Israel Jails Teen
after Seven Years
Slayers
In a rare court decision, Israeli border guards get minor
sentences over the unlawful killing of a Palestinian teenager
in the West Bank after seven years.
Shahar Botbeka, the ring leader, and Denis Alhazov were jailed
for eight-and-a-half years and five-and-a-half years
respectively by the Jerusalem District Court on Monday.
Two other border policemen, also involved in the same murder,
had previously been convicted and sentenced to imprisonment —
one for eight-and-a-half years and the other for four-and-ahalf years.
The four men, who were celebrating their last day in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Hebron (al-Khalil), had
seized Palestinian youth Imran Abu Hamdieh from outside his
home in the town on December 30, 2002 and savagely beat him.
Imran, suffering from serious head injuries after the beating,
was bundled up in the back of an Israeli military vehicle and
thrown out by Botbeka and Alhazov while the vehicle was
traveling at 80km/h (50 mph). He died on the spot.
The eight-and-a-half year sentence is the longest jail time to
have been handed down for such a case in Israeli history.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said the gravity of
the offense merited an even harsher punishment.
Although Palestinians are frequently attacked by Israeli
soldiers, police and settlers in the West Bank, it is very
rare for such cases to reach the courts and even rarer that a
court should issue a custodial sentence.
"As a rule, the authorities refrain from enforcing the law on
soldiers and police officers who commit crimes of violence
against Palestinians," the organization said in a written
statement.
(Press TV)
The Kingdom of Lies
By Jeremy Salt – Ankara
Racism is common to most and probably all societies. Laws
never seem entirely to eliminate it. It was the essential tool
in the creation of modern settler states. The United States
could not have come into existence without the obliteration of
North American Indian cultures and of large numbers of the
people themselves. They had to die so the US could be born. In
Australia the indigenous people of Tasmania were wiped out to
the last man, woman and child, while on the mainland the
tribes were massacred, confined, stripped of their ancestral
land and eventually turned into fringe dwellers. Until
recently Australia had a prime minister who could deny that
aboriginal children of mixed ‘blood’ were taken from their
parents up to the 1930s and refused to issue any expression of
remorse for their mistreatment. More recent targets of racism
have been Lebanese and Vietnamese immigrants, while the Howard
federal government’s racist treatment of Iraqi and Afghan
refugees and asylum seekers remains one of the most shameful
chapters of Australia’s history.
In the US the election of a colored president would have been
inconceivable until very recently. It was so unbelievable that
people wept when Barack Obama won the elections.
Racism comes in many shades. Discrimination against people on
the grounds of skin color, ethnicity or religion is a basic
human rights issue, a first cousin to discrimination,
harassment and denial of opportunity on the basis of gender.
President Mahmud Ahmedinejad, in his recent speech at the
Durban Review Conference in Geneva, drew attention to Israel
as a racist state but Iran has serious issues of its own to
deal with. Homosexuality in Iran is treated as a crime. Gays
and prostitutes are executed in public. The Bahais have been
the victims of discrimination and persecution throughout
Iran’s modern history and this remains the case today. They
have no legal identity in Iran. On all of these issues, Iran
is itself vulnerable to criticism on the grounds of human
rights, which does not, of course, detract in any way from his
criticism of Israel. The outrage directed against Ahmedinajad
obscured the real issue at the heart of what he was saying: is
Israel a racist state?
In settler societies such as the United States, Australia and
Canada, the crude racism which drove invasion and colonization
mostly belongs to the past, when there was an active concept
of race, allied with the categories of civilization, barbarism
and savagery. The North American Indian was regarded by the
white settlers as a savage, perhaps noble, mean or cunning,
but a savage ‘redskin’ nevertheless. In Australia the
indigenous people were scarcely counted as human beings. It
was not until the 1960s that they were even given the vote.
The same relegation of ‘Negroes’ to a contingent category of
humanity (at best) justified slavery and segregation in the
southern states of the United States. The dehumanization of
all of these groups was essential to the colonizing process
(including the colonization of Algeria after the French
invasion of 1830) and the enrichment of white settlers.
All modern ‘western’ colonial settler states share the same
characteristics, i.e. the obliteration of indigenous cultures
and the displacement of people from their land. This was true
of the North American settlers, the Australian colonists and
the Boers who eliminated the Herero people of southwest Africa
in the early 20th century. Treaties in which the indigenous
people were compelled to consent to the invasion and
settlement of their land were signed in North America and New
Zealand but not in Australia, where the colonists regarded the
indigenous people as less than human and could therefore
assert that the land was ‘empty’. There are numerous parallels
here with Zionism not only on the basis of an ‘empty’ land
being settled or of civilization being brought to a
‘primitive’ people but in the double nature of the
colonialism. In North America and Palestine, settlement was
fostered by a distant government against which the settlers
eventually rebelled before declaring their ‘independence’.
Gradually, mostly only in the last half century, laws and
attitudes changed. This rolling process met with resistance at
every stage from those who justified discrimination on the
basis of the Bible or racist genetic theories. Not until the
1960s and 1970s were racially discriminatory laws eliminated
from the statute books in modern settler states such as the US
and Australia, which does not mean that structural racism has
been eliminated. It has not. It can be measured in education,
health and welfare statistics, while episodes of racism
involving police and the public at large show that attitudes
are harder to change than laws.
The difference between Israel and these other settler states
is partly one of timing. Israel was founded not at the
beginning or the middle of the historical cycle of the settler
state phenomenon but right at the end. Israel is a paradox – a
settler state arising at the beginning of the post-colonial
era. Across Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America and the
Middle East, national liberation movements challenged powers
unwilling to voluntarily relinquish the territories they had
seized in the 19th century. The right of native people to
self-determination was expressed in the UN Charter. It was at
this precise moment that Israel was established. At a time
when universal values were being emphasized Israel headed in
the opposite direction.
The Holocaust generated enormous emotional support across the
western world for the establishment of Israel. It might not
have been the ‘pretext’ for its creation of Israel, as Mahmud
Ahmedinejad is reported to have said in Geneva, but it was
certainly exploited by the Zionists to make sure that Israel
came into existence. Refugees from Europe might have gone
elsewhere, but for ideological reasons the only place the
Zionist movement wanted them to go was Palestine. The media
joined the chorus calling for the creation of a Jewish state
in Palestine as a solution to the refugee problem and an
antidote to anti-semitism. In fact removing the victims from
the scene of the crime was no answer to the historical problem
of European anti-semitism. Their ‘solution’ allowed European
governments to evade responsibility for the consequences of
actions in which all of them were in some way complicit. A
people who were in no way responsible for the massive crimes
which had been committed against Jews were being made to pay
for them. Their rights and interests were treated with as much
indifference or disdain as anti-semites had traditionally
treated the rights and interests of Jews. The export of the
‘Jewish problem’ to Palestine was in its own way anti-semitic.
Within the British government there were objections but only
for financial reasons. Britain was broke and could not afford
the extra cost of policing Palestine were 100,000 Jewish
refugees from Europe to be admitted as the Zionists and
President Truman were demanding in 1946. Even within the US
administrations there were reservations. How, for example,
could the principle of self-determination be reconciled with
the denial of the right of the majority of the people of
Palestine to decide their own future? Would not a ‘socialist’
Jewish state in Palestine further the ambitions of the USSR in
the Middle East? And what of America’s interests and its
relations with the Arab world? They could only be seriously
damaged by support for this project.
Ultimately it was Truman and not the UN who decided that
Israel would be created in Palestine. Without his direct
intervention the partition vote would never have got across
the finishing line at the UN General Assembly. It still has to
remembered that the vote was only a recommendation, anyway,
swept aside when Ben-Gurion, ignoring the provisions of the
partition plan, made a unilateral declaration of
‘independence’ in the name of the state of Israel six months
after the plan was passed. In essence it was no different from
the declaration of UDI made in the 1960s by the Rhodesian
Prime Minister, Ian Smith. In the name of ‘independence’, both
Smith and David Ben-Gurion declared war on the right of an
indigenous people to determine their own future on their own
land. One got away with it and one did not.
What kind of state Israel would become was predetermined. In
Israel today there are individuals and organizations fighting
for coexistence with the Palestinians but since the beginning
of Zionist settlement such voices have always spoken from the
margins. From Herzl’s time onward it was understand within the
mainstream that the Palestinians would never give up their
land voluntarily and somehow would have to be removed from it.
Thus Israel deliberately set itself from the beginning not
just against the Palestinians but against the entire
population of the Middle East, for whom Palestine (with
Jerusalem at its heart) was an inalienable part of the ArabIslamic heritage. Zionist justification rested on the argument
that the ‘Jewish people’ were the true indigenous people of
Palestine and that Muslims and Christians were present only as
‘caretakers’ whose role in history had now come to an end. The
secondary moral position was that the suffering of Jews
throughout history added up to a stronger claim than the
rights of the Palestinians, a line of reasoning supported by
Arthur James Balfour in 1917. The end justified the means. If
it took the deprivation of Palestinian rights for a Jewish
state to come into existence, so be it.
In a land in which the vast bulk of the population was not
Jewish, a Jewish state could only be constructed by taking one
inherently racist measure after another. If the state were to
be Jewish so would land ownership and labor. The conditions
written into the charter of the Jewish National Fund and other
land-purchasing organizations stipulated that land once
acquired could never be retained to non-Jewish hands. This
‘extra-territorialisation’ of land as it was described by a
British commission of inquiry sent to Palestine fuelled the
Palestinian rebellion of 1936-39. Exclusive Jewish access to
the land was followed through after 1948 by the destruction of
approximately 500 villages and the passage of ‘absent
property’ and ‘present absentee’ laws which prevented even
Palestinians remaining inside Israel from returning to the
property they owned.
Security laws were another means of separating the
Palestinians from their land. Consolidation of the Jewish
presence on the land has continued through the attempt to
erase the Palestinian presence in Jaffa and other cities
inside the ‘green line’.
On the other side of the green line the tactics are cruder and
more obvious. Open demographic war is being waged against the
Palestinians in East Jerusalem while in Hebron the centre of
the city has been closed down and residents around the market
moved out in the name of ‘security’, i.e. the protection of
racist and fanatical Jewish settlers living in the heights
above. Across the occupied West Bank it is the armed
interlopers who describe the Palestinians as interlopers and
‘infiltrators’ of their own occupied land. All of their
vandalism, bullying, harassment of men, women and children,
destruction of property and uprooting of olive trees and
occasional killing is underwritten by the state, and yet the
state is outraged when the charge of racism is raised in
Geneva. The colonization of the territories is not incidental
or accidental racism but the carefully thought out strategic
and ideological racism of a racist state. The fact that it
continues every single day is testimony to Israel’s contempt
for universal values and international law.
Just as the land would have to be the exclusive possession of
the Jewish ‘people’ (as 93 per cent of it is now legally
classified), so it could only be worked by Jewish labor.
Jewish employers were explicitly prohibited from hiring ‘Arab’
workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Until the 1960s the central
Israeli labor organization, the Histadrut, would only admit
Jewish members. In practice, labor discrimination has never
worked perfectly because of the low cost of ‘Arab’ labor
compared to ‘Jewish’ labor and because of the Palestinian need
to work, a situation which has led to Palestinian laborers
building the settlements being constructed on their own
occupied land. When the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir
visited Gaza in the 1970s she expressed shock, not at the
establishment of Jewish settlements on expropriated land, but
at the use of ‘Arab’ labor to work the land for the settlers.
As Israel was the state for Jews wherever they lived and not
for all the people who lived within its borders (so to speak,
seeing that Israel has never actually declared its borders),
the laws would have to be framed accordingly. The Nationality
Law automatically conferred Israeli citizenship only on Jews
(i.e born of a Jewish mother). The Law of Return granted the
‘right’ of ‘return’ to Jews who had never lived in Palestine
while denying the right of return to Palestinians who had
lived there for generations. Some families could trace their
origins in Palestine back to the Islamic conquest of the 7th
century.
The structural discrimination against the Palestinians can be
measured in socio-economic statistics dealing with poverty,
unemployment, access to government services and education,
house construction and funding for municipalities. Taking
their cue from the government, and the openly racist
statements made by senior political, military and religious
figures, describing the Palestinians as ‘two legged animals’,
‘drugged cockroaches’, ‘insects’, ‘snakes’ and ‘a cancer’,
large numbers of Israelis polled have said they do not want to
live in the same apartment blocks as ‘Arabs’ and in fact would
like to see them out of the state altogether. The racism
coming out of the mouths of rabbis and religious seminaries,
couched in terms of an exclusive Jewish right to ‘Eretz
Israel’, with many of the students or graduates of these
seminaries living in the most aggressive of the West Bank
settlements, is amongst the worst.
Having
set
out
on
this
path
Israel
has
followed
it
unswervingly. One flagrant violation of human rights must be
followed by another. Without war and without racism in spirit,
deed and law there can be no Zionism and no ‘Jewish state’.
The Palestinians have been pursued wherever they have gone
because by their presence they constitute an existential
threat to Israel. Over the years the attitudes of the Israeli
mainstream towards the Palestinian ‘enemy’ have grown even
harsher. Palestinian armed struggle, suicide bombings and the
rocketing of settlements near Gaza are not connected with the
policies pursued by Israel against the Palestinians for six
decades but with some ex nihilio desire to kill Jews and
destroy Israel. This state of mind is deliberately cultivated
from the top with the aim of keeping Israel’s Jewish citizens
in a state of permanent readiness for the next war. The recent
‘war’ in Gaza was approved by more than 80 per cent of
Israel’s Jewish population. The misrepresentation of a massive
military onslaught on a largely defenseless civilian
population as a ‘war’ allowed the civilian mainstream to
justify the crimes that were being committed. Israelis looked
on with indifference and even with approval as ‘our boys’
killed hundreds of people in three weeks, most of them
civilians and 400 of them children. The media turned into a
kingdom of lies. Every specious argument of the political and
military establishment was accepted without question and
transformed into truth.
The racist t-shirts printed by Israeli ‘soldiers’ engaged in
the attack on Gaza were only the surface manifestation of a
much deeper psychosis. The t-shirts captured the attention of
the outside world in a way that slow, structural, incremental
racism never does. Literally every day brings some new or
continuing manifestation of Israeli state racism to the
surface. After 50 years the beduin are still being driven off
their traditional land in the Naqab. Palestinians married to
Israelis are prevented from living inside Israel with their
spouses and families. The recently declared Jerusalem Regional
Master Plan is inherently racist but apparently too complex
for the outside media to work out its implications. It
embodies the next stage of programmed discrimination that has
continued without letup since 1967. The Jerusalem municipality
is itself an illegal and racist body whose ‘master plan’ is a
template for the further ‘Judaisation’ of Jerusalem whatever
the cost to the Palestinians. It must be remembered that until
1948 Palestinian Muslims and Christians owned about 70 per
cent of the property in West Jerusalem and all but one or two
per cent of the property in the east. They did not forfeit
their rights to their houses and land. Their rights have
simply been usurped. In normal legal parlance the
appropriation of their property is known as theft. For the
first time since the Crusaders massacred Jews and Muslims in
the 11th century Jerusalem is being transformed into a city
for a people of only one religious denomination. Under Arab
and Ottoman rule Jerusalem remained a polyglot city. What the
Jerusalem municipality and the state of Israel both want is a
city cleansed of its non-Jewish population except for tourists
and a colorful ethnic remnant hanging around the old city.
Is all of this racist? Of course it is. In fact, those who
care to study the UN’s Convention on Genocide, passed in 1948
as Zionist militias were still driving Palestinians off their
land and destroying their villages, will see that Israel’s
behavior meets some of the criteria of article 2 of the
convention which describes genocide as any of the following
acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or part a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
(a) killing members of the group
(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group
(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or in part
Israelis involved in the struggle against racism and
occupation are fighting an uphill battle. The structural
discrimination of the state against its non-Jewish citizens
and against the Palestinians living in the occupied
territories (as well as the Syrians living on the occupied
Golan Heights) is a motor driving Israel and its people from
one extreme to another. Thirty years ago it was regarded as
unthinkable that Menahim Begin could ever be Israel’s Prime
Minister but Begin was followed by Yitzhak Shamir, Benyamin
Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. All of them come out of the same
school of Revisionist Zionism. Now revisionism is the
mainstream, the labor movement is marginalized and Israel has
again elected Netanyahu as its Prime Minister. He in turn has
chosen as Foreign Minister the crude, arrogant, provocative
and openly racist West Bank settler Avigdor Liebermann.
Racism in Israel is not like racism in other states, which is
usually a matter of changing laws and slowly working on public
opinion. In Israel racism is so deeply embedded in Zionist
ideology and the structure of the state that without racism
Israel cannot remain the state that it has become. Yet there
are no signs that the Israeli people or the politicians they
are electing as their leaders have any intention of changing
direction. When they have a powerful military and when they
are under no pressure from the outside world they see no
reason to change. In its blockade of Gaza Israel has been
supported from the beginning by the US, the EU and the
Quartet. None of these venerable authorities could see any
reason for Israel to be punished or restrained even after the
killing of 1400 Palestinians in Gaza from late December 2008
to mid-January 2009. Their indulgence encourages a dangerous
state of mind. The politicians, the generals, the rabbis, the
media commentators and the academics know that they are in the
right and that everyone else is in the wrong. The outrage at
criticism, the arrogance, the self-righteousness, the selfjustification, the endless claims of moral superiority and the
contempt and hatred of the Palestinians are extremely
disturbing. Israel is not a small, weak state in the middle of
nowhere. It is a powerful state, armed with nuclear weapons,
in the middle of the Middle East. The refusal of the
‘international community’ to restrain states which live
outside the law has led to many disasters in the past. The
species of animal life known as homo sapiens has a poor record
when it comes to averting calamities ahead of time. In the
Middle East the creation of Israel brought disaster down on
the heads of the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab
countries. The states which created Israel have not yet taken
responsibility for the consequences of their actions, but have
rather made themselves more complicit in the crimes still
being committed. As long as the disaster is someone else’s
(and not Israel’s) they do not seem to be concerned. How else
can this be understood but as their own racism? Do they have
to be pushed to the point where they are directly and
unavoidably involved in Israel’s confrontation with the
Palestinians and the surrounding Arab world to realize the
consequences of what they have done these past six decades?
– Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History
and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and
the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle
Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has
written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly
Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he
lived in Melbourne. He contributed this article to
PalestineChronicle.com.
Palestinian Authority Detains
Hamas Members
Palestinian Authority security forces have arrested thirteen
members of Hamas in different locations of the West Bank, the
resistance movement says.
The Hamas members, detained on Wednesday, were students and
academics formerly held in Israeli jails.
The arrests came as representatives from
Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West
a new round of reconciliation talks in
reach an agreement on the formation of a
to set up a date for elections.
the rival faction of
Bank, agreed to hold
Cairo next month to
unity government and
Hamas accuses Palestinian Authority of disrespecting the
ongoing inter- Palestinian peace talks by stepping up its
arrest campaign against the supporters of resistance.
Tensions between Hamas and Fatah emerged after Hamas’ victory
in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Following the elections,
Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the democratically elected Hamas
government and appointed a Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in
the West Bank.
(Press TV)
Soldiers Confirm Israel’s War
Crimes in Gaza