeh? Why are we hypocrites?

We will have forced a democratically elected leader (in a region we want democracy to flourish in so badly that we started a war) out of office because we have suffocated the life out of the indigenous Palestinian population. At the same time that we starve Palestinian children we finance the construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall, we finance the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1935945.ece) and we keep silent when a racist like Avigdor Lieberman is named Deputy Prime Minister in Israel... But we've been silent in the past over the same things. Menachem Begin, former Israeli Prime Minister once led a Terrorist group that, among other attacks, killed 91 people (British, Arab and Jewish civilians) in July 1946. Begin STEADFASTLY REFUSED TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINE'S RIGHT TO EXIST:

"The Jewish people have unchallengable, eternal, historic right to the Land of Israel including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the inheritance of their forefathers"

So we starve Palestinians because Haniyeh will not "recognize" Israel...

We shower Israel with money to buy weapons....

Haniyeh will be forced to step down to save his people...

And Lieberman becomes the new Deputy Prime Minister...

And Begin is given the Nobel Peace Prize...

Avigdor Lieberman appointed Deputy Prime-Minister

Globe and Mail

November 7, 2006

Knesset critic urges boycott of Olmert's 'fascist' deputy

Lieberman under fire for plan to expel Israeli Arabs by redrawing the border

By Mark MacKinnon

Jerusalem -- Israel's new Deputy Prime Minister is a dangerous "fascist" who should be boycotted by the international community, a leading Israeli Arab politician said yesterday.

Ahmad Tibi, deputy speaker of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, said that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's decision last month to invite Avigdor Lieberman into cabinet has given legitimacy to policies that are racist against Arab citizens of the country.

Mr. Lieberman has ignited controversy in recent days by calling for Israel's borders to be redrawn in order to exclude most Arab citizens and make a more homogenously Jewish state. He said Cyprus, which has been divided between Greek and Turkish halves since a war in 1974, was the "best model" for Israel.

"I'm not surprised at all because I know his ideology. But now it's much more dangerous and serious because it's not just the statements of a member of the Knesset, it's the racist statements of the Deputy Prime Minister of the state of Israel," Mr. Tibi said in an interview at his Knesset office.

He compared Mr. Lieberman to other far-right politicians such as Austria's Joerg Haider and France's Jean-Marie Le Pen.

"Practically, he is calling for ethnic cleansing. Using the Cyprus model is outrageous because 160,000 Greek [Cypriots] were deported, by force. But this is the way [Lieberman] sees things."

Over the course of a series of interviews with foreign and domestic media, Mr. Lieberman said that "minorities are the biggest problem in the world" and advocated giving Israel's Arab villages and their citizens to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Once viewed as a fringe extremist, Mr. Lieberman has seen his popularity rise sharply in recent months. Anti-Arab sentiment in Israel has hardened over the course of the 34-day war this summer against Lebanon's Hezbollah militia, and the ongoing firing of rockets by Palestinian groups based in the Gaza Strip. Recent polls suggest Mr. Lieberman is now the country's second most popular politician, trailing only former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another right-winger.

Mr. Tibi, whose hometown of Taibeh is one of those Mr. Lieberman proposes toexclude from Israel, said the Deputy Prime Minister's popularity reflects growing street-level racism against the Arabs who make up 20 per cent of Israel's population.

A poll taken earlier this year by GeoCartographia, a respected Israeli research group, found that 63 per cent of Israeli Jews saw the country's Arab citizens as a "security and demographic threat to the state," while 40per cent believed that Israeli Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate. The poll was taken in the spring, before the Lebanon war.

"Racism is racism, whether it is in France, Austria or Israel. Lieberman is much more radical than Joerg Haider in Austria. Joerg Haider did not ask to transfer 20 per cent of the Austrian population," Mr. Tibi said. "Lieberman should be isolated and the international community should put pressure ontothe Israeli government to kick him out of the cabinet."

Mr. Lieberman has no love for Mr. Tibi either. Earlier this year, he called for Israeli Arab politicians who had contacts with Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Palestinian Authority, to be executed. Mr. Tibi, himself a controversial figure who once served as an adviser to Yasser Arafat, flew to Cairo last week to meet with Palestinian foreign minister Mahmoud Zahar, aleading Hamas member. Mr. Tibi has also violated Israeli law by travelling to Lebanon, which is classified as an enemy state.

"World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials," Mr. Lieberman said back inMay. "The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in this house."

Israeli Arabs aren't the only ones opposed to Mr. Lieberman. His appointment to cabinet was sharply criticized by many on the country's weakened political left, and led to the resignation of cabinet minister Ophir Pines-Paz, a member of the Labour Party, which nonetheless remained in Mr.Olmert's coalition.

Giving Mr. Lieberman the posts of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs was the price Mr. Olmert paid to get Mr. Lieberman and his party, Yisrael Beiteinu ("Our Home is Israel"), to support his coalition government, which was facing the possibility of collapse amidst public dissatisfaction with the conduct and nebulous outcome of the Lebanon war.

While Mr. Olmert was quick to distance himself from Mr. Lieberman's remarks over the weekend, Mr. Tibi said Mr. Olmert should have gone further and dismissed Mr. Lieberman from cabinet.

"You cannot just say that 'I don't agree with these ideas, or these ideas are not representing us.' If you are upgrading him [to Deputy Prime Minister], you are giving him public legitimization, official legitimization and a place from which he can, day by day, express his fascist ideas," Mr.Tibi said.

Mr. Tibi said it was particularly offensive that Mr. Lieberman, who lives in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and who immigrated to Israel from Moldova in 1978 when he was 21, was claiming the right to take away the citizenship of Arabs who had lived in Israel since its formation.

Beit Hanoun

As people slept in their beds in the northern Gaza neighborhood of Beit Hanoun, teenage Israeli soldiers loaded their tanks, turned their turrets towards the center of town and let loose a barrage of shells.

This morning 18 to 20 people, half of whom were children, were blown apart as they slept. Their extended family - mostly women - were also killed and dozens injured.

Now Hamas is claiming that it will resume Suicide Bombings within Israel. All because Israel has decided that the inconvenience of rockets being fired from Gaza into southern Israel merited a response of serial massacres of civilians. Instead of pursuing peace: by dismantling the Apartheid Wall that has ruined thousands of lives in the West Bank and by withdrawing from the Occupied Territories (instead of expanding it's settlements there, murdering Palestinians, and stealing their land) Israel has chosen violence and war. A war it cannot win.

While it saddens me that Hamas [Islamic Jihad has carried out the occasional suicide bombing in Israel during Hamas' official and unofficial cease-fire(s)] has chosen to do this, I doesn't surprise me. Let me review a few of the events that have happened in the past six months that has led to this decision:

- Eight members of a family, three of whom were children, are blown apart by a mortar shell while picnicking on a Gaza beach in June.

- A Family of nine were killed when the Israeli Air Force dropped a 225kg bomb on a residential building at 6 in the morning. July 13th (see Post from this date)

- and today, 20 killed by intentional tank shelling of a residential complex. BBC reports that most were "women and children".

And we are again reminded of the question posed by Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj, the Gazan psychiatrist, outspoken opponent of suicide bombings and winner of the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders: Given the conditions in which the Palestinian people must live the question is not "why are there suicide bombers" but "why is not every Palestinian a suicide bomber"?

From BBC reporter Matthew Price:

A father of one child who was killed told me: "One missile I believe could have been a mistake, but the number of missiles that were fired, I can't believe that was a mistake."

A resident who works in one of Gaza's hospitals says: "I have not seen injuries like this for a long time."

"The shrapnel severed peoples hands and arms and they were left lying on the ground," Dr Ali said.

He had been sleeping in his bedroom when the shells struck the next door building. The windows of his bedroom had been blasted out and there was glass on the ground.

Dr Ali tells the same story as everyone I spoke to, that there had been no anti-Israeli attacks by Palestinian militants from this area, as the Israeli military claims, before the shells struck.

"I am angry. I hate the US, I hate George W Bush, I hate of course Israel. I also hate the Arab states which do nothing to help and the international community," said Raed. But it was not anger in his eyes, it was more like an immense sadness that showed through.

That mood was shared by most of the people we saw, many of them slumped tearfully against walls in the street. Normally when something like this happens members of armed groups turn up and chant slogans with their loudspeakers.

But this time we only saw one militant appear, and he quickly vanished again.

Women and Children

Despite what you see on the news, the situation in Palestine is not just the Israeli Army (with it's Canadian, French, American, British soldiers) against scary, bearded Palestinian Militants. Women and children often are at the receiving end of the former's brutality.

Today after Hamas radio asked for women to demonstrate against the latest Israeli invasion of Gaza, these same women marched towards an-Nasser mosque in Beit Hanoun and acted as a human shield - on their own free will - to help Palestinian "militants" held inside the mosque by the Israeli army. The Israelis, in a fashion that we've seen time and time again, opened fire.

One 40 year old woman is dead - and dozens are injured. BBC has reported that another woman has since also died of her wounds. More than 20 people have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army in the past three days (including a child) as they relaunch an assault on the strip of land and it's inhabitants - some of the poorest people in the world. Israeli Human Rights Group Bet'selem has reported that 300 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the Army since Gilad Shalit (from France) was captured a few months ago.

So keep in mind, as you listen to the Israelis try to spin the story of their soldiers shooting unarmed middle aged women in order to extra-judiciously assassinate men they think might have fired rockets from Gaza into Israel (even though they rarely hit anything) that there is no excuse for this. That Israel is again committing horrible acts of violence. And that it continues to go unaddressed by us in "the West" because he think that we are not involved. We are involved.

***

Also remember that violence against the Palestinian people happens VERY DAY and goes unreported here. How about children trying to get to school in Hebron...

The Israelis, needing to protect the Fundamentalist Jewish Settlers in Hebron (see "Hebron" post from July) from the dangerous textbooks of these Palestinian children refuse them access to their school. So they conduct, as an act of defiance, their class in front of the illegal checkpoint.

Later, pubescent boys are beaten and arrested in the streets as they confront the Israeli occupying Army. So threatening those young boys are, with their backpacks and their shifty teenage eyes. Thank god those soldiers have machine guns and bullet proof vests.

If you don't think that Hebron, with it's thousands of soldiers and militant, fundamentalist Jewish Settlers looks bad... check out what they do to Christian Peacemaker Teams and UN International Observers. Or if you want to see some more proof of the difficulties Palestinian children face trying to get to school watch some of the videos provided through the Tel Rumieda Project (an organization dedicated to monitoring Jewish Settlements in Hebron).

http://www.telrumeidaproject.org/video.html