Grave Concern for Life of 2 Bahraini Activists behind Al-Khalifa Bars

3 Mar 2023

By Staff, Agencies

The rapid deterioration in the health condition of two prominent rights activists, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja and Abduljalil Al-Singace, who are serving life sentences in Bahraini jails linked to the 2011 uprising has sparked grave concern.

Al-Khawaja, 61, was sent back to prison on February 28 after security forces denied him access to a cardiologist for a serious heart-related complicacy, his daughter Maryam Al-Khawaja was quoted as saying in Bahraini media.

The rights activist, who was first arrested and put on trial in 2011 for leading peaceful protests that called for fundamental freedoms in the Gulf country, informed his daughter that he was suffering from breathing difficulties and heart palpitations.

After performing various medical tests, a doctor recommended that al-Khawaja be urgently moved to a cardiologist’s care, however, Bahraini security forces “refused to book the necessary appointment,” his daughter said.

Maryam said “a plain-clothed man” at the medical facility insisted his hands be cuffed and that he be taken back to prison.

According to his daughter, Abdul-Hadi believes the refusal to book his appointment was done to punish him because he had protested against being chained.

“I am constantly in a state of anxiety waiting for that call that something happened to my father in their notorious prison, and this latest news has now increased my anxiety tenfold,” his daughter said, concerned about her ailing father’s fate.

She said her father was “dying in their prisons” while the international community, especially the EU and Denmark, was watching it as mute spectators.

• Sports Washing Brutality: British MPs Blast F1 Organization over Bahrain, Saudi Arabia

Sports Washing Brutality: British MPs Blast F1 Organization over Bahrain, Saudi Arabia

3 Mar 2023

By Staff, Agencies

A group of British MPs has written to the organizers of Formula One [F1] to express their “grave concerns” over motorsport’s role in “sports washing the appalling human rights records of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia”.

Ahead of the new F1 season, which begins this Sunday, in Bahrain, 20 parliamentarians including Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, and Layla Moran, called for an independent inquiry into F1 and the governing body Federation Internationale de l’Automobile’s [FIA] activities in countries with questionable human rights records.

McDonnell, Labor’s former shadow chancellor said: “The presence of F1 gives the impression that Bahrain is somehow a normal state. Its abuse of human rights means it certainly isn’t. No sport should be providing this regime with any credibility.”

The British politicians condemned F1’s “refusal to engage with key stakeholders including human rights groups” before it awarded Bahrain the “longest contract in F1 history, breaching F1’s own policy”.

“Multimillion-dollar profits must not come at the expense of human rights,” the letter to F1 and the FIA, reads.

“You have a duty to ensure your presence has a positive impact, which will not be possible whilst political prisoners remain behind bars in Bahrain. If Lewis Hamilton can speak out, why can’t you?”

“I along with other MPs and peers from the UK parliament have written an open letter to FIA and F1,” Lord Scriven, a Liberal Democrat confirmed.

“We are asking them to do things to improve the way the sport operates around human rights, they are not extreme or radical things, they are issues that we would expect any sporting organization with any moral leadership at the heart of how motorsports, is governed and operates.”

Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, the director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy [Bird], heralded the MPs letter, adding that F1’s leadership “cannot simply claim that their presence in these countries has a positive impact when evidence demonstrates otherwise”.

“F1 continues to profiteer from brutal Gulf autocrats, making multi-millions whilst victims pay the price,” Alwadaei said. “When Lewis Hamilton is able to speak out in the face of injustice, he sets a moral standard that F1 management must follow.”

Speaking ahead of the Grand Prix on Sunday, Hamilton, the motorsport’s most high-profile driver, said: “I couldn’t say whether or not I know that it’s got worse. I’m not sure it has got better while we’ve been coming all these years.”

He continued: “I know for me, I’ve only in the latter years started to understand more and more of the challenges of the people here in Bahrain, and also then in Saudi, it was my first time there last year but of course I read about some of the troubles there… But more needs to be done, without doubt. Whether or not that will happen, time will tell.”

Construction of the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir began in 2002 and cost $150m. The first race took place on 4 April 2004 and was won by Michael Schumacher, driving a Ferrari.

‘Empire of Lies’: Lavrov Says World Increasingly Certain No One Immune to West’s Banditry

February 3, 2023

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

Countries are increasingly convinced that no one is immune to the West’s banditry and expropriation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a meeting of the United Russia Party commission on international cooperation and support for compatriots abroad.

“As for the West, President [Vladimir] Putin has aptly called it an ’empire of lies.’ The West, and this is confirmed by our contacts, has not been perceived globally as the beacon of democracy for a while now. The US and its NATO satellites have completely undermined their reputation as reliable international partners that are capable of coming to an agreement. The understanding that literally no one is immune from expropriation and from state banditry on the part of the former colonial powers is becoming ever stronger in the world,” the minister said.

Lavrov said Russia and some other states, whose numbers are growing, are consistently reducing their dependence on the greenback. “We are working together with like-minded people to transfer international settlements into national currencies, and create alternative payment and logistics systems so as not to depend on the whims and dictates of the country that has declared itself a hegemon. In general, we are working towards establishing a fairer global monetary, financial, trade and economic architecture, which objectively contributes to the fight against new manifestations of neocolonialism,” he said.

Source: Agencies

Related

• Putin Threatens Tough Response to Western Tank Supplies for Kiev
• How, Not When: Lavrov Lays Out Russia’s Priorities for Ending Ukraine Crisis
• Russian Forces Closing in on Artyomovsk, DPR Oficial Says

Israel troubled by Yemen’s booming military capabilities: Report

Israeli media has been trying to position Yemen as a new threat for Tel Aviv, just as its army readies for a possible conflict with Hezbollah

August 26 2022

(Photo credit: MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images)

ByNews Desk- 

Sources close to Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement say Israel’s allegations that its jets attacked the Yemeni capital on 7 August are “evidence” of Tel Aviv’s growing concerns about Sanaa’s military capabilities.

Last week, Israeli chief of staff Aviv Kochavi said the Israeli army struck “a third country” during their bombardment of the Gaza Strip at the start of this month.

Kochavi did not name the third country, however, Israeli media later claimed the target of the attack was the Al-Hafa military base on the Naqam Mountain, west of Sanaa, adding that the blast killed several Lebanese and Iranian operatives.

Speaking to Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, the Yemeni sources called Tel Aviv’s claim “incorrect speculation,” and alleged that the explosion in Sanaa that day was the result of “the detonation of the remains of mines in the Al-Hafa area.”

The sources go on to say the allegations stem from Israel’s “terror over the development of Sanaa’s military capabilities.”

“Israel realizes that Yemen possesses great defensive and offensive capabilities that are capable of striking it,” Al-Akhbar’s sources say, adding: “Israeli fears of Yemeni drones and missiles have escalated since the beginning of the year.”

Ansarallah officials have often regarded Israel as the most prominent threat to Arab national security, and acknowledge that Tel Aviv has been participating in the Saudi-led aggression against Yemen.

“All Israeli movements in the region are being monitored,” the Yemeni sources claim.

As Israel prepares for a possible conflict with Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah over control of a gas field in the Mediterranean, Hebrew media outlets have begun planting the seeds of the “danger” posed by Yemen.

According to a “high-ranking security source” that spoke with Israel’s i24NEWS, Israel is considering the possibility of opening a front in the south of the occupied territories to confront Ansarallah missiles.

The security source goes on to claim that “the real danger facing Israel lies in Yemen,” and that the possibility of Ansarallah targeting Israel “is now a reality.”

Earlier this year, the Sanaa-based National Salvation Government (NSG) banned any normalization process with Israel, and criminalized any contact with the state or its citizens.

Defining Fascism: Dimitrov versus Eco

March 19, 2022

<a href=”http://&lt;!– wp:paragraph –> <p>Source</p> Source

By James Tweedie

What is fascism? With the Russian ‘de-Nazification operation’ in the Ukraine entering its fourth week and “Black Lives Matter” replaced with “I Stand With Ukraine” as the virtue-signal de jour, now seems like a good time to define it.

While I’m a big fan of the Iranian journalist Ramin Mazaheri, I have to disagree with his latest article on The Vineyard of the Saker. Mazaheri says Russia misinterprets Nazism as simply Russophobia. I fear he underestimates the intellect of the nation which did three-quarters of the fighting and dying to defeat fascism 77 years ago.

Rather than trying to suck the meaning of the word ‘fascism’ out of our thumbs, let us instead compare two well-known definitions by Georgi Dimitrov and Umberto Eco, a Marxist and a Liberal.

Eco, the Italian author of the historical whodunnit The Name Of the Rose, listed 14 different features in his 1995 essay Eternal Fascism. The problem is, none of them individually are proof that we’re living in a fascist state.

Eco admits at the start: “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.”

But he claims: “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

The first item on Eco’s list, ‘the cult of tradition’, is common to most ‘small-c’ social conservatives. The syncretism that Eco speaks of here is found in his own eclectic list.

Points three to five, ‘action for action’s sake’, ‘disagreement is treason’ and ‘fear of difference’ are true of the dozens of Trotskyite and anarchist sects jumping on the Ukraine bandwagon.

Points six to eight, ‘appeal to a frustrated middle class’, an ‘obsession with a plot’ and the belief that their ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’ describe the US ‘Never Trumpers’ and British liberals still desperate to rejoin the European Union (EU).

Nine and 11, ‘ life is lived for struggle’ and ‘everybody is educated to become a hero’ apply to the ‘woke’ millennials obsessed with their own perceived victimhood.

Dimitrov, the Bulgarian general secretary of the Communist (Third) International, characterised fascism in a speech to the 7^th Comintern congress in 1935 as: “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

“Fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital,” he elaborated.

“Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia.”

Thus, fascism is the form of government which the capitalist class resorts to when revolt by the toiling classes means it can no longer rule by consent under democracy, as it prefers to.

“The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries,” Dimitrov stressed. His clear implication is that fascism could take a new form without the open racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia of the German Nazi regime. Fascism could come waving the rainbow flag and preaching “human rights”. I think it already has.

And Dimitrov highlights the fascists’ imperative for violent and oppressive anti-communism, something which Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, fails to mention at all in his glib listicle.

My mother was born a year before the Second World War. Her parents were communists. At a very young age she was aware that a Nazi invasion would mean she and her family would be murdered, just as communists in the fascist-ruled and occupied countries had already been.

Eco has no excuse for ignoring or forgetting this, just as Western pseudo-leftists have no excuse for overlooking how the regime that took over in Kiev after the 2014 Maidan Square coup banned the Communist Party of Ukraine and others, or how its thugs burnt down the Odessa Trade Union House while the police looked on, murdering some 50 working people.

Modern Russia is not the USSR, but it never ceased to be the target of imperialism despite embracing the so-called ‘free market’. Ordinary Russians know that, and their leaders have in the past few weeks denounced the “Empire of Lies” with a clarity that Lenin — who literally wrote the book on it — would applaud.

To answer those who equate fascism with nationalism: If Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo had been nationalists, their armies would never have set foot outside their countries’ borders and 50 million lives would not have been needlessly lost. Fascism is imperialist, and imperialism is the antithesis of nationalism.

It’s easy to see why some prefer Eco’s definition to Dimitrov’s. Dimitrov avoids the easy path of condemning historical fascism for its bigotry and para-militarism, but instead marks out the common ground between Nazis and liberals: anti-communism. Eco explicitly panders to those who think the holocaust was what happens when we stray from the modern liberal path.

But if one believes, as a majority of British voters did in 2016, that the EU is an undemocratic, corporatist supra-national state which rules the continent on behalf of finance capital, It follows that the burnished liberal utopia is fascism here and now.

The stated goal of the US antifa rioters in 2020 was to bring down President Donald Trump and ensure victory for Joe Biden, who helped bring the genuine fascist government to power in Kiev in 2014. Biden has now prodded the Ukraine into a disastrous showdown with Russia that threatens to escalate to nuclear Armageddon.

There was no revolution in the US in 2020, just as there was none in Ukraine in 2014. The Never-Trumpers posed no alternative but business as usual under the Democratic Party, which came bundled with a neo-McCarthyite witch-hunt. That has torn down the façade of liberal democracy and left only the naked tyranny of big business, pushing the world inexorably towards war. Nice work, anarchists.

Russia is taking a stand against fascism, and imperialism. What are you going to do about it?

• The Russian ‘denazification’ PR disaster: How, why and what to do

Israeli Justice… a Futile Chase

caged but undaunted

(Originally published JANUARY 3, 2020 in Counterpunch)

by STANLEY L. COHEN

“Doctrine of Futility”

Seventeen years ago, 23 year old Rachel Corrie (a Washington State volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement) was crushed to death by an armored military bulldozer as she stood on top of a mound of dirt trying to prevent the dozer from destroying a civilian home in the Southern Gaza Strip village of Rafa. Wearing a bright orange vest and shouting out at the bulldozer through a megaphone, Corrie was murdered for the temerity of her unarmed act of peaceful defiance. More than a dozen years later the Israeli Supreme Court rejected her parents’ suit to hold Israel’s military accountable for her death. In finding that an “explicit statutory provision of the Knesset overrides the provisions of international law”, the Israeli High Court sacrificed well more than a century…

View original post 7,154 more words

The Enemy is not Resistance

caged but undaunted

{Originally published May 10, 2019)

The Enemy is not Resistance

The Islamic Resistance Movement began more than thirty years ago at an historical moment in time which it knew to be fraught with absolute peril for their people. The founders of this national liberation struggle examined the overwhelming military capabilities of Israel, fostered by its global superpower sponsor, the United States. They looked at Israel’s expansionist programs… the Zionist project of illegal settlements erasing their homes and villages, dispossessing mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers… and at the failure of the international community to stop them. They knew then, that within a generation Palestinians would lose it all … their motherland and patrimony and their nation… leaving them homeless captives to the whims of another man’s door. In that moment, resistance was not a lifestyle choice or a revolutionary pose. It was existential necessity, just as it is now.

Everything…

View original post 2,110 more words

Imam Khamenei: Trump’s Remarks ‘Silly, Superficial’

“I don’t trust these three European countries either”

May 9, 2018

Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says President Donald Trump’s speech announcing US withdrawal from a nuclear deal with Iran was “silly and superficial.”

“Last night you heard that the US president made silly and superficial remarks. There were maybe more than 10 lies in his comments. He threatened both the establishment and the nation, saying he will do this and that,” Imam Khamenei said in a meeting with a number of teachers and university professors in the Iranian capital Tehran on Wednesday.

“Mr. Trump I tell you on behalf of the Iranian nation: You are making a damn mistake,” the Leader said.

The Leader made the remarks one day after Trump announced Washington’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Imam Khamenei stressed that the US problem with Iran was not related to the country’s nuclear program.

“We accepted the JCPOA, but enmities with the Islamic Republic did not end. Now they raise the issue of our presence in the region and the issue of missiles. If we accept them too, they will bring up another issue,” he said.

“The reason for US opposition to the establishment is that the US used to completely dominate [Iran] but the [Islamic] Revolution cut off their hands [from the country],” he added.

On the other hand, the Leader said it was ‘illogical to stay in the deal with the Europeans without guarantees.”

Source

Related Articles

• Imam Khamenei: Without Definite Guarantee of 3 EU Countries, We Won’t Stick With JCPOA
• Iranian Media Weighs Trump’s Pullout: A Deal without the Troublemaker
• Iranian Lawmakers Burn US Flag, JCPOA Copy in Parliament 
• Saudis to Seek Nuclear Weapon If Iran Resumes Its Nuclear Program: FM
• Iran: Withdrawal from Nuclear Deal Will Be Painful for US
• Iran Vows to Boost Defense Program despite US Threats
• The Strategic Dimensions of Hezbollah’s Electoral Battle
• Mattis: US Forces Withdrawal from Korean Peninsula Won’t be Discussed with North

In the Occupied Territory, Two Kinds of Justice

Originally published in CounterPunch Magazine December 25, 2017

by Stanley L. Cohen

Many take their liberty for granted even as they have endless time to rail on and on about how “they” are coming for us. Be it the “coup”, apparently now underway, or the spread of domestic McCarthyism that seeks to cower us into silence, or the baffling, sudden, corrupt reach of the Department of Justice, for most white men here we enjoy a privilege that says not us. Typically, it works.

A world away, liberty is less a race-based edge than it is the benefits you gain by the day of the week you celebrate your faith. For those who get directions from god on Saturdays, there appear to be no limits to the dispensation to which you are entitled; be it the execution of an unconscious prisoner, the mass arrest of a family with the temerity to fight for their land or a Prime Minister protected by legislative fiat empowered well beyond the reach of mere mortal law.

Israel has long preached justice and equality to the world. How often have we heard its mantra about democratic ideals and traditions as so much a unique historical tenet of its travel… a journey for the chosen that get to choose who the beneficiaries are… and are not.

For those of us in the US, either schooled in the classic process of the law or victimized by its aim, we’ve grown spoiled by its safeguards even though they remain but abstract and elusive for those many in the prisoner dock of  “wrong” color, with but coins in their pocket or militant politics in their gait.

Yet, despite the betrayal of equal hope for all, the march from investigation to arrest to trial and result knows no formal de jure distinction along the way. Of course, one would be so much a fool to argue that justice is blind, or little more than a commodity for purchase, or the skill of one’s advocate, or the luck of one’s judicial draw. Yet these damning imperfections leave hope along the way that justice may, on occasion, just slip and fall into ones lap despite a long and tarred drop.

That is not the case in Israel. Israel has two systems of justice… one for Jews and the other for Palestinians be they Muslim, Christian or atheist. Nowhere is that more apparent or destructive than it is in the Occupied Territory.

The Detention of Children

Several days ago, 16 year old Ahed Tamimi was arrested, by heavily armed Israeli soldiers, during a violent pre-dawn raid on her home. It followed a video, since gone viral, of her slapping a soldier on the face and arm and pushing another soldier, standing nearby, who she was ushering away from the family home… this, after her 14-year-old cousin, Mohammed,  had been shot by an Israeli rubber coated bullet that entered through his mouth and lodged in his brain.

For Ahed, it was not the first time that her challenge to the occupation received international attention and acclaim.  As an 11 year old, she was video recorded confronting soldiers with clenched fist. She did not back down.  At 13, she helped to wrestle her 11 year old brother, his arm in a cast, from the clutches of an Israeli soldier who was physically assaulting him during a standoff near her family home. For that, she was the recipient of the Handala Courage award in Turkey.

Not long after Ahed’s current arrest, Nariman Tamimi was seized when she went to the local police station to check on her daughter. After attending his daughter’s initial military court appearance, Bassem Tamimi, a prominent land defender and non-violent organizer in the village of Nabi Saleh, was also taken into custody. He has been arrested numerous times by Israeli forces. In 2012, he was termed a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International during one of his several detentions in an Israeli prison.

Later that night, soldiers seized a family cousin, Nour Tamimi, a 21 year old journalism student, from her own family home.

Mother, father, daughter, and cousin arrested after another cousin shot… all within a matter of a few days.  Welcome to Palestine. Welcome to the Occupation.

Liberty means more than the freedom to walk in and out of your home with the approval of those who occupy the streets that lead to it. 

Though the arrest of Ahed has captured the attention of many, it is as much the force of her charisma as it is the call of justice that has produced it. Since 2000, over 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in an Israeli military system devoid of any meaningful protection for the most vulnerable and traumatized among those that have known nothing but the bark of occupation their entire lives.  It is a military justice process notorious for the systematic ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children.

The majority of these children have been seized in middle of the night raids by heavily armed Israeli soldiers. By now, military kidnappings have become so much the expected norm that Palestinian teens sleep with their clothes on to maintain their modesty when the doors to their bedroom are kicked in with the shouts of “get up get up” by heavily armed soldiers.

Dragged out the door to the screams of their powerless parents, for most, it will be the last they will hear from them without the watch and eavesdrop of prison guards for the many months of detention to follow.

Several hours after their arrest, children arrive at an interrogation and detention center alone, tired, and frightened.

All Interrogations, by their very nature, are inherently coercive no matter the age or experience of its target.  None are more so than for an often bruised and scared child forced to go through the process without the benefit of counsel or the presence of parents who are never permitted to participate.

Israeli law provides that all military interrogations must be undertaken in a prisoner’s native language and that any statement made by them must be reduced to writing in that language. Despite this prohibition, detainees are typically coerced into signing statements, through verbal abuse, threats, and physical violence, that are written by police in Hebrew… which most cannot understand. These statements usually provide the main evidence against these children in Israeli military courts.

By virtue of the military court process, as of the end of this past summer there were 331 Palestinian minors held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners, including 2 administrative detainees.

The Military Court Process

The military courts, themselves, are held inside military bases and closed to the public… and usually family members of the accused.  Within these courts, military orders supersede clear Israeli and international law.  The court proceedings reduce the prospect of any justice to little more than a military dress parade where soldiers exhibit their uniform without any independence or skill attached to it whatsoever.

In military courts, all parties to the proceeding… the judge, prosecutor and translators… are members of the Israeli armed forces. The judges are military officers with minimal judicial training and, by-in- large, served as military prosecutors before assuming the bench

The prosecutors are Israeli soldiers appointed to the position by the Area Commander.  Some of them are not yet certified as attorneys under the Israeli Bar Association.

Under the rules of occupation, all defendants in military courts are Palestinian… with the jurisdiction of the Israeli military court never extended to some eight hundred thousand Jewish settlers living in the West Bank.  They are accorded the full benefit and safeguard of Israeli civil law.

Under Israeli military orders, a Palestinian can be held without charge, for the purpose of interrogation, for a total period of 90 days during which he or she is denied the benefit of counsel. These detention periods can be extended without limit and require but an ex parte request of military prosecutors.  By comparison, an Israeli citizen accused of a security offense, within the Occupied Territory, can be held without indictment within the civil process for a period of 64 days during which time counsel is available at all times.

Though Palestinian detainees are entitled to trials in military proceedings which must be completed within eighteen months, if the trials have not concluded within that time frame, a judge from the Military Court of Appeals can extend the detention of a Palestinian by multiple six-month increments… indefinitely. It is this process which has left thousands of Palestinian political detainees imprisoned for years on end without the benefit of counsel, formal charges, or trial. The comparable time limit for detainees before Israeli civilian courts is nine months.

While criminal liability begins at age 12 for Palestinians and Israelis alike, under the military system Palestinians can be tried as adults at age 16. For Israelis, the age of majority for trial as an adult in a civilian court is 18.  This two year difference, without physical distinction of consequence, can mean the difference of many years in sentence should a conviction ensue.  In some cases, it can literally mean a variance between a few years in prison versus decades upon conviction.

For those Palestinian detainees who have been accorded a military trial in the Occupied Territory, the conviction rate is but a bit short of 100%. All military trials are undertaken by a judge and not a jury.

Although the United Nations has repeatedly held that the military justice system in the Occupied Territory violates international law, it has done nothing to ensure equal protection to hundreds of thousands denied justice by virtue of being Palestinian and nothing else.

Detention as a Political Weapon

For fifty years, the justice system in the Occupied Territory has been the exclusive domain of the Israeli army… completely removed from any oversight by civilian laws, courts, and safeguards. It’s been estimated that, during this time, several hundred thousand Palestinians have been sentenced for a wide range of “security violations” as defined by arbitrary military fiat on a case by case basis. It has been reported that 20% of the Palestinian population have been swept up and detained by the military during this time.

While Israel has tried to portray its exercise of judicial authority in the Occupied Territory as one largely concerned with traditional criminal offenses or serious acts of “violence”, in point of fact, most of those seized have been detained for little more than non-violent political activity.

Designated as “Hostile Terrorist Activity,” these offenses often target speech, association, cultural expression, “unauthorized” assembly and movement, non-violent protest, and political activity carried out by elected representatives of local Palestinian government entities.

Others have been detained for “incitement” or membership in “illegal associations” as determined by the local Israeli military commander… or for “leaving the area without permission.”

Journalists have been arrested because of their critical coverage of the military at demonstrations or for reporting about the occupation in general. One was arrested for making a Facebook comment on another arrested Palestinian’s mugshot: “your smile will end the occupation.”

Troops have raided and shut down several broadcast outlets for six months on the grounds of incitement including the Manbar al-Hurriya radio station and eight local outlets operated by PalMedia, Ram Sat and Trans Media.

Documentation of almost two dozen Palestinians, in the West Bank, detained by the Israeli military for nothing more than Facebook posts or exchanges is claimed by 7amleh, the Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement. Additionally, Israel’s security system handed over a list of 400 other Palestinians, having posted to Facebook, to the security of the Palestinian Authority, who arrested them.

Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) have been arrested and detained for carrying out a population census in occupied East Jerusalem which the military deemed as “illegal work” with the Palestinian Authority.

Although International law prohibits interference with the free exercise of one’s political opinions, the Israeli military has sought to suppress the Palestinian political process, as a whole, for decades. Palestinian political leaders and activists are routinely arrested and detained.

In July of 2014, a high of 38 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council were detained for political activity. As of November 2017, the current number is 11 members.    Others have been prevented from travelling outside the Occupied Territories.  A number of Legislative Council members had their residencies in Jerusalem revoked and were forcibly deported to other parts of the Occupied West Bank.

70 lawmakers from the Palestinian Legislative Council have been arrested since 2002 for political activity and little else, including a number that have been detained on multiple occasions.

Among the current members of the PLC in Israeli detention is 55-year-old Khalida Jarrar, a female legislator and senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Head of the Prisoners’ Commission of the PLC and vice-chairperson of the board of directors of Palestinian Prisoners’ Rights Group, Jarrar, who was last released from Israeli detention a year ago, was accused of “promoting terror activities”.

For seventy years, Israel has held itself out as a nation under siege.  It has used this talisman to evade and avoid the clear mandate of international law. Nowhere is that more readily apparent and painful than in the Occupied Territory which, with the passage of time, has become illegally annexed and policed by military force of law.

Jails do not break the back of resistance. They firm it with the price expected for the cost of freedom. In Palestine, it is a price willingly embraced by both the young and those who have aged with the slam of the prison gate.

Perhaps one day, Israel will awaken to the truth that the siege it fights is the very one it promotes. Until then, neither the military nor its sham courts will quell the taste of freedom or the natural beckon for it.

Parallel Worlds: Gaza and Israel

Originally published December 29. 2017 in

by Stanley L. Cohen

History is inexplicable.  It has a way of seizing the chosen few to deliver a commanding message that transcends the tapered, often rote, confines of time, place and journey.

Like the mystery of magic, defining moments seem to find powerful launch through the flash of a sudden second and echo through the voice of those destined to become iconic well beyond the rhyme of powerful lyric alone.

To them, theirs is a journey of the ages. For those fortunate enough to witness such passage it is a transcendent reminder that greatness is measured not through acquired wealth or power but by the prompt of the principle, courage and sacrifice of the few.

Who can forget Faris Odeh, 15 years old when he stared down a tank with little more than a stone in his hand, murdered by Israel in Gaza?  Or 23 year old Rachel Corrie, on that mist covered morning, armed with a bullhorn as she faced off against a bulldozer to save a home, murdered by Israel in Gaza.

And now legend has taken 29 year old Ibrahim Abu Thuraya from us.  Disabled but not disarmed, he had the boldness to stand his ground clutching his weapon, the flag he loved… murdered by Israel in Gaza.

What is there about a tiny enclave known as Gaza that so offends, so alarms, so intimidates Israel? It would be far too easy to say nothing and simply reduce it to Tel Aviv’s voracious chase of its off-shore gas reserves or its potential as a Mediterranean tourist coastline …once cleansed of its native population and the destruction which bears the marked Star of David.

No. Gaza terrorizes Israel not by force of arms but through the endless resound of its resilience and the muscle of its inspiration.

To millions of Palestinians under siege in Palestine, or those forcibly exiled by a Diaspora now 70 years of age, and to its chorus of supporters worldwide, Gaza stands as a shining beacon of resistance and hope.  Yet, to romanticize Gaza is to lend excuse to Israel and no such apologia will be offered here.

50 miles from the destruction that is Gaza sits Tel Aviv… as so much a marker of grotesque Israeli indifference.

Indeed, not a day passes without a new tease from the “third hottest city” in the world and “party capitol of the middle east” whether it’s the pristine Mediterranean seashore, cosmopolitan restaurants, coffeehouses, and galleries or hip after hour dance and bar scene of the “City that Never Sleeps.”

Ranked as the 25th most important financial center in the world, Tel Aviv has the third-largest economy of any city in the Middle East and draws well over a million international visitors annually to its numerous upscale hotels. Home to Israel’s only stock exchange, it has some 70 skyscrapers as tall as an American football field and includes one with 80 floors topped by a spire 150 feet in height.

Described as a “miniature Los Angeles,” Tel Aviv has been called one of the 10 most technologically influential cities in the world. Serving as home to numerous venture-capital firms and scientific research institutes, it has hundreds of startup companies, textile plants and food manufacturers.

Israel’s second largest municipality, Tel Aviv never wants for “culture” and entertainment. Its population of almost half a million, with an unemployment rate of approximately 4% and income 20% above the national average, can choose from eighteen of Israel’s 35 major centers for the performing arts. The Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center is home of the Israeli Opera and the Cameri Theatre. The Heichal HaTarbut is Tel Aviv’s largest theatre and home to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

But an hour’s drive, yet worlds away, sits Gaza; home to two million Palestinians.

Once known, in polite social circles, as the earth’s largest open air prison, it long ago moved on from jail to Israeli administered death camp. Whether by embargo or bombs, it is simply impossible to watch the life and death of the coastal enclave without seeing Israel’s criminal plan unfold.

With the first blush of sunrise, the streets of Gaza City fill rapidly with those who’ve survived its ritual night of darkness illuminated solely by bursts of another Israeli bombing run.  For them, with each passing hour, the taste of daylight portends a constant race against what little time remains to shop at empty markets, rush for medicines long gone, or dangerously dated, search for missing bottled water, or attend to the needs of family too paralyzed or ill to join the chase.

While Tel Aviv remains a constant tease of new ventures, glorious dining and enrapt theater going, Gaza lives a repetition of bare survival… at least for the lucky.

For others, it’s an endless wail of mourn as infants are laid to rest with lungs once barely filled with the breath of life. Alongside them sleep the young who, traumatized by the unbearable pain of living, tragically surrendered to the calm of willing death. Next to them lie the “elderly” who grew old and ill far too soon while their generation is coming of age and power everywhere else.

By now, it seems some have grown inured, indeed, comfortable with the visible suffer that is uniquely Gaza. Unlike an explosive genocide that unfolds overnight, impossible for many to ignore, Gaza has long simmered out of sight…out of mind.

Entering its second decade of complete isolation and embargo, Gaza periodically, inevitably, explodes from mindless rage in which Israel seeks to “mow the lawn” for little more than the embattled enclave’s determined resilience.

In late 2008 through early 2009, Israel unleashed an all out military attack on the defenseless population of Gaza. When the toxic white phosphorous cleared, some 1,417, mostly civilians, lay dead along with 13 Israeli soldiers… 4 from friendly fire.

In 2014, Israel undertook a 50 day all-out assault on Gaza as it once again targeted the entire enclave with massive disproportionate force.

Although some debate continues over the exact results, according to most estimates up to 2,310 were killed of whom 1,492 were civilians, including 551 children and 299 women. Another 10,895 were wounded including 3,374 children of whom 1,000 were left permanently disabled. 

Among the infrastructure leveled were 220 factories, dairy farms with livestock and the orange groves of Beit Hanoun.  138 schools and 26 health facilities were damaged and thousands of homes totally destroyed or severely damaged. The lone power station in Gaza and its transmission lines was targeted and severely damaged.  Sewage pumps and a major sewage pipe serving 500,000 inhabitants were destroyed. 10 out of 26 hospitals were damaged or destroyed along with several TV stations. 203 mosques were damaged, with 73 destroyed … along with two of Gaza’s three Christian churches.

Israel lost 66 soldiers and 5 civilians, including one child. 469 Israeli soldiers and 261 civilians were injured.

Four years later, conditions have only worsened in Gaza. Where once the UN announced it would be uninhabitable by 2020, for all intents and purposes, that day has come and gone. Yet the determination of its people continues on.

Gaza Today

Today, years of Israeli attacks and siege, have left Gaza reeling from an absence of a basic infrastructure capable of meeting even the minimal needs of its two million people.

Whether its electricity, clean water, healthcare, or sewage treatment and waste management, Gaza is undergoing a very public humanitarian crisis now entering its second decade.

In Gaza, abject poverty is rampant. At 41.1 percent, the unemployment rate is the highest in the world. Its youth unemployment is 64 percent. Currently there are 50,000 young women and men with university and graduate degrees unable to find work in their chosen fields… or any other. That figure grows each year by some 17,000 to 18,000. While once the industrial and production sectors offered more than 120,000 job opportunities per year, now less than 7,000 such positions become available.

Although thousands of homes damaged or destroyed during Israel’s attack in 2014 are still in need of repair, the construction sector is practically idle and essentially out of business. It used to contribute to about 22 percent of local production and offered some 70,000 job opportunities.

Sixty per cent of Gaza lives under the poverty line. Over a fifth of it lives in “deep poverty.” According to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), “over 80 percent of the people in Gaza depend on humanitarian assistance.”

Another report by UNOCHA found that over 80 percent of its displaced families have borrowed money to get by in the past year, over 85 percent purchased most of their food on credit, and over 40 percent have decreased their consumption of food.

According to UNICEF a third of Gaza’s children suffer from chronic malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies that can stunt development and affect overall health.

In other, less visible, ways, the residual impact of years of Israeli attacks and a decade long siege have produced a palpable and deleterious psychological impact on the people in Gaza.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack OCHA estimated that at least 373,000 children required psychosocial support. Today the UNRWA Community Mental Health Programme has found that Gazans are experiencing increasingly higher levels of stress and distress. The World Health Organization (WHO) has found Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to be widespread with studies indicating that upwards of 54% of Gaza’s children, teens and adults either symptomatic, or suffering from its full-on effects.

According to WHO between 10 and 20 percent of the population suffer from severe mental illness. Because of isolation, community pressure or lack of treatment opportunities the figure is likely much higher. Once unheard of, suicide has now becoming a familiar occurrence in Gaza clearly suggesting that the coping skills of Palestinians are being exhausted. Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported at least 95 people tried to commit suicide in the Gaza Strip in the first quarter of 2016, a nearly 40 percent increase from previous years.

Life in Darkness

For nearly a decade, Tel Aviv has held a yearly blackout in support of Earth Hour. Meanwhile, millions of nearby Palestinians struggle to eke out a life of bare existence with twenty-one hours of darkness each and every day.

Indeed, while Tel Aviv has converted an idle power station named “Gan HaHashmal” (Electricity Park) into a public park, recently OCHA published new data that shows electricity for Gaza has dropped to a total of just three hours daily and at times that vary from day to day. Lacking any advance notice as to when the electricity will go on, or off, the most rudimentary of life’s work is left largely to little more than blind wish leaving familial, educational, employment and health tasks either undone or incomplete.

According to the WHO, power cuts and fuel shortages have created constant crises for Gaza’s 14 public hospitals; threatening the closure of essential health services leaving thousands of people without access to life-saving medical care.

In Shifa hospital, tiny premature babies, some with multiple infections or congenital diseases, lie crammed in incubators fighting for life as lights sputter. With electricity virtually cut off, their life support is entirely powered by a generator with unpredictable current.

At any given time, power loss threatens the lives of hundreds of the new-born and adults in neonatal and intensive care units and some 658 patients requiring bi-weekly haemodialysis, including 23 children. Refrigeration systems for blood and vaccine storage are also at risk.

With adversity often the mother of invention, many in Gaza have struggled to keep pace with the needs of energy through use of poorly vented generator systems and candle light when available. According to Al Mezan, 29 people including 24 children have died since 2010 from fire or suffocation incidents related to attempts to overcome power outage. In one such tragedy, three siblings were killed after their home caught fire from the candles being used during the power outage.

Water Crises in Gaza

While Tel Aviv holds a yearly contest with an award of free parking to the family that has consumed the least amount of water, in Gaza it would be a competition without a challenge.

As a result of repeated attacks that have targeted Gaza’s water infrastructure… and a 10 year embargo on materials necessary for its repair, a crises in the making has now reached one of epic proportions unmatched anywhere else in the world.

For two million people, it is estimated that 3% of the water of Gaza remains fit for human consumption. In particular, it poses grave risks to its children.

As a result of untreated sewage dumped into the Mediterranean Sea, agricultural chemicals and unfiltered seawater, the rest of Gaza’s water is dangerous; 68% of it biologically contaminated during storage or transportation to Gaza’s households. Indeed, recent studies have shown Gaza’s water contains a large concentration of chloride… as well, nitrate rates two to eight times higher than the WHO recommends.

Recently the UN warned its underground water aquifer, upon which the territory is almost entirely dependent, will soon be completely contaminated; stripping Gaza of access to all its water.

With the shortage of clean water comes the well based fear of a deadly cholera epidemic… particularly in a community with an unusually young population.  This is all the more likely where signs of acute malnutrition and severe wasting are an increasing phenomenon among the young children in Gaza.

Healthcare Dying

Cancer rates are exploding in Gaza. A decade of Israeli wars has poisoned its soil and water, leaving depleted uranium in their wake. Daily spray of insecticides used by Israel to clear border areas, have exacerbated what is becoming a deadly environmental disaster to a community long under siege through every means possible.

According to the head of oncology at Shifa Hospital, today Gaza produces 90 cases of cancer per 100,000 people compared with 65 in 2010. These statistics are particularly ominous given the unusually young population of Gaza with 60% of its residents under 25. Due to a lack of early diagnosis and treatment options in Gaza, women with breast cancer are dying at rates two to three times those receiving first world care.

On top of its energy crises, Gaza suffers from a chronic shortage of hospital beds, medical equipment and specialist physicians.

Treatment for an estimated 6,000 cerebral palsy patients is particularly problematic with many families unable to cover the cost of its specialized care. Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesman for Gaza’s Health Ministry notes:

The poor financial conditions of families (means they) cannot take responsibility for their children who suffer from cerebral palsy or provide them with medical care such as physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy.

According to the World Bank, 56 % of all Palestinians have no access to “reasonable and customary” healthcare. For those few, in Gaza, with the financial ability to obtain necessary health care, a lack of embargoed “sensitive” medications has created a “very very dangerous” situation with dozens of drugs unavailable… including antibiotic skin ointment and medicines to treat infants born with hypoglycemia and to counteract venomous snake bites. The UN reports that 34% of essential life preserving drugs at the Central Drug Store in Gaza are completely out of stock.

According to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel  (PHRI), the public health system is not able to provide specialized treatments for complex medical problems in a variety of fields including neonatal care, cardiology, orthopedics and oncology. Moreover, nearly 50 percent of Gaza’s medical equipment is outdated and the average wait for spare parts is approximately six months. With few functioning mammography machines and the unavailability of radiation treatment, lumpectomies and plastic surgery, women with breast cancer routinely receive mastectomies as the only option.

The energy crisis has shed light on the huge rise in babies born with congenital, and other, disabilities who are waiting to leave Gaza for specialist treatment in Israel or elsewhere. For many, the wait for the much sought after exit permit can prove too long to survive.

Recently, three seriously ill babies died after permits to grant the children treatment in Israel were denied by the Palestinian Authority.  Earlier this year, a 5 year old girl with cerebral palsy died while waiting permission from Israel to leave for external treatment.  Not long thereafter, another 5 year old boy and 22 year old man died waiting permission to obtain treatment outside of Gaza.

Ka’enat Mustafa Ja’arour, 42, died of uterine cancer while awaiting a response to her permit request for treatment at a hospital in Jerusalem.  In May, 52-year-old Talat Mahmoud Sulaiman al-Shawi, a resident of Rafah, died after being denied entry to Israel to treat a kidney tumor. In August, Fatin Nader Ahmed, 26, died in hospital, while awaiting a travel permit for treatment for her brain cancer.

So far this year, 20 patients have died after their exit permits were either denied or not granted in time. Physicians report that another 10 who, in July, died of cancer but could have been saved if they had been transferred elsewhere for treatment.

A short distance from Gaza, Israeli patients receive the benefit of complex medical treatment from some of the finest and most specialized hospital and emergency care centers in the world.

The Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center has been selected as one of the world’s top 10 medical destinations specializes in adult and pediatric neurosurgery, orthopedic and surgical oncology, kidney-pancreas transplants, liver transplants, micro neurosurgery and trauma.

The Assuta Hospital, in Tel Aviv, is part of Israel’s largest private medical service and offers surgeries and diagnostic procedures in all fields of medicine; including cardiology, oncology, gynecology and urology.

The Wolfson Medical Center, on the southern border of Tel Aviv, addresses a wide range of health conditions from malaria to diabetes and heart conditions and specialty care in ENT, orthopedics, infectious diseases, pediatrics, OB/GYN, family medicine and psychiatry.

Meanwhile, back in Gaza, Yara Bakheet, age 4, and Aya Abu Mutalq, age 5, are laid to rest… denied access to basic medical treatment that would have saved their lives but for Israel’s delay in granting an exit visa for treatment.

Gaza Lives

In the light of this nightmare, some wonder what can drive hundreds, at times, thousands of young women and men to the edge of steel barricades and barbed wire that make their home a prison built of walls but not of silence.  Yet they struggle on as they toss stones at soldiers hundreds of yards away and ignite fires that pose no threat but speak loudly of freedom.

Ultimately, it’s the indefatigable spirit of these 140 square miles of self-determination that threatens the myth, indeed, puts the lie to the grand sale of an all powerful and democratic Israel.

What little mark Israel has built and, ultimately, will leave behind in the assembled home it seized has been erected not by the call of principled purpose but the drive to become but another mini-empire in a region long known for despots that have placed economic and political profit before people.

At day’s end, it’s a legacy that knows no home, or welcome, but that of brute force.

For empires large and small, real or sham, history is but a predictable march of gaudy pretense.  Gilded shacks built of shallow stilts and tattered shrines, theirs is homage to little more than empty tease. It’s who and what they are… it’s what they do… at least until they crash. And sooner or later they all crash.

Be assured, Israel will not be the exception.

Yes, empires come and go like so much a cheap, but deadly, chase for a call in eternity that welcomes no such guest.  For the learned, it’s a lesson of history acquired not by 140 characters but by keen informed observation. For far too many, empty sound bites have, today, become a defining vision without a view.

Yet, there are crossroads in history where an image, a single glance, depicts more powerfully than the finest of poetic verse, a statement of principle, determination and sacrifice which inspires the winds of time for evermore.

Somewhere, right now Faris Odeh, Rachel Corrie and Ibrahim Abu Thuraya smile down upon us as history’s hope and eternity’s message.

Ahed Tamimi… A Child Who Is Not

Since writing this, Ahed’s father has also been arrested.

rebel.lio

Ahed Tamimi… A Child Who Is Not

I understand the sense with which people opt to protest the arrest of Ahed Tamimi with claims she is just a child, however, Ahed is a warrior. Her childhood was stolen, along with that of her siblings, by thief in the night Israel. She was raised a warrior. Had to be.. like all the other youth of Palestine. The youth of Palestine are armed with words, marches, banners and flags… and, yes, stones, bottles, slingshots and fire. Fighting against an occupying, colonizing, heavily armed military is the life to which they are born. Living precariously on the soil of generations, not knowing on which day or what moment the soil will be stolen or family will be stolen, homes destroyed, brothers or sisters shot, maimed, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and friends beaten, arrested, imprisoned… or worse.

Ahed’s brother, Mo…

View original post 245 more words

Donald Trump: A president swallowed by history

by Stanley L Cohen

{Originally published 12 Dec 2017at al Jazeera}

US President Donald Trump is a great impersonator. Not a day goes by without his desperate effort to masquerade as human. Surrounded by faux gold and fawning fools from his earliest days, Trump has stumbled from scam to scam, bank to bank, grope to grope, as he reached the absolute pinnacle of moral failure. His is a world of cheap thrills, empty rhetoric and intimidating context.

Few of knowledge would stop to challenge Trump’s unprecedented scorecard of international failure. Indeed, ad hoc chaos has become very much the executive order of his day.

Whether it’s a Muslim ban that targets states from which not a single national has engaged in an act of terrorism that has cost the life of a US citizen, to his retweets of videos posted by a British far-right activist, to a pointless border wall styled on hateful votes and little else, to a proposal to seize Iraqi oil as “spoils of war”, his is a hustler’s hustle. It’s the penultimate Ponzi scheme, a boiler-room operation based in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The life of Donald Trump is a full-time campaign to disguise incompetence to the roar of the inept. While the spectre of nuclear holocaust on the Korean Peninsula, military threats to Iran, and attacks on the domestic political aspirations and independence of Venezuela and Cuba may empower those who draw vigour from the echo of empty words, they do little but confound a world built on fragile relations and nuanced exchange. To be sure, they present a clear and real danger to us all.

Those foolish enough to believe the arrival of the Romanovs of Fifth Avenue would herald a tempering of US imperial ambitions were soon disappointed.

Thus, in Yemen, having been empowered to act on its own, the Pentagon unleashed drone slaughters of mostly civilians at an unprecedented pace. From offshore, the US fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles into Syria as an offset to a suspected chemical weapons attack. In Afghanistan, we saw the detonation of the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb as very much a herald to more US troops and to permanent US warfare.

With reckless abandon, Trump has fled from international agreements designed to give hope to the prospect of life for us all long after the debacle of his imperial design comes to its well-deserved end.

The Paris Climate Agreement became the first victim, with the US departing as the only country in the world indifferent to a global call for adoption of clean energy and the phase-out of fossil fuels. With damning nationalist praise, Trump announced to the world he “was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”.

Not long after his coronation, he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, distancing the US from what were its Asian economic allies. Later, citing its alleged anti-Israel bias, he withdrew from UNESCO, which the US helped found in the shadow of World War II. Can it be long before the US abandons a nuclear arms-control agreement that has long been, verifiably, working?

US President Donald Trump gestures to show the extent of temperature change he thinks there is, as he announces his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement [Joshua Roberts/Reuters]

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s global “no confidence” rate soared to 74 percent. 

Cast in the light of a presidency certain to soon enter its second year of crude dysfunction, why is anyone, at all, surprised by Trump’s empty, lawless announcementthat the US will hereinafter recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel?

Like the wall for which Mexico will pay, at day’s end, Trump’s apostolic blessing was little more than a “sham show in waiting”, to offer up to a powerful Zionist lobby and ignorant evangelical political base when needed.

Indeed, having shown no understanding of the history or complexity of today’s world, let alone core values of international law, Trump’s gratuitous toss of “legitimacy” to the illegitimate journey of Israel was as predictable as it was desperate.

Jerusalem is not Israeli, by law

Any discussion of Trump’s mindless recent croon about a world-defining moment of 70-plus years, reduced to presidential fiat, alone, must necessarily begin from the reality of international law. To bestow upon an occupation force lawful annexation of land not theirs for the taking is, ultimately, to do little more than insist that the world is flat.

In 1948, when the United Nations recognised Israel as a state, it called for a demilitarised Jerusalem as a separate entity under the protection of its exclusive aegis.

Not long thereafter, pursuant to Resolution 194 (III), the General Assembly declared Jerusalem to be an open city subject to the well-recognised legal principle of internationalisation.

Predictably, not long thereafter, Israel declared Jerusalem to be its capital as it established various government agencies in the western part of the city.

Meanwhile, Jordan continued to exercise formal control of Jerusalem’s eastern section, including, most importantly, the Old City, leaving open its ultimate status to a final settlement of the unresolved “question” of Palestinian statehood. 

All was to radically change as Israel seized and occupied the entire West Bank of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, during the war of 1967, thus rendering it subject to the various protections of the Geneva Convention.

In relevant part, the convention holds it unlawful for an occupying power to transfer its own population into the territory it occupies. In addition, it prohibits the establishment of settlements and the confiscation and annexation of occupied land.

Time and time again, the United Nations, as a toothless organisation, has ordered Israel to cease its expansion of illegal settlements and annexation of occupied Palestinian land.

Time and time again, Israel, as a rogue state, has scoffed at the notion that it owes any obligation whatsoever to well-settled international law. 

Indeed, between 1967 and 1989, the UN Security Council adopted 131 resolutionsdirectly addressing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel held itself out as beyond the reach of these resolutions. 

In 1980, and again in 1990, pursuant to Resolutions 478 and 672, the UN demanded that Israel abide by the Geneva Convention and end the construction of illegal settlements. In doing so, it emphasised the “independence” of the City of Jerusalem and the protection of its “unique spiritual and religious dimension”. Israel ignored this demand.

In February 1999, the Security Council again rebuked Israel’s effort as an occupying power “… to alter the character, legal status and demographic composition of Jerusalem”. Israel ignored this demand.

In point of fact, as of 2015, Israel had been condemned in, and had ignored, some 45 resolutions by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Anyone with even a modicum of historical context, let alone intellectual capacity or interest, would understand that a now seven-decade-old, deadly standoff between Palestine and Israel will not go away by wishful thinking or inane talismanic chant.

Yet that is precisely what Donald Trump did when, with typical denial, he preached on a faux resolution, took credit, and then, with alarming ease, said, “Problem solved … next”.

Ultimately, in a strange sort of way, and in more ways than one, Trump’s unearned arrogance and dramatic disconnect from the crossroads of history and reality may have produced results clearly unintended, yet, necessary.

Oslo is dead

For decades, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has toiled under the well-financed illusion that the Israelis who sat across the negotiation table, and their enablers in Washington, brought more than just the appearance of goodwill to the effort.

Time after time, outrage after outrage, the PA has always returned with hat in hand to the folly of talks which accomplished little, but provided an irrelevant political vent as more and more land was annexed, and lives stolen, to the hum of bombs or the slam of prison doors. 

Palestinian technocrats who started out in their prime with Oslo have now aged beyond hope, along with any illusion of relevance. So, too, the march of time leaves no doubt that Oslo has represented nothing but a palpable pretext for Israel to carry out systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, be it by force of arms or by law.

In the years since Yasser Arafat posed with Yitzhak Rabin and renounced armed struggle, three US presidents have come and gone. Each has sold a perverse balance that the US could, somehow, play objective arbiter in the midst of a one-sided slaughter supported, all the while, by US politics and money.

US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands as they deliver remarks before a dinner at Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem [Ariel Schalit/Reuters]

However, do give Donald Trump credit where credit is due. With one, short, slurred speech, he peeled away, forever more, the veneer of any US integrity or independence when it comes to facilitating a just and equitable resolution, respecting the rights and aspirations of Palestinians. 

Oslo is a failed, futile fantasy that has filled the coffers of the few while the many have suffered from an economic strangle-hold dressed up in institutional benevolence that, in reality, has been used primarily by the PA to buy and control political winds and opposition.

Any reasonable read must lead to the conclusion that the long terminally-ill Oslo has died, along with its whimsical two-state solution, when Trump, essentially, told the PA to shut its doors and walk away.

Hopefully, 82-year-old Mahmoud Abbas got the message loud and clear.

The one state solution

It is well past reality’s reach that a two-state solution can, at this late date, provide a viable vehicle for meaningful Palestinian sovereignty or for overall peace.

The notion that a series of disconnected Bantustans – stripped of a traditional land base, natural resources, and the unique centre of religious and faith-based history – can suddenly become a feasible independent state for millions of stateless Palestinians is fool’s gold.

Ultimately, no matter what its form or shape, the essence of statehood is the ability to develop and maintain political and economic institutions and security and to control borders, including air rights and, where applicable, seaports.

To suggest that Israel would cede any degree of meaningful self-determination, in these all-defining cornerstones of sovereignty, to a Palestinian state is simply laughable, in light of its decades-long practices.

Indeed, at this late date, there is but one solution acceptable to the millions of Palestinian living as refugees abroad or suffering under apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing fueled by supremacist hate: one state for all from the river to the sea.

It matters not whether this state becomes a system of independent, but connected, cantons – as in Switzerland. What is important is that the single state embraces no official state religion, ensures equal protection and rights for all, guarantees “one person, one vote”, and opens all jobs, roads and communities. What is also important is that it is based not on race, religion or politics but on the willingness to struggle for a collective good that will at long last serve the united interest of one people.

While some will surely scoff at this notion and, perhaps, find little hope for its success, unification provides the sole means by which Palestinians and Jews, Muslims and Christians can begin to heal the wounds that have long divided people that, left to their own unimpeded devices, would find much more that unites them than divides.

Lest there be any claim of naivete, the road to a one-state resolution is, of course, littered with more than mere encumbrances of communities, schools and highways long segregated by barricades and barbed wire.

Seventy years of forced displacement, death and destruction have left, for many, the scars born of tears and hate. Only time and unification can begin to heal those wounds and end the nightmare. All else is just sheer destructive folly.

For Israelis, who see delay as their ally, it’s a false hope born of little more than convenient denial. “Out of sight, out of mind” does not solve a crisis but simply puts off its reckoning to another day – one which grows more difficult and demanding with the passage of time.

All occupations, large and small, ultimately awaken one day to find themselves captive to a “graveyard of empires”. Here, it will be no different.

The eternal capital of Palestine

Today, in Palestine and in Israel, there are more than 5 million Palestinians with the median age of 19 years. They will not go away or surrender to the silence of the night.

For years, the young women and men of Palestine have been in the vanguard of an unbroken national effort to reclaim their freedom and rebuild their state.

For them, the price has been dear. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Information, since 2000, alone, Israel has killed more than 3,000 Palestinian minors. During the same period, Israeli forces have injured another 13,000 youth and arrested more than 12,000 others. Today, Israel holds about 300 children in its prisons.

Despite an awful price exacted for their courage and resistance, for the young women and men of Palestine, the future holds no truth but one, built on a determined struggle to confront and end a criminal occupation and apartheid by any means necessary, including armed struggle. 

For Palestinians, history is, indeed, a guidepost of what is yet to come. For Palestinians, history is an unbroken saga, handed down from the elderly in refugee camps throughout the Middle East to their very young who find comfort in the cultural breath of dabke.

Mr Trump: Were you an informed observer of history, you would know well that this is not the first time the US has tried to designate a city as the capital of a state against the political and historical will of its people. 

In Vietnam, such an attempt did not end well, as Saigon eventually gave way to the legitimate, national aspirations and rights of millions who refused to be held captive by the imperial design of a foreign occupation force.

Yes, Mr President, history does, and will indeed, repeat itself.

Capitals are much more than cold, sculpted monuments to those that have come before, or warehouses of political ideals and rights beyond the reach of all but the chosen few. Nor can they inspire from behind barricaded buildings in which petty despots dole out rights and benefits based upon one’s mere name or faith. 

Capitals are homes to collective freedom and will, with open doors that know no artificial boundaries or lawful segregation. To be honest, to empower, they must represent the collective will and aspirations of all those who look to them for justice and opportunity.

For millions of Palestinians, that capital is Jerusalem. It weaves with the rock of the ages and hums to the tune of history. To walk down the ancient pathways of the Old City, to hear the call to prayer, to look out in all directions from Al-Aqsa plaza across the open and free expanse beyond its age-old walls is a journey that is Jerusalem.

Nothing that you, Donald Trump, can say or do will undo the magic and majesty that is Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Palestine.

Can A Congress Of Nations Grow A Spine In Time To Save The World

rebel.lio

Can A Congress Of Nations Grow A Spine In Time To Save The World

“The US no longer sees the world as a global community, but as a fighting arena where everyone has to seek their own advantage,” Mr Gabriel told the Berlin Foreign Policy Forum, according to German newspaper Deutsche Welle.

“Germany can no longer simply react to US policy but must establish its own position… even after Trump leaves the White House, relations with the US will never be the same.”

Ignorance… The State of Ignoring

Prior to 1939, world leaders were witness to a gradual buildup of militarization within a nation previously brought to surrender in a world war prefaced by a gradual buildup also witnessed by world leaders. The outcome of such buildup was, of course, another world war and another surrender. A portrait of history ignored until the last moment… too late…

View original post 1,803 more words

Peter Kassig the Untold Story

caged but undaunted

Peter Kassig the Untold Story

{Previously published in Arabic in Newsweek Middle East & in English by The MideastWire Blog

*By Stanley Cohen

The life of a “radical” defense attorney in the United States is a seamless journey of never ending, tense, often complex battles with implications that extend well beyond a given case or the courthouse doors. At times, some of these struggles necessarily make for strange bedfellows.

The life and death of Peter Kassig is one such journey.

To activist attorneys, in particular, people’s liberty… on occasion their very lives… comes at us in waves of political uncertainty sculpted by events and decisions over which we have little control.

I had just finished almost two years of non-stop work on behalf of Suliman Abu Ghayth, Usama Bin Laden’s son-in law. Having been released from prison in Iran, Abu Ghayth was kidnapped by the US from Jordan after tasting…

View original post 7,034 more words

Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle

caged but undaunted

**Originally published in Al Jazeera July 20. 2017. This is the unedited version with original title and links**

For Some, History is a Failed Recollection (Original Title)

Long ago, it was settled that resistance… even armed struggle… against a colonial occupation force is not just recognized under international law but specifically endorsed.

In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.

Article 1 (4) of Additional Protocol I provides that “international armed conflict” include those in which people are fighting against “colonial domination, alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.”

Finding evolving vitality in humanitarian law, for decades the General Assembly of the United Nations (UNGA)… once described as the collective conscience…

View original post 2,041 more words

Breaking With Qatar

caged but undaunted

Originally published in Counterpunch June 9, 2017

byStanley L. Cohen

There are provocative, if not dangerous, crossroads in history which can easily take us down either smart or dim-witted paths. I suspect the recent break in relations with Qatar announced by KSA, UAE and Egypt . . .  and with the full blessing, if not lead, of the White House… will prove to be one such weighty moment.

I also suspect that with Trump in the vanguard there is a great chance he will turn a periodic and unfortunate regional flex into a tragic raging fire. Lost for meaning and purpose… it’s what he does best.

I’m no stranger to the region having spent much time there, over the past few decades, as a welcome guest, attorney, advisor and friend who has seen and shared in both its beauty and its pain.

There’s no country, in…

View original post 1,171 more words

Where Food is More than Nourishment

caged but undaunted

Unedited copy of article originally published at al Jazeera May 31, 2017

Where Food is More than Nourishment

Count time, count time, count time. In prisons all across the world, in as many different languages as there are cruel autocratic despots hanging on to ruthless power, political prisoners are called out from the isolation of their cell-blocks to stand for a moment to ensure they’ve somehow not magically escaped from the dungeons and catacombs they call home. What’s missed? For them, prison is a choice… principle is not.

The march from Bobby Sands to Mandela to Palestinian hunger strikers is steady and unbroken. It derives its strength from resistance as ancient as tyranny itself. Often faceless to most but themselves, each collective that has struggled to maintain personal dignity in pursuit of shared justice has become a torch bearer… inheritors of an age-old arch of liberty bound by resistance, sacrifice…

View original post 3,061 more words

If the international community is willing, Hamas’ declaration can mark a turning point

Dr Ahmed Yousef

Wednesday 3 May 2017 11:32 UTC

The movement’s document could mark a step towards a lasting solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – but will the message be heard?

 

Three years ago, I wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian in which I sought to correct the inaccurate, though prevalent, perception of Hamas as a movement whose resistance against Israel is driven by religion, in general, and a hatred of Judaism, in particular.

There has been an active unwillingness to hear the repeated efforts of senior members of Hamas to clarify the movement’s position towards Israel and the conflict

“Hamas draws inspiration from faith; yet religion has little to do with our struggle,” I wrote at the time. I attempted to explain the journey and evolution that Hamas has undergone since its foundation it the 1980s.

Unfortunately, to date there is little evidence that this message has yet been universally understood amongst the international community. Rather, it seems that at times there has been an active unwillingness, and especially amongst Western societies, to hear the repeated efforts of senior members of Hamas to clarify the movement’s position regarding Israel and the conflict.

Despite this failure to acknowledge earlier efforts to explain its motives, Hamas has released a document this week attempting again to convey the movement’s current thinking on several key issues.

A struggle against occupation

The document makes it clear that Hamas differentiates between Judaism, a religion towards which there is no hostility and whose adherents should be respected, and the current occupation of Palestinian land by Israel – against which there is a legal and moral right to resist.

Put simply, the struggle is not against Jews but against the occupation and Israeli rogue state, whose government persistently pursues policies aimed at humiliating and depriving the Palestinians of their basic rights of independence and self governance.

Although the Palestinian people can never be forced to give up the dream of returning to their ancestral homelands, this new document reflects political realities that we face in the present day.

In line with the position of other Palestinian national movements, Hamas has expressed a willingness to accept a Palestinian state along 1967 borders, provided that the Palestinian people are free to live in dignity, security and with recognition of their right to sovereignty, self-determination and complete independence of Israel.

Years of debate

Some may be sceptical of these claims, arguing that it is at best a tactical shift that masks the “real” nature of Hamas which is best reflected in the Charter of 1988. But such arguments are fundamentally flawed.

Hamas’ declaration is all the more remarkable when the devastation and loss of thousands of Palestinians in the three wars since 2008 is taken into account

As I have written previously, the 1988 charter was a product of the circumstances that prevailed at the time and should be understood as an expression of the deep anger, frustration and hopelessness that stems from the continued illegal occupation that laid at the heart of the first Intifada.

In contrast, this new document is the product of years of thinking and debate, among both Hamas’ leadership and the rank and file of the movement. Indeed, it would have been impossible for the leadership to make such a public declaration without broad acceptance or it would have risked alienating its own base.

Hamas’ declaration is all the more remarkable when the devastation and loss of thousands of Palestinians in the three wars since 2008, along with the daily costs of the siege of Gaza, is taken into account. That Hamas is still pressing ahead with this decision despite this recent history is a reflection of the deep commitment to the values and principles contained within the document.

In April 2017, Palestinian children play among the ruins of a building in Gaza City destroyed during the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2014 (AFP)

Accordingly, I believe that this new document represents a historic opportunity. If the international community is willing to hear its message, it could mark the beginning of a new conversation with Hamas. This could lead to a genuine exchange and dialogue that creates understanding. Such a conversation marks an essential first step in the journey towards a lasting peaceful solution to the conflict.

If, on the other hand, this gesture is rejected like previous ones, and people continue to wrongly associate Hamas with an extremism that seeks regional domination and the destruction of those who do not share our Islamic beliefs, it can only undermine the efforts of the movement to engage in a meaningful dialogue and risk the continuation of the conflict that has marred life in the region for far too long.

– Dr Ahmed Yousef is a senior political adviser to former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, former deputy of the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the head of the House of Wisdom Institute.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

House of Hate

caged but undaunted

(Originally published on Al Jazeera March, 30, 2017)

House of Hate

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
―Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

I remember as a young boy sitting and watching my father’s blank stare as he looked at a documentary about WWII and concentration camps. He seemed to travel to distant places, as if he was all alone and not seated there right next to me. Only once did he share with me what he had seen as a soldier when part of a group that had liberated camps.

On that occasion he described carrying the skeletal remains of a still as yet living man from the darkened catacombs far below the ground to the light of day, as they both cried… the survivor because he expected to die and my dad, I am…

View original post 1,438 more words

The White House . . . Denial and Cover-ups

caged but undaunted

(Originally published in Counter Punch March 24, 2017)

The Russian “hack” is sexy. It’s the kind of cabal that can surely draw left and right into a marriage of temporary convenience… perhaps even political warfare, albeit, for different petty reasons. Ultimately, it’s just so much fluff. If you think the so-called Russian hack will in itself drive Donald Trump from power, don’t hold your breath. It just isn’t going to happen.

That’s not to say that Trump’s days are not numbered, but simply to suggest that the pathway to the exit door of this administration is constructed not of digital chips, but rather old school overt acts such as perjury, obstruction of justice and, ultimately, conspiracy. Indeed, how often have you heard it said that the cover-ups are always far worse than the substantive offenses they seek to hide? Just ask…

View original post 1,929 more words