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Children in the Cross-hairs

JamieSW — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:19:20 +0000

Media Silent On Evidence Of Israeli Targeting Of Youngsters

On the afternoon of Thursday 28 February, 2008, a group of Palestinian boys were playing football on some open ground near their homes in the Gaza Strip. At around 3.20pm, an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at the boys, killing four of them instantly and seriously injuring another three. The four dead boys were Omar Hussein Dardouna, aged 14, Dardouna Deib Dardouna, aged 12, Mohammed Na’im Hammouda, aged 9, and Ali Munir Dardouna who was just 8.

Palestinian human rights fieldworkers investigated the circumstances of this attack by Israeli forces. They concluded there was no Palestinian resistance in the area at the time and that the boys “must have been clearly visible to the [Israeli] aircraft that fired the missile.”

Similar cases abound. A new study by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reports that 68 children died in Gaza between June 2007 – June 2008 (PCHR press release, October 21, 2008; http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2008/2008/43-2008.html). Over the same period, 12 children were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank. The report highlights the “deliberate targeting of civilians, including children”. (Palestinian Council for Human Rights, ‘Blood on their hands. Child killings by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the Gaza Strip. June 2007 – June 2008’, October 22, 2008, p. 4; http://www.electronicintifada.net/downloads/pdf/081021-pchr-childkillings.pdf)

Since the Second Intifada, which began in September 2000, Israeli forces have killed 859 children in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The child death toll rose dramatically during the first six months of 2008, mostly as the result of a large-scale Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip. The massive assault, code-named ‘Operation Winter Heat’, was launched on February 27. The Israeli military killed more children (47) in the Gaza Strip during the first four months of 2008 than during the whole of 2007 (32 children). A total of 110 civilians were killed during ‘Operation Winter Heat’ in February-March 2008. (See our earlier Media Alerts: ‘Israel’s Illegal Assault On The Gaza “Prison”’, March 3, 2008, http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080303_israels_illegal_assault.php; and ‘Israeli Deaths Matter More’, March 11, 2008, http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080311_israeli_deaths_matter.php)

The website Remember These Children reports that 123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,050 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (http://rememberthesechildren.org/about.html)

Most children killed in recent years in the Gaza Strip have died as a result of bombardment, surface-to-surface missiles, or missiles fired from aircraft. The Palestinian human rights investigation notes that Israel has “consistently bombed either inside or extremely close to densely populated residential areas, including schools and areas in close proximity to schools.” It uses “disproportionate and excessive force across the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories], without regard for civilian life, including the lives of children.”

But the report is even more damning than that. It concludes that Israeli forces “deliberately target unarmed civilians, including children, as part of their policy of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian civilian population.”

The human rights investigation also concludes that:

“There is also strong and consistent evidence to suggest that [Israeli forces] deliberately kill Palestinian children in reprisal for the deaths of Israeli civilians or members of the [Israeli forces], which amounts to a war crime.” (PCHR, op. cit., p. 46)

According to international humanitarian law, children are to be afforded special protection during international armed conflicts. This includes military occupation such as exists in the Palestinian territories under Israel. Legal protection is provided by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Israel signed the CRC in 1991.

Protection was strengthened by the (CRC) Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. The Protocol reaffirms “that the rights of children require special protection” and condemns “the targeting of children in situations of armed conflict and direct attacks on objects protected under international law, including places that generally have a significant presence of children, such as schools and hospitals.” Israel signed the Optional Protocol on 14 November 2001 (PCHR, op. cit., p. 14), but it endlessly tramples the legal agreements to which it is a signatory.

Finally, the PCHR report notes that Israel has consistently failed to investigate Israeli killings of unarmed civilians, including children. On the rare occasions that official investigations are launched, these have been conducted by the Israeli forces themselves. The persistent result is a whitewash, and a travesty of justice.

And while Israel continues to kill unarmed civilians with impunity, the international community has failed to intervene effectively to exert pressure on Israel to stop killing Palestinian civilians, including children. These killings ought to be publicly condemned by the international community who, as High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, are obliged to act immediately in order to protect all unarmed civilians from Israeli attacks.

As the PCHR observes:

“The lives of Palestinian children are as sacred as the lives of children from Israel, Europe or anywhere else in the world.”

Minimal Response From A Protective Media

The report from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights was shocking. Guy Gabriel, an adviser to the London-based Arab Media Watch, told us that the group “is a credible organisation with a lot to commend it, and is better placed than many – in terms of location, resources and support – to inform the wider world about the situation in Gaza.” (Email, October 31, 2008). Journalist John Pilger commented: “The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights is, in my experience, a highly credible statistics gathering body.” (Email, October 27, 2008)

This credible human rights group, then, had produced compelling evidence of a persistent pattern of deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians, including children, by the Israeli military. Surely this would have been headline news everywhere.

Sadly no. In the entire British press there was a giant, gaping hole in coverage.

The only exception we could find was a short, 400-word piece in the Guardian on the day of the report’s publication: Rory McCarthy, ‘Palestinian group says Israel killed 68 children in Gaza in year’, The Guardian, October 21, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/21/israel-palestinian-children

As McCarthy pointed out:

“A prominent Palestinian human rights group says it has found evidence that 68 children were killed in the Gaza Strip in the 12 months to June this year as a result of ‘disproportionate and excessive lethal force’ by the Israeli military.”

This was welcome coverage. But, crucially, there was no mention of the military policy of deliberately targeting civilians, including children. In his report, McCarthy said he was unable to obtain any response to the study from an Israeli official (it was a Jewish religious holiday). He then inserted the standard Israeli disclaimer:

“[Israel] has in the past repeatedly defended its military actions in Gaza, saying it does not intentionally target civilians, and noting that Palestinian militants frequently fire from civilian areas.”

On October 27, 2008, we emailed McCarthy and praised him for reporting the publication of the study. We then pointed to the study’s central, repeated message – backed by multiple eye-witness testimony – that Israel deliberately targets civilians, including children. We asked why his Guardian article had omitted this core conclusion. McCarthy did not respond to our email, nor to a second sent on October 29.

As for the “balanced” and “impartial” BBC, the corporation appears to have performed its usual role of protecting the powerful. Judging by the PCHR report’s apparent absence from headline BBC news coverage and the BBC’s website, the corporation has buried the report’s findings. As far as we could determine, the same shameful silence characterised ITN and Channel 4 News.

By contrast, Al Jazeera aired a three-minute segment on the report that included a moving interview with a bereaved mother. There was also disturbing footage of injured and traumatised children, one of whom had seen his father killed by an Israeli missile (Al-Jazeera, October 22, 2008; http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=PTzQOsO32ro). In the Al Jazeera news piece, Hamdi Shokri of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights emphasised:

“We have clear evidence to suggest and to say that there were patterns of deliberate killing and deliberate targeting of children.”

We emailed Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, on October 26, 2008. We asked him why the BBC had done so little, if anything, to bring this damning human rights report to the public’s attention. Why had the BBC failed to expose a deliberate Israeli practice of targeting children? In short, why can’t the BBC do better in its coverage of the occupied territories? Bowen did not respond.

Greg Philo, of the world-renowned Glasgow Media Group, recently commissioned YouGov to ask a sample of 2,086 UK adults whether they thought that more news coverage should be given to the Israeli point of view, or more to the Palestinians, or equal for both. Nearly twice as many people thought that the Palestinians should have the most as compared with the Israelis, but the bulk of the replies (72%) were that both should have the same. A staggering 95% of the population were unhappy with the main news output of the broadcasters. (Philo, ‘More News, Less Views’, September 30, 2008; http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/mediagroup/MoreNews.html)

Routine silences and omissions in coverage of the Middle East are symptoms of a deep-rooted bias that suppresses public awareness of the true gravity of Israel’s human rights abuses. Rarely, if ever, do we hear of the “indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing, and shooting of children”, as documented in a thousand-page study from Save the Children. The average age of the victims was ten years old; the majority of those shot were not even participating in stone throwing. In 80 per cent of cases where children were shot, the Israeli army prevented the victims from receiving medical attention. The report concluded that more than 50,000 children required medical attention for injuries including gunshot wounds, tear gas inhalation and multiple fractures.

In 1989, a bulletin from the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, titled ‘Deliberate Murder’, reported the targeting of Palestinian children in leadership roles. Israeli army and snipers from “special units” had “carefully chosen” the children who were shot in the head or heart and died instantaneously. Other evidence, from Israeli human rights groups and the Israeli press, point to extensive use of torture, such as severe beating and electric shocks, against detainees including children. (Mike Berry and Greg Philo, ‘Israel and Palestine – Competing Histories’, Pluto Press, London, 2006, pp. 86-87)

Amnesty International has also reported that groups of Palestinian civilians, including children, appear, “on many occasions, to have been deliberately targeted”. Israeli soldiers themselves have admitted that they have deliberately shot and killed unarmed civilians including children (Ibid., p. 116). Indeed, for many years, Amnesty has documented and condemned Israeli violations of human rights against Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. Most of these violations are grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are therefore war crimes. (Ibid., pp. 60-61).

Israeli Terror: Not Terror, By Definition

In his 2002 documentary, ‘Palestine Is Still The Issue’, John Pilger interviewed Dori Gold, then Senior Adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister. Pilger asked why Israel fails to condemn its own leaders for their terrorist acts in the same way that they condemn terrorist acts against Israel:

John Pilger (JP): When those Israelis, who are now famous names [Menachem Begin, Yitzak Shamir and Ariel Sharon], committed acts of terrorism just before the birth of Israel, you could have said to them, nothing justifies what you’ve done, ripping apart all those lives. And they would say it did justify it. What’s the difference?

Dori Gold (DG): I think we have now, as an international community, come to a new understanding. I think after September 11th the world got a wake-up call. Because terrorism today is no longer the mad bomber, the anarchist who throws in an explosive device into a crowd to make a point. Terrorism is going to move from the present situation to non-conventional terrorism, to nuclear terrorism. And before we reach that point, we have to remove this scourge from the Earth. And therefore, whether you’re talking about the struggle here between Israelis and Palestinians, the struggle in Northern Ireland, the struggle in Sri Lanka, or any of the places where terrorism has been used, we must make a global commitment of all free democracies to eliminate this threat from the world. Period.

JP: Does that include state terrorism?

DG: No country has the right to deliberately target civilians, as no organisation has a right to deliberately target civilians.

JP: What about Israeli terrorism now?

DG: The language of terrorism, you have to be very careful with. Terrorism means deliberately targeting civilians, in a kind of warfare. That’s what the terrorism against Israeli schools, coffee shops, malls, has been all about. Israel specifically targets, to the best of its ability, Palestinian terrorist organisations.

JP: All right, when an Israeli sniper shoots an old lady with a cane, trying to get into a hospital for her chemotherapy treatment, in front of a lot of the world’s press for one, and frankly we’d be here all day with other examples, isn’t that terrorism?

DG: I don’t know the case you’re speaking about, but I can be convinced of one thing. An Israeli who takes aim – even an Israeli sniper – is taking aim at those engaged in terrorism. Unfortunately, in every kind of warfare, there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed. Terrorism means putting the crosshairs of the sniper’s rifle on a civilian deliberately.

JP: Well that’s – that’s what I’ve just described.

DG: That is what – no. I can tell you that did not happen.

JP: It did happen. And – and I think that’s where some people have a problem with the argument that terrorism exists on – on one side. Your definition is absolutely correct, about civilians. And those suicide bombers are terrorists.

DG: If you mix terrorism and counter-terrorism, if you create some kind of moral obfuscation, you will bring about not just a problem for Israel, but you will bring ab – bring about a problem for the entire western alliance. Because we are all facing this threat.

As John Pilger concluded:

“It’s hard to see the difference between what the Israelis call ‘counter-terrorism’ and terrorism. Whatever the target, both involve the killing of innocent people.” (John Pilger, ‘Israeli Terror’, http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=143; ‘Palestine Is Still The Issue’ documentary can be viewed here: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1259454859593416473; Dori Gold interview starts at around 34 mins:32 secs)

Today, Dori Gold “spends his time traveling around the world raising awareness about the situation going [sic] in Israel and the fight over Jerusalem [and] is available for speaking engagements, fundraisers and corporate events.” (http://www.bookthebest.com/profile/dori_gold)

We asked John Pilger for his response to the new study from the Palestinian human rights group and the report’s effective burial by the corporate media. He told us:

“That this shocking report has been virtually ignored across the mainstream media, with the exception of the Guardian, is a striking example of the media’s two classes of humanity in Palestine. There is first class humanity, worthy of meticulous, often emotive coverage; these are the Israelis, including those guilty of great crimes, such as Ariel Sharon. And there is second class humanity, unworthy of even acknowledgement of their brutalising let alone the epic injustice done to them; these are the Palestinians. No, ‘second class’ is too high. They are third and fourth class victims, for not even the suffering and murder of their children is considered human enough to warrant reporting.” (Email, October 27, 2008)

We are reminded of British historian Mark Curtis’s term, “Unpeople”, to describe those on the receiving end of the West’s policies, actions and massive firepower. For those unfortunate individuals in the crosshairs of Western violence, their human aspirations, hopes, dreams, loves and lives are simply of no value.

SUGGESTED ACTION

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Rory McCarthy, Guardian reporter
Email: rory.mccarthy@guardian.co.uk

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Email: reader@guardian.co.uk

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Email: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk

Helen Boaden, director of BBC News
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk

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Email: david.mannion@itn.co.uk

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Email: jim.gray@itn.co.uk

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From Goma to Gaza, Mr Miliband

JamieSW — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:21:08 +0000

David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner were quick to fly to Kinshasa and Kigali this weekend to be seen to be responding to the sudden visibility of the long-running horrible humanitarian crisis of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Whether they achieve much more than another temporary truce among the assorted warlords whose troops have been living by rape and pillage in the area for more than a decade, is of course another question.

But Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner have another invisible humanitarian crisis on their hands in which some highly publicised flying around could have a dramatic effect on the ground. They should announce visits to Jerusalem to speak to Israel’s leaders, and then arrive by helicopter (the airport is destroyed) in Gaza City, breaking the Israel military’s 17-month siege of Gaza.

They would be able to do it with ease, unlike the handful of people who made the trip recently in two boat trips from Cyprus, bringing medicines, hearing aids for the deaf, and hope that the world could hear the horror of what is happening to them.

The two European leaders could see for themselves in Gaza how Israel’s collective punishment of 1.5 million people has crippled Gaza’s economy, cut fuel and electricity, leaving its desperate people hungry, deprived of medicines, with hundreds barred from travelling for operations or healthcare, or for education. Only last week, camps in Gaza City and Khan Yunis saw waist-high water flood homes and roads after heavy rains because the pumping system was not working.

All this suffering is there to be seen.

And they could hear about the many avoidable deaths, and learn the names of men from 77 to 21 who died at Erez checkpoint when their permits were delayed, and about children, like one-year-old Bayyam Abu Hilu, who died at home when she was denied a permit “for security reasons”.

They would hear how underlying these realities the mental health needs of every family – particularly for children – are overwhelming.

Last weekend I was among about 100 foreigners due to arrive in Gaza for a medical conference on the impact of siege on mental health. The World Health Organisation was a co-sponsor of the conference, Walls versus Bridges and, with other international organisations, had applied to the Israeli military authorities for permission for each individual to enter. Everyone – mainly doctors, psychiatrists, academics from the US, Canada and Europe – was barred, and had to fall back on a blurry video conference from Ramallah.

Among the grim testimonies of psychiatrists from Gaza, such as Dr Eyad Saraj from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, which organised the conference, with WHO, was a video from the former US first lady, Rosalyn Carter. Mrs Carter deplored the fact that “the closure of Gaza is making it impossible for people to lead normal lives,” and said she looked forward to the conference’s recommendations.

Do Miliband and Kouchner really not know what Mrs Carter knows about the devastating impact on people of Israel’s continuing control over the Gaza Strip’s borders, airspace and coastal water? Or about the effect of Israeli military occupation, checkpoints, and the wall, in crushing economic, social and intellectual life for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank?

They should go to Gaza now and see for themselves, as Tony Blair has so shamefully failed to do in his role as Special Envoy for the Quartet. Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner might then want quietly to tell the Israeli government it will become more and more difficult for them at home to resist the calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions which Palestinian civil society has been asking US and European church and other human rights groups to work for.

The Middle East Quartet: A Progress Report

JamieSW — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:39:55 +0000

Editor’s note: Below is the Executive Summary of the report, which was published on September 25. The full report is available here (.pdf).

Executive Summary

The humanitarian crisis in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) continues (see ‘The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion’).1 Its population of 3.7 million people, 52 per cent of whom are children, struggle for their basic needs.2 Palestinian women, children, and men are increasingly dependent on aid as their livelihoods are destroyed. The only sustainable solution to the crisis is a comprehensive peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians based on international law. As humanitarian and development and human rights organisations, we believe that immediate steps can and must be taken to relieve suffering, as well as to ensure that a peace agreement is eventually reached.

As this report demonstrates, the lack of progress on key goals calls the Quartet’s current approach into question. In its Berlin statement, the Quartet [comprising the U.S., EU, UN and Russia] expressed the,

“urgent need for more visible progress on the ground in order to build confidence and support progress in the negotiations launched in Annapolis”.

This “visible progress” has not materialised. Analysis of the reality on the ground demonstrates that in five of the ten areas in which the Quartet has laid down clear recommendations, there has been either no progress or an actual deterioration in the situation. Clearly, a new approach is warranted. Moreover, the Quartet’s capacity to encourage positive developments has been weakest in the three areas where progress is now most urgent: settlements, lifting obstacles to movement and access, and bringing an end to the blockade of Gaza. The Middle East Quartet, comprising Russia, USA, EU, and UN, identified 2008 as a crucial year for the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) and the period in which to realise agreements made at the Annapolis Conference on 22 November 2007.3 Quartet members committed to assisting parties to meet their specific obligations and to promoting a just, comprehensive, and lasting settlement of the conflict in the Middle East.4 The deadline for an agreement by the end of 2008 is now looming and seems unlikely to be met. Indeed, the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, stated: ‘so far there has been no achievement in the negotiations… I cannot say that there has been an agreement on a single issue. The gap between the sides is very large.”5

The Quartet’s meeting in New York [this took place on Sept. 26] comes at a critical moment for the Quartet to demonstrate that it can play an effective role in bringing peace to the Middle East. This report outlines the Quartet’s own recommendations across six areas that it considered to be of vital importance for the broader peace process. It assesses the impact that limited progress has had on the daily lives of Palestinians and Israelis. The Quartet’s Berlin statement provides a clear picture of the progress needed and, as the most recent declaration of the Quartet, will be used as a basis for this report.6 The statement, like this report, focuses on settlements, access and movement, Gaza, Palestinian security sector reform, donor pledges, and the revival of private sector activity in the oPt.

The Quartet has rightly emphasised that progress in key areas is the only way to prevent further deterioration in the everyday lives of Palestinians and Israelis and in the overall political process itself. The Quartet’s meeting in New York provides an opportunity to re-group, recommit, and decide on additional steps that can be taken to ensure that parties comply with their obligations under the roadmap and international law. This report provides recommendations to Quartet members on how best to respond to ensure urgently needed progress. Unless there is a swift and dramatic improvement, it will be necessary to question what the future is for the Middle East Quartet.

Settlements: Despite efforts by Quartet members to signal strong opposition to continued settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there has been a marked acceleration in construction, and no serious attempts by the Israeli authorities to dismantle outposts. Settlements, outposts, and the infrastructure that serves them, illegal in international law, devastate the Palestinian economy and the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians. While the Quartet can be commended for raising the issue of settlements and outposts, there has been a marked failure to hold the Israeli authorities to their obligations under the roadmap and international law. This highlights the urgent need to go beyond rhetoric and adopt concrete measures to ensure that Israeli authorities comply with their obligations under international law.

Access and Movement: The Quartet has failed in its efforts to secure the removal of checkpoints and other obstacles to access and movement for people and goods that would enable Palestinians to see a tangible improvement in their daily lives. There is no ‘new reality’ in the West Bank; the economy continues to stagnate, and the blockade of Gaza continues. The failure of the Quartet in this area will lead to further impoverishment and economic decline. It may also constitute a fatal threat to the broader peace process.

Gaza: Despite violations on both sides, the agreement on cessation of violence endures and there have been marked improvements in security for Israelis and Gazans alike.7 However, normal civilian life in Gaza has not resumed. The Quartet has been unable to end Gaza’s isolation and facilitate adequate flows of humanitarian and commercial goods (consistent with the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA)). There have been increased supplies of fuel to Gaza, but these supplies are not yet steady or sufficient. Despite their efforts, the Quartet has failed to prompt the immediate resumption of stalled UN and other donor projects. Overall, progress in Gaza falls far short of the Quartet’s own stated recommendations. Despite its recognition of the urgency of the situation, the actions taken by the Quartet have been insufficient to kick-start meaningful changes on the ground.

Comprehensive Palestinian Security Sector Reform: The introduction of an EU-trained Palestinian police force across the West Bank is reported to be beginning to deliver tangible and much-needed improvements in the stability of life across the West Bank. Nonetheless, concerns among Palestinian civilians about their personal security are said to remain. The focus on the rule of law for Palestinians, while welcome, has paid inadequate attention to human rights in the reform process.

Donor Pledges: The Quartet Representative has been successful in securing substantial funding pledges. This impressive aptitude for fundraising has not yet led to the prompt delivery of projects, nor improved the lives of Palestinian women, children, and men for the better. The Quartet has not ensured that all donors make good on their pledges, in large part because the absence of demonstrable progress and real change in key areas – particularly settlements, access and movement, and Palestinian reconciliation – has made greater financial assistance ineffective. By adopting a twin-track approach, the Quartet has committed itself to achieving success in both promoting removal of obstacles to Palestinian economic development and increasing investment in Palestinian growth. Failure on one track, particularly the first,seriously undermines prospects for the other.

Private Sector Progress: The Quartet Representative has had isolated successes in implementing a small number of the agreed projects aimed at boosting the private sector. Most notable are his efforts to enable the allocation of frequencies to the second Palestinian mobile telephone operator in the oPt. However, a holistic approach to private sector development is required. There has been almost no progress in alleviating obstacles to access and movement needed to stimulate private sector activity and invigorate the Palestinian economy. Without this, the Quartet Representative will continue to be frustrated in his efforts to improve the daily lives of Palestinians while de-development of the Palestinian economy will continue to increase.

Read the full report here (.pdf).

List of signatories:

CAFOD, CARE Deutschland-Luxemburg; CARE France; CARE Nederland; CARE Norge; CARE Ősterreich; CARE International UK, Christian Aid, DanChurchAid, diakonia, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), medico international, Medicos del Mundo; Oxfam International, Save the Children UK; Save the Children Sweden, United Civilians for Peace (a coalition of Dutch organizations: Oxfam Novib, Cordaid, ICCO and IKV Pax Christi), World Vision Jerusalem.

1. Available at www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/downloads/oxfam_gaza_lowres.pdf.
2. See www.unicef.org/infobycountry/oPt_statistics.html.
3. See Quartet Statements of 24 June 2008, 2 May 2008, and 17 December 2007 at www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2008/jun/106215.htm, www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2008/may/104319.htm, and www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2007/dec/97671.htm.
4. See Quartet Statement at Annapolis Conference on 27 November 2008 at www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2007/nov/95667.htm and President Bush, ‘Joint Understanding read by President Bush at the Annapolis Conference’ 27 November
2007 and speech at www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rm/2007/95695.htm.
5. Mahmoud Abbas quoted in Haaretz, Sunday 14 September 2008 at www.haaretz.com.
6. See Quartet Statements of 24 June 2008, 2 May 2008, and 17 December 2007 at www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2008/jun/106215.htm, www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2008/may/104319.htm, and www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2007/dec/97671.htm.
7. The terminology ‘cessation of violence’ is used in this report as the generally accepted wording of the agreement by the UN.

Cowardice of silence

JamieSW — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:00:47 +0000

When I phoned Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon yesterday, I imagined the path to her door that looks down on Inya Lake. Through ragged palms, a trip-wire is visible, a reminder that this is the prison of a woman whose party was elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by men in ludicrous uniforms. Her phone rang and rang; I doubt if it is connected now. Once, in response to my “How are you?” she laughed about her piano’s need of tuning. She also spoke about lying awake, breathless, listening to the thumping of her heart.

Now her silence is complete. This week, the Burmese junta renewed her house arrest, beginning the 13th year. As far as I know, a doctor has not been allowed to visit her since January, and her house was badly damaged in the cyclone. And yet the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, could not bring himself to utter her name on his recent, grovelling tour of Burma. It is as if her fate and that of her courageous supporters, who on Tuesday beckoned torture and worse merely by unfurling the banners of her National League for Democracy, have become an embarrassment for those who claim to represent the “international community”. Why?

Where are the voices of those in governments and their related institutions who know how to help Burma? Where are the honest brokers who once eased the oppressed away from their shadows, the true and talented peacemakers who see societies not in terms of their usefulness to “interests” but as victims of it? Where are the Dennis Hallidays and Hans von Sponecks who rose to assistant secretary-general of the UN by the sheer moral force of their international public service?

The answer is simple. They are all but extinguished by a virus called the “war on terror”. Where once men and women of good heart and good intellect and good faith stood in parliaments and world bodies in defence of the human rights of others, there is now cowardice. Think of the parliament at Westminster, which cannot even cajole itself into holding an inquiry into the criminal invasion of Iraq, let alone to condemn it and speak up for its victims. Last year, 100 eminent British doctors pleaded with the minister for international development, then Hilary Benn, for emergency medical aid to be sent to Iraqi children’s hospitals: “Babies are dying for want of a 95 pence oxygen mask,” they wrote. The minister turned them down flat.

I mention that because medical aid for children is exactly the kind of assistance the British government now insists the Burmese junta should accept without delay. “There are people suffering in Burma,” said an indignant Gordon Brown. “There are children going without food … it is utterly unacceptable that when international aid is offered, the regime will try to prevent that getting in.” David Miliband chimed in with “malign neglect”. Say that to the children of Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza, where Britain’s role is as neglectful and malign as any. As scores of children in Shia areas of Baghdad are blown to bits by America and what the BBC calls Iraq’s “democratic government”, the British are silent, as ever. “We” say nothing while Israel torments and starves the children of Gaza, ignoring every attempt to bring a ceasefire with Hamas, all in the name of a crusade that dares not say its name. What might have been a new day for humanity in the post-cold war years, even a renewal of the spirit of the Declaration of Human Rights, of “never again” from Palestine to Burma, was cancelled by the ambitions of a sole rapacious power that has cowed all. The “war on terror” allows Australia and Israel to train Burma’s internal security thugs. It consumes both most humanitarian aid indirectly and the very internationalism capable of bringing the “clever” pressure on Burma, about which Aung San Suu Kyi once spoke.

Dismissing the idiocy of a military intervention in her country, she asked: “What about all those who trade with the generals, who give them many millions of dollars that keep them going?” She was referring to the huge oil and gas companies, Total and Chevron, which effectively hand the regime $2.7bn a year, and the Halliburton company (former chief executive Vice-President Dick Cheney) that backed the construction of the Yadana pipeline, and the British travel companies that send tourists across bridges and roads built with forced labour. Audley Travel promotes its Burma holidays in the Guardian. The BBC, in contravention of its charter, has just bought 75% of Lonely Planet travel guides, a truculent defender of “our” right to be tourists in Burma regardless of slave labour, or cyclones, or the woman beyond the trip-wire. Shame.

Gaza: Humanitarian situation worst since 1967

JamieSW — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:34:27 +0000

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is worse now than it’s been at any time since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, according to a new report published today (6 March) by a coalition of leading humanitarian and human rights organisations. The weekend’s upsurge in violence and human misery underlines the urgency of this report.

In their new joint report, the coalition – comprising Amnesty International, CARE International UK, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Médecins du Monde UK, Oxfam, Save The Children UK and Trócaire – warns that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is a collective punishment of the entire Gazan civilian population of 1.5 million. The report concludes that the Israeli government’s policy of blockade is unacceptable, illegal and fails to deliver security for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Geoffrey Dennis, Chief Executive of CARE International UK said:

‘The recent escalation in violence, both from rocket attacks and military strikes, will make life even more unbearable in Gaza. Unemployment has soared and 80% of people in Gaza are now dependent on food aid compared to 63% in 2006. Water and sewage infrastructure is on the point of total collapse. Unless the blockade ends now, it will be impossible to pull Gaza back from the brink of this disaster and any hopes for peace in the region will be dashed.’

According to the report, the blockade of Gaza has dramatically worsened levels of poverty and unemployment and has led to deterioration in education and health services. Over 1.1 million people are now dependent on food aid and of 110,000 workers previously employed in the private sector, 75,000 workers have now lost their jobs.

Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said:

‘Israel has the right and obligation to protect its citizens, but as the occupying power in Gaza it also has a legal duty to ensure that Gazans have access to food, clean water, electricity and medical care. Punishing the entire Gazan population by denying them these basic human rights is utterly indefensible. The current situation is man-made and must be reversed.’

The coalition’s 16 page report, ‘The Gaza Strip: A humanitarian implosion’, urges the UK government and EU to press for a new strategy for Gaza. In particular, the report calls on the UK government to:

Exert greater pressure on the Israeli government to open the crossings into Gaza and stop fuel and electricity cuts in order to stem the worsening humanitarian crisis.

Help facilitate a process of Palestinian reconciliation that can lead to a credible and effective peace process with Israel.

Abandon the failed policy of non-engagement and begin negotiations with all Palestinian parties, including Hamas.

The report calls on the Israeli Government and Palestinian armed groups to immediately cease all attacks against civilians. All unlawful attacks must stop: the Government of Israel should put an immediate end to disproportionate attacks in Gaza and Palestinian armed groups should immediately stop indiscriminate rocket attacks into southern Israel.

Christian Aid’s Director, Daleep Mukarji, said:

‘The UK government should acknowledge that a new strategy is needed for Gaza. The current policy does not secure vital security for Israeli citizens, and even if it did the blockade policy would still be unacceptable and illegal. Humanitarian aid can help stave off total collapse but it will not provide a long-term solution. Gaza cannot become a partner for peace unless Israel, Fatah and the Quartet engage with Hamas and give the people of Gaza a future.’

Read the full report here (.pdf).

To blame the victims for this killing spree defies both morality and sense

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:09:43 +0000

The attempt by western politicians and media to present this week’s carnage in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate act of Israeli self-defence – or at best the latest phase of a wearisome conflict between two somehow equivalent sides – has reached Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. Since Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, issued his chilling warning last week that Palestinians faced a “holocaust” if they continued to fire home-made rockets into Israel, the balance sheet of suffering has become ever clearer. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in the past week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. During the same period, three Israelis were killed, two of whom were soldiers taking part in the attacks.

So what was the response of the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, to this horrific killing spree? It was to blame the “numerous civilian casualties” on the week’s “significant rise” in Palestinian rocket attacks “and the Israeli response”, condemn the firing of rockets as “terrorist acts” and defend Israel’s right to self-defence “in accordance with international law”. But of course it has been nothing of the kind – any more than has been Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, its continued expansion of settlements or its refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees.

Nor is the past week’s one-sided burden of casualties and misery anything new, but the gap is certainly getting wider. After the election of Hamas two years ago, Israel – backed by the US and the European Union – imposed a punitive economic blockade, which has hardened over the past months into a full-scale siege of the Gaza Strip, including fuel, electricity and essential supplies. Since January’s mass breakout across the Egyptian border signalled that collective punishment wouldn’t work, Israel has opted for military escalation. What that means on the ground can be seen from the fact that at the height of the intifada, from 2000 to 2005, four Palestinians were killed for every Israeli; in 2006 it was 30; last year the ratio was 40 to one. In the three months since the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference at Annapolis, 323 Palestinians have been killed compared with seven Israelis, two of whom were civilians.

But the US and Europe’s response is to blame the principal victims for a crisis it has underwritten at every stage. In interviews with Palestinian leaders over the past few days, BBC presenters have insisted that Palestinian rockets have been the “starting point” of the violence, as if the occupation itself did not exist. In the West Bank, from which no rockets are currently fired and where the US-backed administration of Mahmoud Abbas maintains a ceasefire, there have been 480 Israeli military attacks over the past three months and 26 Palestinians killed. By contrast, the rockets from Gaza which are supposed to be the justification for the latest Israeli onslaught have killed a total of 14 people over seven years.

Like any other people, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation – or to self-defence – whether they choose to exercise it or not. In spite of Israel’s disengagement in 2005, Gaza remains occupied territory, both legally and in reality. It is the world’s largest open-air prison, with land, sea and air access controlled by Israel, which carries out military operations at will. Palestinians may differ about the tactics of resistance, but the dominant view (if not that of Abbas) has long been that without some armed pressure, their negotiating hand will inevitably be weaker. And while it might be objected that the rockets are indiscriminate, that is not an easy argument for Israel to make, given its appalling record of civilian casualties in both the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.

The truth is that Hamas’s control of Gaza is the direct result of the US refusal to accept the Palestinians’ democratic choice in 2006 and its covert attempt to overthrow the elected administration by force through its Fatah placeman Muhammad Dahlan. As confirmed by secret documents leaked to the US magazine Vanity Fair – and also passed to the Guardian – George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Elliott Abrams, the US deputy national security adviser (of Iran-Contra fame), funnelled cash, weapons and instructions to Dahlan, partly through Arab intermediaries such as Jordan and Egypt, in an effort to provoke a Palestinian civil war. As evidence of the military buildup emerged, Hamas moved to forestall the US plan with its own takeover of Gaza last June. David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser the following month, argues: “What happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”

Yesterday, Rice attempted to defend the failed US attempt to reverse the results of the Palestinian elections by pointing to Iran’s support for Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel’s attacks on Gaza are expected to resume once she has left the region, even if no one believes they will stop the rockets. Some in the Israeli government hope that they can nevertheless weaken Hamas as a prelude to pushing Gaza into Egypt’s unwilling arms; others hope to bring Abbas and his entourage back to Gaza after they have crushed Hamas, perhaps with a transitional international force to save the Palestinian president’s face.

Neither looks a serious option, not least because Hamas cannot be crushed by force, even with the bloodbath that some envisage. The third, commonsense option, backed by 64% of Israelis, is to take up Hamas’s offer – repeated by its leader Khalid Mish’al at the weekend – and negotiate a truce. It’s a move that now attracts not only left-leaning Israeli politicians such as Yossi Beilin, but also a growing number of rightwing establishment figures, including Ariel Sharon’s former security adviser Giora Eiland, the former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy, and the ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz.

The US, however, is resolutely opposed to negotiating with what it has long branded a terrorist organisation – or allowing anyone else to do so, including other Palestinians. As the leaked American papers confirm, Rice effectively instructed Abbas to “collapse” the joint Hamas-Fatah national unity government agreed in Mecca early last year, a decision carried out after Hamas’s pre-emptive takeover. But for the Palestinians, national unity is an absolute necessity if they are to have any chance of escaping a world of walled cantons, checkpoints, ethnically segregated roads, dispossession and humiliation.

What else can Israel do to stop the rockets, its supporters ask. The answer could not be more obvious: end the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the Palestinian refugees, ethnically cleansed 60 years ago – who, with their families, make up the majority of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, agree a truce, exchange prisoners and lift the blockade. Israelis increasingly seem to get it – but the grim reality appears to be that a lot more blood is going to have to flow before it’s accepted in Washington.

Israel’s Illegal Assault On The Gaza ‘Prison’

JamieSW — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:02:19 +0000

Attacking The Prisoners

Israel has drawn international criticism for its latest series of onslaughts against the ‘prison’ of Gaza, the crowded home to 1.4 million Palestinians. Since last Wednesday (February 27), 112 Palestinians have died under Israeli air attacks and ‘incursions’ by Israeli troops. The dead include many women and children, such as four boys who had been out playing football and even babies killed in their homes. Last Saturday alone saw the deaths of 60 Palestinians under Israeli attacks. Three Israelis have died – one a civilian killed during a rocket attack by Hamas last Wednesday and, since then, two Israeli soldiers.

On February 29, Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, said on the BBC Today programme that:

“We’ve been restraining ourselves for a very, very long time. But we have a responsibility to defend our citizens. This is the context.” (BBC Radio 4 Today interview with Edward Stourton, Friday, February 29, 2008, 7.30 am;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ram/today3_israel_20080229.ram)

The same day, a senior Israeli source threatened a “holocaust” in Gaza. Matan Vilnai, the deputy defence minister, warned:

“The more [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” (BBC news online, ‘Israel warns of Gaza “holocaust”,’ February 29, 2008; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7270650.stm)

The disconnect with the view of the Israeli public was stark: 64% support negotiations with Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, in an attempt to bring about peace.

Palestinian Terrorism: The “Inevitable Consequence” Of Israeli Occupation.

Just before this latest escalation in violence, the newswire service Associated Press briefly flagged up a report on the Occupied Territories, commissioned by the UN. (Bradley S. Klapper, ‘Report: Israeli occupation causes terror’, Associated Press, Feb 26, 6:11 PM ET, published on Yahoo news website, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080226/ap_on_re_mi_ea/un_israel&printer=1). It has since been ignored by the corporate media.

The report, authored by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, concludes that Palestinian terrorism is the “inevitable consequence” of Israeli occupation. While Palestinian terrorist acts are deplorable, “they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation.” Dugard, a South African professor of law, accuses the Israeli state of acts and policies consistent with all three. (‘Human Rights Situation in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories’, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, John Dugard, United Nations Human Rights Council, A/HRC/7/17; http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G08/402/29/PDF/G0840229.pdf)

The report notes that Israel has attempted to justify its attacks and incursions as “defensive operations” aimed at preventing the launching of rockets into Israel. Dugard states clearly that “the firing of rockets into Israel by Palestinian militants without any military target, which has resulted in the killing and injury of Israelis, cannot be condoned and constitutes a war crime.”

But he also notes that “serious questions arise over the proportionality of Israel’s military response and its failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets. It is highly arguable that Israel has violated the most fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, which constitute war crimes.”

In particular:

“Above all, the Government of Israel has violated the prohibition on collective punishment of an occupied people contained in article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

In the days that followed, as killings and injuries rapidly rose under a massive Israeli assault, we could find not a single mention in any UK national newspaper of this important assessment by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories.

Exchange With BBC Radio 4 Presenter

On February 29, we wrote to Edward Stourton in response to his interview that morning with Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the UK. First, we pointed out that Stourton had not challenged Prosor’s erroneous assertion that Gaza could now run its own affairs following the withdrawal of Israeli military forces in 2005. Prosor claimed: “Israel disengaged completely out of Gaza more than two years ago” so that “the Palestinians would take responsibility, would run Gaza.”

Indeed, the thrust of the BBC presenter’s own words, with multiple repetition of the loaded word “disengagement”, was that Israel was no longer the occupying power in Gaza.

We pointed out, by contrast, the assessment of John Dugard: “it is clear that Israel remains the occupying Power as technological developments have made it possible for Israel to assert control over the people of Gaza without a permanent military presence.”

We asked Stourton whether he was aware of this assessment. Moreover, as we saw above, Dugard had observed that Palestinian terrorism was the “inevitable consequence” of Israeli occupation. We asked why the Today programme had not addressed Dugard’s important new report. On the same day, Stourton responded, but only to the first point:

“This is such a difficult area to get right and I always welcome constructive comments – so thank you for your thoughts. I suppose the only point I would make is that if you challenge every statement in an interview like that it can get a bit arid.”

A similar email to Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East news editor, about the corporation’s serious omission, went unanswered.

Stourton’s response was standard for the BBC – friendly, well-meaning but ultimately vacuous. By contrast, in 2004, Tim Llewellyn, the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, blew a loud whistle on the deep bias in BBC reporting:

“Watching a peculiarly crass, inaccurate and condescending programme about the endangered historical sites of ‘Israel’ – that is to say, the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories – on BBC2 in early June 2003, I determined to try to work out, as a former BBC Middle East correspondent, why the Corporation has in the past two and a half years been failing to report fairly the most central and lasting reason for the troubles of the region: the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom.”

He described some of his conclusions:

“In the news reporting of the domestic BBC TV bulletins, ‘balance‘, the BBC’s crudely applied device for avoiding trouble, means that Israel’s lethal modern army is one force, the Palestinians, with their rifles and home-made bombs, the other ‘force‘: two sides equally strong and culpable in a difficult dispute, it is implied, that could easily be sorted out if extremists on both sides would see reason and the leaders do as instructed by Washington…

“When suicide bombers attack inside Israel the shock is palpable. The BBC rarely reports the context, however. Many of these acts of killing and martyrdom are reprisals for assassinations by Israel’s death squads, soldiers and agents who risk nothing as they shoot from helicopters or send death down a telephone line. I rarely see or hear any analysis of how many times the Israelis have deliberately shattered a period of Palestinian calm with an egregious attack or murder. ‘Quiet’ periods mean no Israelis died… it is rarely shown that during these ‘quiet’ times Palestinians continued to be killed by the score.” (See our Media Alert: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040115_Ducking_Palestine_1.HTM)

This is the reality of a systematic BBC bias that works to suppress public awareness of the true gravity of Israel’s human rights abuses.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Write to the following editors and ask them why they have not covered the latest assessment by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories; in particular that Palestinian terrorism is the “inevitable consequence” of Israeli occupation and that “the collective punishment of Gaza by Israel is expressly prohibited by international humanitarian law.”

Write to: Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East news editor
Email: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk

Write to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s news director
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk

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Email: ian.romsey@itn.co.uk

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Email: ian.black@guardian.co.uk

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Email: k.butler@independent.co.uk

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How the EU helps Israel to strangle Gaza

JamieSW — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:16:31 +0000

Since 23 January 2008, we have witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a mass breakout by Palestinians from their Gaza prison, a breakout made possible by Hamas blowing up stretches of the Israeli-built border wall between Gaza and Egypt, near Rafah, and bulldozing other stretches of it.

The breakout was a reaction to Israel’s strangulation of Gaza, which had intensified in the preceding weeks with Israel’s closure of the crossings between Israel and Gaza to the passage of people and goods, on a more or less permanent basis.

But how can Israel strangle Gaza when there is supposed to be an international crossing between Gaza and Egypt, a crossing which is not controlled by Israelis?

Certainly, that was the promise held out in the comprehensive Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) [1], signed more than two years ago, on 15 November 2005, by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The first of the six components of this Agreement was that there would be a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah, controlled by the PA and Egypt, on terms set out in the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing Point (APRC) that formed part of the Agreement. At the time, this was hailed as an historic step on the road to a Palestinian state – for the first time, it was said, Palestinians would have access to the outside world free from Israeli control.

How come then that Israel is still able to strangle Gaza? The answer is that, thanks to the good offices of the EU, which has a role in managing the Rafah crossing under the Agreement, Israel has always had a veto on the opening of the crossing. As we will see, in practice, whenever Israel doesn’t want the crossing open, the EU doesn’t open it.

The crossing was open almost every day from 25 November 2005 to 24 June 2006, though not for 24 hours a day as intended (see, for example, [2]). However, after 24 June 2006, when an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinians, the EU has, at Israel’s insistence, prevented it opening regularly and has kept it closed completely since 9 June 2007, after Hamas took control of Gaza.

Another point: the Agreement doesn’t provide for commercial traffic into Gaza from Egypt via the Rafah crossing, because Israel doesn’t trust Egypt and the PA to prevent the importation of arms. Theoretically, it did provide for commercial traffic out of Gaza into Egypt, but this has never occurred in practice.

Quartet: midwife of AMA

The so-called Middle East Quartet (the US, the EU, Russia and the UN) was the midwife of the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA). In April 2005, the former head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, was appointed Quartet envoy with special responsibility for making arrangements for Gaza in the event of Israeli “disengagement”, which took place a few months later in August 2005. The AMA was largely his work, but Condoleeza Rice (US Secretary of State) and Javier Solana (EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy) were present to announce it publicly in Jerusalem on 15 November 2005.

Rice said that the Agreement as a whole “is intended to give the Palestinian people freedom to move, to trade, to live ordinary lives” [3]. Of its arrangements for a crossing into Egypt, she said:

“First, for the first time since 1967, Palestinians will gain control over entry and exit from their territory. This will be through an international crossing at Rafah, whose target opening date is November 25th.”

Solana said of these arrangements:

“This is the first time that a border is opened and not controlled by the Israelis. … So as you can imagine, this is a very important step that is the first time that takes place.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that the US and the EU had made arrangements for a border crossing between Gaza and Egypt that was “not controlled by the Israelis” and that from now on Gaza couldn’t be strangled by Israel.

EU Third Party

In practice, however, the Rafah crossing has been controlled by the Israelis. Even though Israel has no personnel, military or otherwise, physically present at the crossing, it has been able to close the crossing at will, just as it can close the four crossings (Karni, Erez, Sufa and Kerem Shalom) between Gaza and Israel itself, where it has military personnel physically present.

This has come about because, under the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing Point (APRC), a Third Party must have personnel present at the Rafah crossing before it is allowed to open. The Third Party is the EU – and the EU has always refused to man the crossing when Israel didn’t want the crossing open.

The EU personnel have the following duties at the crossing:

“The 3rd party will have the authority to ensure that the PA complies with all applicable rules and regulations concerning the Rafah crossing point and the terms of this agreement. In case of non-compliance, the 3rd party has the authority to order the re-examination and reassessment of any passenger, luggage, vehicle or goods. While the request is being processed, the person, luggage, vehicle or cargo in question will not be allowed to leave the premises of the Rafah crossing point.” [1]

For this purpose, the EU established the grandly titled EU Border Assistance Mission for the Rafah Crossing Point, or EU BAM Rafah (see its website here [4]). This is a force of less than a hundred, mostly policemen, which is based in Ashkelon in Israel.

In addition to these EU monitors, who are physically present at the crossing, Israeli security forces are able monitor activity at the crossing remotely, via CCTV and other data links from the crossing, and can make a record of the individuals crossing. The Israeli monitors are based in Israel at the Kerem Shalom crossing with Gaza, where a “liaison office” is located (for liaison between Israel and the PA). One of the duties of the EU, as the Third Party to the APRC, is to “lead” this office:

“A liaison office, led by the 3rd party, will receive real-time video and data feed of the activities at Rafah and will meet regularly to review implementation of this agreement, resolve any disputes arising from this agreement, and perform other tasks specified in this agreement.” [1]

Israeli veto

Ridiculous as it may seem, the EU takes the view that the opening of the crossing may be disputed by Israeli representatives in the Liaison Office and that, if Israel refuses to agree to the opening of the crossing, the EU doesn’t send its monitors to the crossing, as required for its opening under the terms of the APRC. In practice, therefore, Israel has a veto over the opening of the crossing, which, according to Rice and Solana, is “not controlled by the Israelis”.

Lest you think that this is the stuff of my imagination, I invite you to go the FAQ section of the EU BAM website. There, the answer given to the question: “What is our capacity in order to reopen the border? [sic]” is:

“According to the agreements EUBAM has no executive power. EUBAM mandate is to lead the Liaison Office and actively monitor, verify and evaluate PA performance with regard to the implementation of the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing Point [APRC]. EUBAM does therefore not have the authority to open the crossing without the agreement and cooperation of both parties. [my emphasis] What we can do, however, is to mediate between them and we have worked very hard to try and get RCP [Rafah Crossing Point] open for as many days as possible since the 25th of June 2006.” [5]

That is as plain as a pikestaff: in the opinion of the EU, the APRC gives Israel a veto on whether the crossing should open. There is absolutely nothing in the APRC to warrant such an interpretation – and it is in flat contradiction to the words of Rice and Solana that the crossing would “not be controlled by Israelis”.

In fact, the EU goes further and interprets the APRC to mean that Israeli representatives don’t even have to go the Liaison Office to prevent the crossing opening. The EU interpretation of the APRC is that, if Israel isn’t represented in the Liaison Office, then the crossing cannot open. That is clear from the answer to another FAQ: “Why the liaison office is based at Kerem Shalom? [sic]”, which is:

“The Liaison Office is at Kerem Shalom because that was agreed between the parties prior to the initial deployment of EUBAM. As the Liaison Office can only operate with the presence of both Parties and EUBAM, it makes no difference where it is, as either party could effectively close the crossing just by refusing to deploy their Liaison Officers in the Liaison Office.” [5]

So, Israeli liaison personnel have merely to stay in their beds in order to keep the crossing closed, the crossing which according to Rice and Solana is “not controlled by the Israelis”.

To reach the Rafah crossing from their base in Israel, the EU monitors have to pass through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, so Israel could, if it wished, physically prevent them taking up their station at Rafah. It has been reported that Israel has used this to prevent the opening of the Rafah crossing. However, it is clear from the foregoing that Israel has never needed to block the monitors physically, since it has been the unwavering policy of the EU never to attempt to open the Rafah crossing if Israel says it doesn’t want it open.

(The EU BAM website says that the original plan was for the EU monitors to be based inside Gaza at Rafah itself – and a base was almost complete in March 2006 – but the plan was abandoned because of the “political and security situation” [5]. The EU monitors could have been based in Egypt, making it impossible for Israel to prevent them travelling to the crossing.).

EU statements

For a few weeks after 25 June 2006, when the Rafah crossing ceased opening on a regular basis, EU BAM press statements paint a picture of it trying hard to persuade Israel to allow the crossing to be opened occasionally for humanitarian purposes.

For example, a statement on 6 July 2006 [6] announces that the crossing will be open that day to enable 250 people waiting on the Egyptian side to cross – the border had been closed from 25 June 2006. It describes this as an “EU BAM initiative, with the agreement of the Israeli Government and the cooperation of the Egyptian and Palestinian authorities”.

But the Israeli Government must have withdrawn its permission, because the next press statement on 15 July 2006 [7] reports that the previous evening “two breaches were blown in the border wall not far from Rafah Crossing Point” and “hundreds of people crossed from Egypt into the Gaza Strip, and many also crossed from the Gaza Strip into Egypt”. The statement continued:

“The Rafah Border Crossing has been closed since 25th June, despite EUBAM efforts to open it for at least the hundreds of passengers stuck in the Egyptian side of the terminal whose humanitarian situation has caused concern. Until the incident yesterday these people had been in the terminal for 19 days. During the period since 25th June both EUBAM monitors and the PA officials who run RCP have been on permanent standby and ready to open the crossing at short notice.”

According to a press statement on 14 December 2006 [8], after the crossing opened that day, “the Government of Israel had requested that the crossing be closed due to the expected arrival of Prime Minister Haniyeh, who was reportedly carrying a large sum of money”. However, in a stout display of resistance to Israel, “the Head of Mission, decided to merely suspend operations in order to clarify the situation”. The press statement explained that “this decision was made after consultations with Brussels, the Palestinian Authority and the Government of Israel”.

Doubtless, the EU High Representative, Javier Solana, was party to this decision to “suspend operations” at the crossing at the request of Israel, the crossing which he said is “not controlled by Israelis”.

Restrictions on people

It is clear that, through the good offices of the EU, Israel has a veto on when the opening of Rafah crossing. It is worth noting that, in the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing Point (APRC), Israel forced the Palestinian Authority to put restrictions on who is allowed to cross when it is open. Thus the ARPC says:

“Use of the Rafah crossing will be restricted to Palestinian ID card holders and others by exception in agreed categories with prior notification to the GoI [Government of Israel] and approval of senior PA leadership.” [1]

The PA has to notify Israel 48 hours in advance about the crossing of those in the exceptional categories (diplomats, foreign investors, foreign representatives of recognized international organizations and humanitarian cases) and, although Israel doesn’t have a veto on an individual crossing (except by closing the crossing altogether), the PA has to give Israel a reason for overriding any Israeli objection.

In addition, under the APRC, Israel is allowed to request that the PA ban nominated Palestinian ID card holders from using the crossing and the PA was obliged to consult with Israel, and the EU monitors, in the event of it refusing an Israeli request.

Other AMA components

In theory, the Agreement on Movement Access (AMA) was genuinely comprehensive. In addition to the Rafah crossing, it was concerned with, in Rice’s words:

“Second, Israel and the Palestinians will upgrade and expand other crossings for people and cargo between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. …

“Third, Palestinians will be able to move between Gaza and the West Bank; specifically, bus convoys are to begin about a month from now and truck convoys are to start a month after that.

“Fourth, the parties will reduce obstacles to movement within the West Bank. …

“Fifth, construction of a Palestinian seaport can begin. The Rafah model will provide a basis for planned operations.

“Sixth, the parties agree on the importance of the airport. Israel recognizes that the Palestinian Authority will want to resume construction on the airport.”

Virtually nothing of this has been realised in practice either. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Occupied compiles fortnightly reports on the implementation of the AMA. Its report for 14-27 November 2007 [2] comments as follows on the implementation of points 3 to 6:

Obstacles to movement in the West Bank number 563, which represents an increase of 185 obstacles, or 49.7%, over the baseline figure of August 2005.

Convoys between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank: Truck convoys – implementation now 22 months overdue (since mid-January 2006); Bus convoys – implementation now 23 months overdue (since mid-December 2005).

Ports: Seaport – awaiting GoI assurance of non-interference with seaport operation; Airport – awaiting commencement of discussions since November 2005.

What now?

If Gaza is to be immune from strangulation by Israel in future, then the Israeli veto over the opening of the Rafah crossing will have to be ended. In addition, the crossing must cater for commercial traffic into Gaza, which is banned under the present Agreement.

It’s difficult to believe that this would ever be acceptable to Israel (or the US), since it increases the chances of Hamas and other groups importing arms into Gaza. The difficulty for the US and Israel is that the present situation, with a border imperfectly policed by Egypt, and liable to be breached in a major way at any time, is even more conducive to arms reaching Gaza.

5 February 2008

Labour & Trade Union Review

POSTSCRIPT

Since the foregoing was written, EU BAM has amended the FAQ section of its website (including the text quoted above from that section). But it still maintains that, under the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing Point (APRC), the crossing cannot be opened without the consent of the Israelis, even though, according to Javier Solana, it is “not controlled by the Israelis”.

References:

[1] See www.mfa.gov.il

[2] www.ochaopt.org/documents/AMA_53.pdf

[3] www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/56890.htm

[4] www.eubam-rafah.eu/portal/

[5] www.eubam-rafah.eu/portal/en/node/25

[6] www.eubam-rafah.eu/portal/en/node/338

[7] www.eubam-rafah.eu/portal/en/node/339

[8] www.eubam-rafah.eu/portal/en/node/345

Bringing down the new Berlin Walls

JamieSW — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:49:42 +0000

The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a heroic spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the smashing down of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on the occupied West Bank, Ariel Sharon’s master plan of walling in the population and stealing their land and resources has all but succeeded, requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to sign it off, the people of Gaza have defied their tormentors, however briefly, and it is a guarantee they will do so again. There is profound symbolism in their achievement, touching lives and hopes all over the world.

“[Sharon’s] fate for us,” wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian, “was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted [by] collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today – that is what he had in store for us and he nearly achieved it.”

Israel’s and America’s experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it. There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer Rains, which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then extrajudicial executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade: the denial of electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines and the denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere, incessant voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one merging with the other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of the “international community” whose response is not to help, but to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as “disputed” and damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as “Hamas militants” who “refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist” when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the Palestinians’ right to exist.

“What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public,” wrote Uri Avnery, a founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, on 26 January, “is that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from Gaza] could be stopped tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire. It repeated the offer this week…Why doesn’t our government jump at this proposal? Simple: to make such a deal, we must speak to Hamas…It is more important to boycott Hamas than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media co-operate with this pretence.” Hamas long ago offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire and has since recognised the “reality” of the Jewish state. This is almost never reported in the west.

The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was dramatically demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Aboutreika. Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory over Sudan in the African Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the words “Sympathise with Gaza” in English and Arabic. The crowd stood and cheered, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world expressed their support for him and for Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a delegation of sports writers to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika’s yellow card said: “It is actions like his that bring many walls down, walls of silence, walls in our minds.”

In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as useful or expendable, we have little sense of this. The news selection is unremittingly distracting and disabling. The cynicism of an identical group of opportunists laying claim to the White House is given respectability as each of them competes to support the Bush regime’s despotic war-making. John McCain, almost certainly the Republican nominee for president, wants a “hundred-year war”. That the leading Democratic candidates are a woman and a black man is of supreme irrelevance; the fanatical Condoleezza Rice is both female and black. Look into the murky world behind Hillary Clinton and you find the likes of Monsanto, a company that produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that continues to destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama’s chief whisperers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and 9/11.

This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and almost anything that matters, including the following announcement, perhaps the most important of the century: “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” Inviting incredulity, these words may require more than one reading. They come from a statement written by five of the west’s top military leaders, an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, who help run the club known as Nato. They are saying the west should nuke countries that have weapons of mass destruction – with the exclusion, that is, of the west’s nuclear arsenal. Nuking will be necessary because “the west’s values and way of life are under threat”.

Where is this threat coming from? “Over there,” say the generals.

Where? In “the brutal world”.

On 21 January, on the eve of the Nato announcement, Gordon Brown also out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that “the race for more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]” is over. The reason he gave was that “the international community” (basically, the west) was facing “serious challenges”. One of these challenges is Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and no programme to build them, according to America’s National Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown’s Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal at a cost believed to be as much as £25bn. What Brown was doing was threatening Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which wants to attack Iran before the end of the presidential year.

Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth, provides compelling evidence in his recently published The Seventh Decade: the New Shape of Nuclear Danger that nuclear war has now moved to the centre of western foreign policy even though the enemy is invented. In response, Russia has begun to restore its vast nuclear arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during the Cuban crisis, describes this as “Apocalypse Soon”. Thus, the wall dismantled by young Germans in 1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the minds of a new generation.

For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the campaigns against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating this new “nuclear threat”. The effect of the Iraq invasion, says a study cited by Noam Chomsky, is a “sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks”.

Behold Nato’s instant “brutal world”.

Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates “us” from “them”. This is described today as a great divide of religions or “a clash of civilisations”, which are false concepts, propagated in western scholarship and journalism to provide what Edward Said called “the other” – an identifiable target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and economic plunder. In fact, the foundations for this wall were laid more than 500 years ago when the privileges of “discovery and conquest” were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that the then all-powerful pope considered his property, to be disposed of according to his will.

Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested with the same privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy in Washington. The goal is what Bill Clinton called the “integration of countries into the global free-market community”, the terms of which, noted the New York Times, “require the United States to get involved in the plumbing and wiring of other nations’ internal affairs more deeply than ever before”.

This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated propaganda that presents its aims as benign, even “promoting democracy in Iraq”, according to BBC executives responsible for responding to sceptical members of the public. That “we” in the west have the unfettered right to exploit the economies and resources of the poor world while maintaining tariff walls and state subsidies is taught as serious scholarship in the economics departments of leading universities. This is neoliberalism – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. “Rather than acknowledging,” wrote Chalmers Johnson, “that free trade, privatisation and the rest of their policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for neoliberalism have also revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi explanation for developmental failure – namely, culture.”

What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended, violent ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred of Muslims is widely advertised by those claiming the respectability of what they call “the left”. At the same time, opponents of the new papacy are routinely smeared, as seen in the recent fake charges of narcoterrorism against Hugo Chávez. Having insinuated their way into public debate, the smears deflect authentic critiques of Chávez’s Venezuela and prepare the ground for an assault on it.

This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of Iraq and the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a wall, on which Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia in Brave New World, might have written: “Opposition is apostasy. Fatalism is ideal. Silence is preferred.” If the people of Gaza can disobey all three, why can’t we?

AMW Concern at Lack of Gaza Commentary

JamieSW — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:49:33 +0000

Arab Media Watch expresses concern at the lack of critical commentary in the British press on Israel’s recent decision to intensify its siege of the Gaza Strip by withholding vital fuel supplies and increasing military attacks.

Israel’s actions have resulted in civilian deaths, a worsening humanitarian crisis, the breach of Gaza’s border with Egypt, and bleaker prospects for the resumption of peace talks. Nonetheless, there has been no comment whatsoever in the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star and Evening Standard.

The only commentary in the Times, by Robin Shepherd entitled “A barrage against Israel,” unreservedly defends Israel’s actions, blaming the situation in Gaza on “the culture of violence in Palestinian society” and accusing Israel’s critics of “sheer irrationality.”

He adds: “In the topsy-turvy world of British and European commentary…reasoned argument is cast aside. The frenzied, rhetorical onslaught against the Jewish state is at best intellectually lazy. At worst it forms part of a hateful agenda that shames those who indulge in it.”

It is deeply troubling that this is the only comment made in the Times about the collective punishment of 1.5 million civilians, which is illegal under international law and a violation of Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power.

The only commentary in the Daily Express, by Frederick Forsyth, focuses on how Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria have “kept the Palestinians penned like animals in rat-infested ‘refugee camps’, which are truly stinking slums breeding hopelessness and despair,” and have kept them “in destitution and captivity as a stick to beat Israel.”

Sympathy for Palestinian living conditions is unusual for Forsyth who, unsurprisingly, has no such strong words for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

A commentary by Deborah Orr in the Independent (”The tragic truth about collective punishment“) and one by Con Coughlin in the Daily Telegraph (”Gazans should make the most of liberation“) take a similar approach, focusing more on Arab treatment of the Palestinians, and Palestinian treatment of themselves and Israel. This is puzzling given the country’s central role in the crisis, and the fact that it initiated the military and economic siege.

The Telegraph, Independent, Financial Times and Guardian each published a leader on the issue. Each is praiseworthy for their condemnation of Israel’s actions, but perhaps most interestingly and unexpectedly, the Telegraph calls on Israel to “consider putting out feelers to Hamas, with the aim of starting a political dialogue…Hamas should no longer simply be ignored.”

This pragmatic approach is, however, countered by Coughlin’s view on how Israel should “deal with the existential threat the terror group poses”: “To make peace in the Middle East, it is often necessary first to make war.”

In addition to the leaders, nine commentaries were published: five in the Independent, and one each in the Telegraph, Guardian, Times and Daily Express. As such, the Independent had by far the most to say.

However, the Independent was the only newspaper to react directly to Israel’s intensification of its siege on Gaza. Commentary in the other newspapers appeared only after the Gaza-Egypt border was breached as a reaction to the blockade. As such, one wonders whether there would have been any commentary beyond the Independent had Palestinians not reacted the way they did.

AMW commends commentaries by Mark Steel (”Not a shopping spree, just a taste of freedom“) and Richard Ingrams in the Independent, and Karen Koning Abu Zayd in the Guardian.

However, the treatment of the issue by significant sections of the British press can be summed up by Guardian correspondent Rory McCarthy’s statement last month: “The case of the increasingly desperate humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip has been…often ignored.”