domingo, 27 de agosto de 2017

Zionists Jihadists in Israel vs Conscience Objectors


Although they are not primarily profit-seeking mercenaries (already banned under international law), the term “foreign fighter” carries an implication of illegitimacy because they are dangerous fanatics. And this phenomenon is far wider than just Islamists. Are IDF foreign soldiers comparable to al-Qaeda and ISIS jihadists? The answer is YES:
Israel may call their foreign fighters "lone soldiers" to romanticize their crimes, but in fact, they are what they are, young Jewish jihadistes who leave their parents, families, countries and comfortable lives behind in places like Sydney, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere to join the IDF - Israeli Occupation Forces, becoming Palestinians jailers, abusers and killers in the name of a foreign country.

In 2014, during the brutal Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that some 800 to 1,000 foreigners join the Israeli military every yea according to the IDF spokesman’s unit. There are currently 6.300 foreign lone soldiers serving in the IDF.
For Jews who left Israel before the age of 15 or who never lived there, their service is voluntary. For many, it is a response to a well organized "calling". Most of them don't even have dual citizenship and peak little to no Hebrew and have only recently been to Israel.
A lone soldier’s monthly salary is twice of what a regular soldier in their unit would receive and a they are a kind of star in Israel. For Israeli kids, army service is a rite of passage to become an occupationist zionist. But because it is a choice for young foreign Jews who re-direct their own moral life paths to defend unlawful Israel's zionist Project of erasing Palestine from the map, "those enlistees are given a hero's welcome — and a lifetime of Shabbat dinner invitations from their fellow soldiers, who become their surrogate families", explain one of their sites.
These Israeli jihadistes are nothing like ISIS'. They don't run away from poor homes to become killers, they come from structured privileged families that support and encourage their child's enterprise to lose his soul in a dirty fight of ethnical cleansing.
And it all began with the recruitment drive launched in 1945 by David Ben Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister, to obtain the assistance of zionist Jews to rapidly build militias to submit the native Palestinians. In order to assure yishuv (zionist immigrants) supremacy, Ben Gurion turned to North American donors to equip and field experienced World War II combat vétérans. And of course, the hasbara (propaganda) worked perfectly because their pitch was not the opportunity for a Jewish state, but  "to avoid the inevitable resumption of the Holocaust" without foreign help; as if they were victims and not brutal invaders. At the time, over 5,000 volunteers came from over 40 countries and they, particularly the pilots, were subsequently credited by Israeli leaders from Benjamin Netanyahu to Yitzhak Rabin as having played a decisive role in the outcome of the occupation. 

Over the next 50 years, foreign Jews, including Chicago Mayor and former Barack Obama's White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel were both IDF jihadists. In the late 1990s, the Mahal2000 program encouraged Jewish youth from abroad to serve in combat units for stints of 14 months. The IDF today incorporates this successor program as one option for service by non-citizens. Thousands of Western Jews have now volunteered, sought by the IDF to fill manpower gaps left by the Shministim, good Israeli born conscicence objectors who refuse to serve in the IDF.  

This new generation of young Israeli kids is standing up to the government. The Shministim are all about ages 17, 18, 19 and in the 12th grade - are taking a stand. They believe in a better, more peaceful future for themselves and for Israelis and Palestinians, and they are refusing to join the Israeli army. They’re in jail, holding strong against immense pressure from family, friends and the Israeli government.

The most famous of all is Omer Goldmen, the daughter of a former chief of the Mossad - Israeli secret services. In her own words in 2009: “ We refuse to do military service for the Israeli army. I grew up with the army. My father was deputy head of Mossad and I saw my sister, who is eight years older than me, do her military service. As a young girl, I wanted to be a soldier. The military was such a part of my life that I never even questioned it.  Earlier this year, I went to a peace demonstration in Palestine. I had always been told that the Israeli army was there to defend me, but during that demonstration Israeli soldiers opened fire on me and my friends with rubber bullets and tear-gas grenades. I was shocked and scared. I saw the truth. I saw the reality. I saw for the first time that the most dangerous thing in Palestine is the Israeli soldiers, the very people who are supposed to be on my side.   When I came back to Israel, I knew I had changed. And so, I have joined with a number of other young people who are refusing to serve - they call us the Shministim. On December 18th, we are holding a Day of Action in Israel, and we are determined to show Israelis and the world that there is wide support for stopping a culture of war. Will you join us? Please, just sign a letter. That’s all it takes.” There you go. And she is not the only one. If you are a Jew, instead of becoming a killer, join  Jewish Voice for Peace. Here’s the link. 
Israeli Jihadists

PALESTINA
If you are in London this Fall, go to the Young Vic Theater to see:
A Palestinian father has just released a video of his home invaded by Israeli soldiers in the midlle of the night, which happens everyday all over the West Bank.
Um pai de familia palestino acabou de divulgar um video de soldados israelenses invadindo sua casa no meio da noite, abuso quotidiano que a IDF comete em toda a Cisjordania diariamente.

The Palestinians are captives who are convinced they could not manage without their donating captors, by Amira Hass | Aug. 23, 2017
Let’s start from the end: Even if the Palestinians had a single, united, respected leadership that had a reputation for integrity, and even if its members excelled intellectually, were committed to their people and strategically capable, it would have been difficult for it to challenge the dispossessive/acquisitive enterprise that Israel keeps strengthening and enhancing. Difficult, but possible.
There is no single leadership, however, but several, and they are squabbling with each other even when they are from the same party (Fatah), organization (PLO) or institutional umbrella (two governments). It’s not because of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, but because of a system and modus operandi, of which he is one of the creators and products at the same time.
The Palestinian public’s attitude toward the leadership is characterized by suspicion, disdain and contempt, along with fear. The milder accusations directed at the leadership in Ramallah speak of a lack of organization, inefficiency and laziness. The more serious accusations are of corruption and clinging to power for personal and sectarian motives. Similar accusations are somewhat less bluntly leveled at the Gazan government and at NGOs.
For many it’s clear that the Oslo framework, which expired in 1999, was a trap. The countries donating to the Palestinians continue to uphold it for fear of an even greater humanitarian disaster and loss of control, and because they are boundlessly loyal to Israel. The donations have decreased but remain a trap. They require obedience and maintenance of “calm,” or permit only low-intensity rage. But the Palestinians are captives who are convinced they could not manage without their donating captors.
The head spins and the heart aches, because facing them is a sophisticated, wicked, effective enemy who has no borders.
Visually, the image of an octopus might be appropriate, but there are two problems with using it to depict the Israeli regime. One is that it recalls anti-Semitic caricatures, but that’s the problem of a regime that imitates caricatures. The second is that Israel sends out far more than eight tentacles as it cooks up a mix of several traditions of domination – military occupation, colonialism (the removal of a people from its homeland to settle others there instead) and apartheid (since the expulsion wasn’t totally successful, there followed separation based on inequality). It should be clear that this refers to the situation on both sides of the Green Line. Israel was given a chance to change in 1993. It chose to miss it.
A better image would be that of a computer that spews out commands in every direction. Once programmed, it doesn’t stop. It sends official armed gangs to burst into people’s houses as they sleep and to confiscate money and property; destruction squads to crush kindergartens, homes and wells; and unofficial armed gangs to boot out shepherds and farmers. It also employs land thieves – the clerks, planners, architects and building contractors – who make sure that the Palestinians suffocate in their built-up areas. The space is all for Jews, says the supreme command. The computer also issues intellectual commands: Ignore everything by indulging in the depths of Jewish heritage. Nullify everything as unimportant through pride in our nation, which produces Nobel laureates. Declaim our suffering and heroism in Auschwitz.
Against the efficient and complex Israeli apparatuses stand the Palestinians with a host of competing leaders, conflicting strategies, uncoordinated government ministries, information that isn’t public knowledge and is not accurate, the tiresome duplication of institutions whose work overlaps, the empty slogans and despair. One expression of this despair is the declaration that Israel is the strong one, therefore change can and must come only from Israel. But no; Israelis have no interest in changing the situation. We benefit from it. The initial change can and must come from the Palestinians themselves, in their own home.


OCHA  





BRASIL - DIRETAS, JÁ!

domingo, 20 de agosto de 2017

Israel & Daesh vs Palestine in the Gaza Strip

A Linha Verde marca a fronteira entre Israel e a Palestina, traçada em 1949 após os acordos de armistício seguindo a Nakba (massacre e expulsão dos palestinos) e a auto-proclamação do estado de Israel. Porém, seguindo o projeto sionista de limpeza étnica e ocupação total da Palestina, o sistema educacional israelense apagou-a do mapa a fim de manipular a consciência dos israelenses. Rami Younis, da revista ativista israelense +972, fez este video curto da raiz desta hasbara.
The Green Line is the de facto boundary betwenn Israel and Palestine under the 1949 armistice agreements following the Nakba.
However, it has been all but erased by the Israeli education system. Rami Younis, of  +972 Magazine, talked to "educators" about how it happened and what it means.
Who is afraid of the Green Line?
How the Zionists conquered Palestine?
 
Abby Martin exposes zionism's criminal project in Palestine

Several Hamas security men also injured in the bombing blamed on ISIL near the Palestinian enclave's border with Egypt. 17 Aug 2017 02:15 GMT a Hamas security man was killed on Thursday in the southern Gaza Strip near the Palestinian enclave's border with Egypt. "A security force stopped two persons who approached the border. One of them blew himself up and was killed. The other was wounded," the Hamas-run Interior Ministry said in a statement. It said several Hamas security men were hurt, and hospital officials told reporters that one of them died of his wounds. Sources named the security man as Nidal al-Jaafari, 28. The assailant in the blast was a member of the Daesh – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). It would be the first time a suicide attack has targeted Hamas forces in Gaza, security sources said.
A fight to defeat resistance Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, has stepped up patrols in the border area with the declared aim of preventing the movement of so-called "Jihadist Salafis" between the territory and the Sinai Peninsula, where ISIL and other groups have been battling Egyptian troops for years. Hamas has recently been pursuing improved relations with Egypt, which keeps its border crossing with Gaza largely shut and has accused the group in the past of aiding fighters in the Sinai. Hamas has denied those allegations. Israel, the only other country Gaza borders, has maintained a decade-long blockade on the strip.

Also in Gaza, the Israeli military has instituted a travel ban on food, toiletries and most electronic devices for Palestinians exiting the Strip.
The army sent the new directive to Gisha, an Israeli NGO that promotes freedom of movement for Palestinians, a day before it went into effect earlier this month.
The directive was not, however, published in the “Status of Closure Authorizations,” a document meant to inform Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank about restrictions on movement.
Even Palestinians traveling abroad, who must take a bus directly from the Gaza border — through Israel — to Jordan, are subject to the new restrictions.
Palestinians in Gaza are no longer allowed to bring their laptops, toiletries or hard-sided luggage when exiting Gaza through the only regularly active passenger border terminal, Israel’s Erez crossing. Even Palestinians traveling to conferences, for business, or for studies abroad are not allowed to bring laptop computers.
“Every Tuesday there is an organized ride from Erez Crossing for those who want to travel abroad, which takes them directly to Allenby Bridge so that they can go on to Jordan. Most of [the passengers] are students, especially at this time of the year,” said Gisha’s Intake Coordinator Shadi Butthish. “These are people who are traveling to get graduate degrees because Israeli policy does not allow Palestinian undergraduate students to travel.”
“Naturally, they would need to take laptops and tablets with them on their travels,” Butthish continued. “Even USBs will need to remain behind in the Strip. People who are flying abroad for a few years won’t be able to bring their electric shavers.”
Non-Palestinians are exempt from the new restrictions, as long as they declare any electronic devices included in their luggage.
Israel has held Gaza under a strict blockade since 2007, after Hamas won an election in the Strip and took over the enclave. Since then, it has restricted basic goods from entering Gaza, and has significantly limited the number of people who can enter and exit the Strip — effectively cutting it off from the rest of the world. After the 2014 Gaza war, Israel pledged to join international efforts to rehabilitate Gaza, saying it would ease the passage of goods and people to and from the Strip.
The Israeli army sent the following response: “The entry into or passage through Israel is not a natural right. Unfortunately, we have seen repeated and varying attempts by the Hamas terror organization to exploit the population for purposes of terrorism against Israel. Accordingly, following a collaborative effort by all of the security authorities, including the [IDF’s] Land Crossings Authority, it was decided to update the security regulations at the Erez Crossing. The changed regulations apply to [Gaza] residents when they enter Israel from the Gaza Strip. The regulations are changed according to the various populations and the purpose of the permit in their possession.”
Inside Story: Is Palestinian reconciliation possible?
PALESTINA
If you are in London this Fall, go to the Young Vic Theater to see:

Israel' blacklist of BDS activists


OCHA  




BRASIL - DIRETAS, JÁ!

domingo, 13 de agosto de 2017

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper"


The title of this article is from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men that appears at the beginning of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.
Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.
Some readers will remember the black and white 1959 Hollywood film starring Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.
I read On the Beach when I began working on conflicts and read it again while the US Congress was passing a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world’s second most lethal nuclear power.  There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.
The “sanctions” are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.
Their main aim seems to be war – real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.
The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies – the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called “a noble cause” and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an “exceptional people”He was not referring to the Vietnamese.
Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously “the left” are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.
The obsession with Trump the man — not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of us.
While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BB, Le Monde and even the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.
On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a “Soviet agent”), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia.
Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was “clearly unconstitutional”.
A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.
This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the “national security” managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them “the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today”.
They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal.
They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia’s “borderland” – the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people. 
Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation.
In response, “partnership” is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin — anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Contrary to the Americans, Russians hate war, but their history tells them to get ready.
The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China’s economic lifelines.
The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, “if required”, he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute’s fiction.
None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.
The urgency has plenty of precedents. In John Pilger film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 – during the Cuban missile crisis – he and his colleagues were “told to launch all the missiles” from their silos. Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded – but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not “stand down”.
At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 – the year Shute wrote On the Beach – no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world’s most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.
The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms “left” and “right” are meaningless.  Most of America’s modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.
When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America’s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings – murder – by drones.
In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the “reluctant liberal warrior”, dropped 26,171 bombs – three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.  Having pledged to help “rid the world” of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.
Trump is a wimp by comparison.  It was Obama – with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side – who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the “deporter-in-chief”.
Let's not forget that one of Obama’s last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this, of course.
Buried in the detail was the establishment of a “Center for Information Analysis and Response”. This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with providing an “official narrative of facts” that will prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war – if we allow it.
And this American hasbara is getting control of major world media right now, even through high rated TV shows such as House of Cards, making people believe that Putin is the Devil and that they, Americans, are much, much better, despite their war crimes worldwide.
So, watch out. 
Roger Waters: We are living in 1984

Norman Finkelstein: International law and equal rights should be the focus for Palestine solidarity

PALESTINA

If you are in London this Fall, go to the Young Vic Theater to see:




Jewish Voice for Peace: USA & Israel's complicity grows stronger to repress and oppress


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BRASIL - DIRETAS, JÁ!

domingo, 6 de agosto de 2017

Israel vs Palestina: Third Nakba in view?


The outburst of Palestinian protests and Israeli “security” measures in Jerusalem since July 14 continues a saga that has pertained since Israeli occupied the West Bank in 1967 in order to steal land and natural ressources, but with a few significant new twists this time. Here are some of them in this ongoing battle between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem.
The power of sustained, mass, non-violent protest by Palestinian civilians, with a precise focus and specific demands, caused Israel to drop all the new “security” measures it said were needed at the Al-Aqsa compound. The success and power of such mass protest will have major implications for the future. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children who placed their prayer mats on the ground in the open air and prayed near their Islamic holy site sent a critical message to multiple audiences: Israel, the Palestinian leadership, the Arab-Islamic world, and the international community.
To the Israeli government and its rightwing colonial-settler Zionist fanatics, the message was that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem will stand their ground when they feel their rights are threatened, and they will kneel to no one, literally, but to God, as they do when they kneel in prayer.
To the divided and broadly hapless Palestinian national leaderships (Fatah and Hamas) that cling to power without serving their people very well, the message was that Palestinian men and women can take charge of their own interests and well-being when they need to; and they can negotiate with the Israelis to achieve better results than Fateh and Hamas have ever achieved. An important new development in this instance of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation in Jerusalem was the role played by the four-member religious leadership of the Islamic holy places waqf (endowment), in close consultation with local community leaders.
To the Arab-Islamic world, where support for the Palestinians in occupied Arab East Jerusalem was sporadic and erratic, the message was that it would be childish of them to try and establish close political, economic, or security links with the Israeli government while Israel was still taking measures to consolidate its control of all Jerusalem against the wishes of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab residents of the city.
This is particularly relevant to continuing attempts by Israel, with apparent U.S. support, to develop more normal relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states, as a confidence-building measure to prod all concerned in the Arab-Israeli conflict towards a negotiated peace. The Palestinians on the ground showed that their confident assertion of their presence and their rights in Jerusalem was the way to push Israel to change its Policy.
To the rest of the world, the message was that the international community should stop falling for the old Israeli ruse that strict controls on Palestinian movement and actions must be put in place for “security” reasons. Israel dropped all the “security” measures it had taken unilaterally — cameras, gates, railings, metal-detectors — when it saw itself confronted by the collective will of hundreds of thousands of unarmed men, women, and children who took to the streets every day and night to affirm only that they are Palestinians who have the right to live in dignity in their own ancestral city.
Some people will say that this particular show of mass collective self-assertion by the Palestinians was due to the fact that it was a religious site — the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound — that they felt was being threatened and besmirched by Israeli actions. That is only partly correct. The more accurate and complete picture is that this incident exploded into a major confrontation because of the complex interactions between religious and political identity that converge in Jerusalem as they do nowhere else in the world. The Palestinians of Jerusalem have found themselves vulnerable, unrepresented, unprotected, and leaderless for many decades since 1967, because neither the occupying Israeli authorities nor the fragmented Palestinian leaderships look out for the best interests and basic human rights of the Jerusalemite Palestinians.
After the Israelis removed all their “security” measures and the waqf leadership announced that public prayers would resume in the mosque, the lengthy and boisterous Palestinian street celebrations were a rare instance of this community enjoying a collective success. All these aspects of the episode suggest that more organized local coordination among religious and civic leaders in Arab East Jerusalem is likely to occur, especially because Israeli continues to find ways to continue the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs that it wants to drive out of the city.
The latest example is an Israeli move to redraw the borders of occupied Arab East Jerusalem as Israel defines them, which would exclude over 100,000 Palestinian Arabs from being residents of the city. If this happens, the Arab proportion of Jerusalemites would shrink further, making them more vulnerable to Israeli pressures and incentives to emigrate. The lessons to be learned from this round of nationalistic confrontation in Jerusalem will be pivotal for future developments in the city where Arabism and Zionism have battled for control for many decades now, and the battle goes on.
The "apolitical" aproach of Palestinian water crisis

Binyamin Netanyahu is proposing that Palestinian citizens of Israel be stripped of their citizenship under a “peace” deal that would place them in a future Palestinian entity.
The Israeli prime minister recently told American officials, according to a report in Haaretz, that “Israeli-Arab communities could move under Palestinian control” as part of a final status agreement.
“In exchange,” the Tel Aviv newspaper wrote, “Israel would annex some West Bank settlements.”
Commonly referred to as “transfer,” this proposal amounts to ethnic cleansing. It is not a new idea, but Netanyahu’s broaching it represents a further step in the Israeli government formally adopting policies once considered taboo even by many Israelis.
The area Netanyahu has in mind – at least initially – is Wadi Ara, a region in the north, including the major town of Umm al-Fahm.
Some 1.5 million Palestinians have citizenship in Israel. They are the survivors and their descendants of the Nakba, the Zionist ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of the Palestinian population from what became Israel before and after it was established in 1948.
The idea that this would be an “exchange” is clearly absurd since none of what Netanyahu proposes to swap is Israel’s to begin with: West Bank settlers live on land stolen from Palestinians in violation of international law.
Meanwhile, the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel – who in any such move would be deprived of the right of determining their own fate on land that is theirs by birth – are not a gift from Israel, which was established by force and conquest in their country at their expense.
So-called population exchanges have an ugly history; they were practiced before the modern era, when it was accepted that rulers treated people like property.
But the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other norms enshrined after the atrocities of the Second World War, vested rights in individuals and outlawed forced displacement and the arbitrary removal of citizenship and nationality.
But as I argued in my 2014 book The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Israel’s claim that it has a “right to exist as a Jewish state” cannot be realized without the massive and constant violation of the most basic principles of human rights, equality and anti-racism.
This can be seen by following the logic of Netanyahu’s proposal. He talks about the transfer as part of a “final status” deal.
But what kind of a “peace” would Netanyahu contemplate? In his first White House meeting with US President Donald Trump in February, the Israeli leader would not commit explicitly to any sort of “two-state solution.”
He insisted though that in any deal Palestinians must recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” and Israel “must retain overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River.”
So adding all the elements together, Netanyahu’s plan would take Palestinians in Israel, who currently possess rights as citizens – albeit limited by law and inferior to Jews – and move them to a situation where like the rest of the Palestinians under perpetual Israeli military occupation they would have no rights at all.
In March, a landmark UN report concluded that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
“The mission of preserving Israel as a Jewish state has inspired or even compelled Israel to pursue several general racial policies,” the report states. These include “demographic engineering, in order to establish and maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel.”
Netanyahu’s latest proposal precisely fits into this mold, and therefore is further confirmation that Israel practices apartheid.
The UN report also noted that while Israel maintains a formal democratic system for citizens of the state, it prohibits anyone from using that system to challenge the regime’s fundamentally racist set-up: “Israeli law bans organized Palestinian opposition to Jewish domination, rendering it illegal and even seditious.”
Netanyahu would do away with the merest threat of Palestinian citizens of Israel using their votes to challenge this domination by stripping them of their citizenship.
The UN report, quickly suppressed by the UN secretary-general on American orders, stresses that it does not directly compare Israel to apartheid South Africa.
Rather, it measures Israel against the definition of the crime of apartheid in international law, which is includedin the founding statute of the International Criminal Court.
Netanyahu’s proposal does nonetheless indeed follow closely the precedent set by apartheid South Africa.
As that racist regime came under increasing pressure to end white supremacist rule in the late 20th century, it created a system of “bantustans” – nominally independent Black-ruled states.
If Black people wanted to vote, the apartheid government said, they were welcome to take citizenship in one of the bantustans – impoverished strips of land stretched across remote areas of South Africa.
But the “independence” of these states – not recognized by any country – was a total sham. They were tin-pot dictatorships run by collaborators with the white racist regime.
The bantustans were a mechanism to remove Black people physically – by encouraging or forcing migration to them – and politically from South Africa, while providing no real rights.
It is difficult to find any difference with what Netanyahu – who has made clear his aversion to seeing Palestinian citizens of Israel vote – is proposing.
There is one key difference: unlike with apartheid South Africa whose bantustans met universal rejection, many in the so-called international community, including Barack Obama when he was president, have eagerly adopted Israel’s racist and segregationist conception under the slogan of “two states for two peoples.”
The idea of racial gerrymandering has found favor with some of Israel’s most ardent admirers.
Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who has a long list of war crimes on his record including the killing of millions of people in Southeast Asia, advised Israel in 2004 to “transfer territory with significant Arab populations from the northern part of Israel to improve the demographic balance.”
In recent years, there have been two main Israeli proponents of the idea of further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, marketed as “land swaps.”
Avigdor Lieberman, the West Bank settler who is currently Israel’s defense minister, has long advocated this approach.
A decade ago Lieberman said he would support a “two-state solution” as long as it provided for real segregation by getting rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
“The guiding principle must be an exchange of territory and of populations,” he said. “It’s not that we’re against the solution of two states for two peoples,” Lieberman added. “On the contrary, we support it: two states for two peoples, not a state and a half for one people and half a state for the other.”
In Lieberman’s view, the risk of a two-state solution without transfer was that Israel would end up as “half a state” – meaning that Jews could not guarantee their domination in an entity with more than 1.5 million non-Jewish citizens who expect equal democratic and civil rights.
Lieberman recently reaffirmed in a posting on Facebook that the Jewish state should eventually be ethnically cleansed of virtually all Palestinians.
“There is no reason why Sheikh Raed Salah, Ayman Odeh, Basel Ghattas or Haneen Zoabi should continue to be Israeli citizens,” he said in reference to prominent Palestinian politicians, three of them at the time members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
The other key proponent is Tzipi Livni, the ostensibly “dovish” former foreign minister who is sought for questioning in war crimes inquiries by prosecutors in several countries.
In 2007, Livni said: “The Palestinian state to be established will not be a solution just for the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. It is designed to provide a comprehensive national solution – for those living in Judea and Samaria, and the refugees camps, and even for the [Arab] citizens of Israel.”
As part of the government of Ehud Olmert the same year, Livni formally raised the idea of transfer with Palestinian negotiators, explaining: “Our idea is to refer to two states for two peoples. Or two nation states, Palestine and Israel living side by side in peace and security with each state constituting the homeland for its people and the fulfillment of their national aspirations and self determination.”
Since no Israeli leader has ever seriously proposed giving a Palestinian state the same rights and sovereignty Israel claims for itself, these declarations are barely disguised calls for a continuation of Zionism’s historic process of dispossessing Palestinians and calling it “peace.”
A few days ago, senior Israeli minister Tzachi Hanegbi even threatened Palestinians with a “third Nakba” – a reference to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967.
One wonders if Netanyahu’s latest proposal is what he meant.

Eleven years after the 2006 Gaza beach massacre that killed seven members of her family, Huda Ghalia has just received her Law degree at the Islamic University of Gaza.
On the afternoon of June 6, 2006, the Ghalia family were picnicking on the Sudaniya beach near Beit Lahia in northern Gaza when Israeli artillery and naval shelling struck them, killing seven members of her family, including her father and five siblings.
Onze anos após o massacre da praia de Gaza em 2006 que matou sete membros de sua família, Huda Ghalia acabou de formar-se em Direito.
Recapitulando sua desgraça, na tarde do dia 6 de junho de 2006, sua família estava fazendo um piquenique na praia de Sudaniya, perto de Beit Lahia no norte da Faixa de Gaza quando foi bombardeada pela artilharia naval israelense. Sete membros de sua família foram mortos, incluindo seu pai e cinco irmãos. As imagens dela chorando a morte do pai rodou o mundo.
Hoje, seus irmãos também estariam cheios de vida e adiantados nos estudos, se não tivessem sido assassinados naquele dia.

THIS IS PALESTINE follows the journey of Riverdance founder and award-winning producer and director John McColgan through Palestine with Trócaire, an Irish human rights charity. It aims to "raise awareness of the human rights abuses that have been happening and are still happening in the West Bank and Gaza as he explores the impact of ongoing occupation on the people who live there. The documentary was co-produced by Tyrone Productions and Trocaire in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the military occupation of the West Bank.

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PALESTINA

If you are in London this Fall, go to the Young Vic Theater to see:


This is Palestine: Shadia Mansour




OCHA  




BRASIL - DIRETAS, JÁ!
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SYRIA


USA
Which country do people fear most in the world?
 
ISRAEL