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SRINAGAR, June 12: The killing of Tufail Ahmad, a teenaged boy in police action at Gani Memorial Stadium is yet another indicator of the unabated killings of teenaged boys, continuing despite assurance of zero tolerance to human rights violations, in Kashmir.

These serial innocent killings have generated anguish and fear psychosis among the parents regarding the safety of their children under prevailing circumstances.

The situation at present is reminiscent to some extent of early 90s when people were reluctant to send their teenaged sons outside due to the fear that they may be arrested and killed by the security forces.

When the infamous “Operation Tiger,” by the security personnel, marking the beginning of organised fake encounters was started in early 90s, large number of boys were picked up and killed in custody during crackdowns

They included teenaged students from all over the valley particularly the old city of Srinagar. The incidents of fake encounters in Kashmir by security forces got exposed with Maroof Sultan’s case in 90s. He was one such intended target of fake encounter. Maroof was arrested by BSF while he was traveling in a bus which was stopped at Solina. Maroof was taken to the infamous Papa II interrogation centre where he was brutally tortured and then the security men brought him to Solina bund in the darkness during night and showered bullets on him. Believing him dead, the BSF men left him there and reported to Shergari Police Station that they had killed a militant in an encounter at Solina Bund and recovered a gun from his possession.

The BSF men then asked the cops to recover the body from the spot. As the police party immediately reached the spot they found Maroof alive and in a very critical condition. The injured boy was taken to hospital where he recovered after a long time to reveal the truth to the world.

Later, scores of Kashmiri boys fell prey to bullets in the fake encounters.

And now, the situation is almost taking the same turn. While the teenaged boys in the past were getting killed in crackdowns, now they fall victim to bullets during demonstrations.

“With demonstrations and subsequent police action being order of the day, I remain concerned about the safety of my son when he goes to school or some other work,” said Tehmeena, a housewife.

“On any tense day, my son returning home safe is a huge sigh of relief for me. Parents in the valley are apprehensive of the security of their children even when they go to school,” she added.

Sharing similar views, Abdul Ahad, a businessman, said, “The government must do something practical to address the sense of insecurity getting developed among the parents. Stopping of killing of the boys during demonstrations would be an important step in this direction.”

He viewed that mere promise of zero tolerance for human rights violations may impress those outside Kashmir but not the ones living in Kashmir. “The ground situation is that the zero tolerance does not exist at all. If it existed, then Tufail, Zahid, Wamiq and others would not have got killed,” Ahad said

Zahid was killed on Boulevard Road near Nishat when a BSF party opened fire on him.

Wamiq was killed near Gani Memorial Stadium while he was playing. He was killed by a smoke shell which hit his head. Even after his death, police booked him under attempt to murder case blaming him for pelting stones on cops. The charge was vehemently denied by the family of the deceased boy and eyewitness. Later the state government ordered a magisterial probe into Wamiq’s killing.

“Killing after killing of innocent children and the justification of such killings by the authorities, has all led to frustration among common people here. They do not believe the promises made by authorities for human rights,” said Muntazir Ahmad, a human rights activist.

By Bismah Malik

“We do not need to apologize for defending ourselves. The armada of hate and violence is merely one manifestation of the constant provocation Israel faces.”

(Danny Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel)

Only a member of the Netanyahu Court could stand before the TV cameras of the world and see “hate and violence” in a shipment of wheelchairs, medical supplies and building materials destined for a people ravaged by the savagery of the 20008/2009 Christmas invasion of Gaza. This “Armada” of six boats, bloated into an invading force capable of destroying the British Navy, represents yet again the eternal threat that plagues the Zionist state, “the constant provocation” from the rest of the nations of the world to destroy the tiny democracy created for those who belong to their faith, victims once again.

And why? Doesn’t Israel simply want to defend itself as is the right of every nation? This too, this everlasting question hurled at the world as a justified reason for unwarranted violence, used yet again to impose its will in defiance of International Law that none can question lest they deny their right to self defense. How convenient, especially when no one in the world of nations knows where Israel is, what borders it possesses, what land is rightfully Israel’s, and by what authority that land was given to Israel. But apparently it can claim to defend itself in International waters against 700 civilians, legislators from many lands, peace activists that range in age from one year to 85, from Jews to Christians to Muslims to Atheists, from doctors to lawyers, to merchants to retired men and women, a flotilla of “hate and violence” set on destroying the peaceful state of Israel. A flotilla of mercy, a flotilla of absolute need since the people of Gaza have not only been ravaged by missiles and warships but by illegal weapons of vast devastation, including white phosphorus and depleted uranium, that cause excruciating, agonizing death and left, in the aftermath, to suffer behind locked gates bereft of medical supplies, equipment or the electricity to run the machines of life.

Lawrence Durrell describes a mournful, solitary scene in his guide to the landscape and people of the island of Corfu: “We carried him in his open box to the cemetery on the hill, and all the time this poetry was flowing out of Mother Hubbard in a continuous stream, keeping pace with her tears, for she really loved Taki.’

‘Was the coffin open?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that a religious custom of the island?’

‘No. But under the Turks it was a law to prevent the smuggling of arms in coffins under the pretence of carrying corpses to the grave. In some places it has lingered on among the superstitious.’”

The Turks have obviously moved on from those days centuries ago as they loaded the boat with its items of mercy and verified that process for the Israeli government, a government that has understood its relationship to be a good one, but not good enough to be trusted apparently. The Zionist state trusts no one, obeys no laws but its own, suffers no outsiders like the UN to witness its actions, and perhaps superstitiously or perhaps pathologically must maintain the sickness of victim hood in its citizens or lose their support. Above all, the Zionist government does nothing in the open except by mistake as it did in 2006 when it invaded Lebanon and in its Christmas gifts to the people of Gaza a year ago and hence dropped its hooded and heavily armed mercenaries onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara at 4am while the innocent slept and the darkness hid their insidious attack.

Following the attack on one of its own vessels, Turkey sought justice from the United Nations in the form of a statement “that would condemn Israel for violating international law, demand a UN investigation and demand that Israel prosecute those responsible for the raid and pay compensation to the victims” (The Salt Lake Tribune). But the Obama administration found reason to protect Israel against such a statement just as the Lyndon B. Johnson administration found reason to protect Israel when it attacked the American Naval vessel the USS Liberty 43 years ago, an attack of greater magnitude and consequence than the raid on the Freedom Flotilla, yet just as illegal, just as merciless, and just as revealing of true friendship among nations. To this day, the remaining sailors of that ship seek justice, not from the UN, but from their own representatives in our Congress who deny the attack or obsequiously grovel before the power of the Jewish lobbies that condemn those who condemn Israel for putting American sailors at risk, nay for killing American sailors with impunity, a blatant criminal act against their beloved friend, the United States of America.

What has Obama to fear that he too would capitulate to the demands of the Zionist sympathizers in Congress or his own administration? Have citizens of many countries no rights to sail in international waters to bring medical supplies to a besieged people, imprisoned now in collective punishment for three years, deprived of life’s basic needs by a nation that is among the wealthiest in the world, who live in luxury behind the walls they have erected to incarcerate a people that have no recognized government, no military, no control of their roads, their own housing needs, their own economy. And the world, it seems, supports the nation that creates this horrendous injustice because the President of the United States demands that those who lifted deck chairs to protect themselves from the armed and armored commandos dropped from the sky should be investigated for legal acts of self protection? What nonsense is this? Why does our President, like Johnson 43 years ago, cow-tow before the demands of men like Avigdor Lieberman and Bibi Netanyahu? Consider that a broad array of countries demanded an independent investigation, not just Turkey. Consider the words of the Foreign Minister of Turkey Ahmet Davutoglu, who called the attack “tantamount to banditry and piracy’ it is murder conducted by a state.” Indeed, why do Americans tolerate a nation that attacks its own sailors, that watches as this administration pulls the FBI off of its investigation and prosecution of Israeli spying through AIPAC operatives, and refuses to demand justice for the murder of Rachel Corrie as she acted in true American spirit to protect those who could not protect themselves and suffered a cruel death by Israeli hands for her efforts?

What power does this rogue nation hold over our government? Let’s begin with the two favorite mantras that bind Israel to America: our only friend in the mid-east and the only democracy in the mid-east. Both are lies. Friends do not attack the ship of a friend, a ship that was virtually at the mercy of the US provided aircraft to the Israeli Air Force that pulverized the Liberty while the Israeli Navy attempted to sink the ship with a torpedo. Friends do not use the military weapons of the friend on the friend. Friends do not premeditatedly plan the sinking of a ship to force that friend to believe a lie so that it will enter a war on behalf of Israel against a nation, Egypt, which had done nothing to the United States. These are the actions of a criminal mind, a nation with a criminal mind. Friends do not plan out military attacks against innocent civilians who have devoted their time and money to bring life giving aid to others and demonstrated their true intent before the world’s nations by having their boats inspected only to have Israel not trust any nation but itself. Such actions do not protect the soldiers and sailors of the United States operating in the mid-east, they endanger them.

How democratic is this purported democracy? I’ve written about this subject before (see “Israeli Democracy: Fact or Fiction?”) and will not repeat myself. Let me note here a sample of a nation that does not act democratically as presented by Jonathan Cook, April 9, 2010, about a matter called the “Anat Kamm espionage affair.” Kamm provided hundreds of army documents to Uri Blau, a reporter for Haaretz, that revealed “systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings.” These were published. She now faces life imprisonment as does Blau, who was hiding in England in April. As Cook remarks, “In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defense against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau would be winning journalism prizes, not hiding away in exile.” So much for freedom of speech, right to self-defense, and the public’s right to know the subterfuge of their government. One additional comment should suffice. Tzvia Greenfield makes this observation in her article “Israel’s Choice: Make Peace or Disappear.” “Israel … continues to control the Palestinians and the territories by force. And in order to maintain its Jewish identity, it also has no intention whatsoever of granting them equal civil rights. One does not have to be a critical intellectual to understand that this internal contradiction, in a state that considers itself advanced, Western and democratic, is untenable.” This nation is what our government claims is our only friend and our only democratic bastion in the mid-east. How pathetic.

Yet our President and our Secretary of State declare over and over again that they will defend Israel’s right to “self-defense.” Does that right include defense of the military systematically disobeying laws and the government’s intent to deny equal rights of citizens? Does it also include defense of lands confiscated by Israel or annexed illegally to Israel or declared military security land and wrested from the true owners? How does this nation justify theft by its truest friend and still declare that Palestinians have rights? Let’s have our government officials speak the truth so that we know the true state of our government.

Hypocritically, this is the regime the United States Department of State provides with billions of dollars worth of military weapons yearly that it uses in such illegal ways as the invasion of Gaza, declaring it was defending itself, when in fact it killed in one minute by one missile on the UN school more Gazan civilians than all the rockets fired legally from their occupied land by insurgents since 2000. And this is Israel’s only defense, its right to defend itself.

Who are the terrorists? Why does the United States defend this terrorist state? What laws does the US abide by? The laws as dictated by Israel or the laws as negotiated and agreed upon by the community of nations through the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice. Why, if Israel has done no wrong in this latest of incidents, why does it not present its case before the ICJ and demonstrate to the world that it was right and the international community wrong? What has Israel to fear except the loss of fear by its citizens? And what we may ask does America have to gain by joining the united nations in their call, their demand for justice, an independent investigation (not one conducted by the Israeli military since they, argues our Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, P.J. Crowley, are the best to undertake such an investigation, because they are the most knowledgeable about the matter; how true and how absurd!) that can attest to the reliability of the Israeli accounts and assert whose rights were denied?

Why does Israel have such a difficult time existing without fear and victim hood in the mid-east? Perhaps the Zionist mindset that finds itself alienated from its brothers and sisters around the world because it has created a nation baptized in blood, stealth, theft, and deception must fear the unveiling of its lies and the eruption of the world’s communities to the injustice it has inflicted on the hapless Palestinians and continues to inflict by cementing them behind massive walls of fear and depriving them of a modicum of compassion and brotherly love. Perhaps it is time for Israel to consider that to fester as a boil inside the mid-east, distrusted and isolated, bodes ill for their future and the future of their best friend, the United States, that has supported them blindly these past 63 years. Perhaps for the sake of that friendship they might consider justice for the Palestinians and peace for the world.

By William A. Cook

While the Indian Government considers deploying the army and air force to quell the rebellion in the countryside, strange things are happening in the cities.

On the 2nd of June the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) held a public meeting in Mumbai. The main speakers were Gautam Navlakha, editorial consultant of the Economic and Political Weekly and myself. The press was there in strength. The meeting lasted for more than three hours. It was widely covered by the print media and TV. On June 3rd, several newspapers, TV channels and online news portals like Rediff.com, covered the event quite accurately. The Times of India (Mumbai edition), had an article headlined “We need an idea that is neither Left nor Right”, and the Hindu’s article was headlined “Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?” The recording of the meeting is up on YouTube.

The day after the meeting, the Press Trust of India (PTI) put out a brazenly concocted account of what I had said.

The PTI report was first posted by the Indian Express online on June 3rd 2010 at 13.35 pm. The headline said: “Arundhati backs Maoists, dares authorities to arrest her.” Here are some excerpts:

“Author Arundhati Roy has justified the armed resistance by Maoists and dared the authorities to arrest her for supporting their cause.”

“The Naxal movement could be nothing but an armed struggle. I am not supporting violence. But I am also completely against contemptuous atrocities-based political analysis.” (?)

“It ought to be an armed movement. Gandhian way of opposition needs an audience, which is absent here. People have debated long before choosing this form of struggle,” Roy, who had saluted the “people of Dantewada” after 76 CRPF and police personnel were mowed down by Maoists in the deadliest attack targeting security forces. “‘I am on this side of line. I do not care…pick me up put me in jail,’ she asserted.”

Let me begin with the end of the report. The suggestion that I saluted “the people of Dantewada” after the Maoists killed 76 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) is a piece of criminal defamation. I have made it quite clear in an interview on CNN-IBN that I viewed the death of the CRPF men as tragic, and that I thought they were pawns in a war of the rich against the poor. What I said at the meeting in Mumbai was that I was contemptuous of the hollow condemnation industry the media has created and that as the war went on and the violence spiraled, it was becoming impossible to extract any kind of morality from the atrocities committed by both sides, so an atrocity-based analysis was a meaningless exercise. I said that I was not there to defend the killing of ordinary people by anybody, neither the Maoists nor the government, and that it was important to ask what the CRPF was doing with 27 AK-47s, 38 INSAS, 7 SLRs, 6 light machine guns, one stengun and a two-inch mortar in tribal villages. If they were there to wage war, then being railroaded into condemning the killing of the CRPF men by the Maoists meant being railroaded into coming down on the side of the Government in a war that many of us disagreed with.

The rest of the PTI report was a malicious, moronic mish-mash of what transpired at the meeting. My views on the Maoists are clear. I have written at length about them. At the meeting I said that the people’s resistance against the corporate land grab consisted of a bandwidth of movements with different ideologies, of which the Maoists were the most militant end. I said the government was labeling every resistance movement, every activist, ‘Maoist’ in order to justify dealing with them in repressive, military fashion. I said the government had expanded the meaning of the word ‘Maoist’ to include everybody who disagreed with it, anybody who dared to talk about justice. I drew attention to the people of Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur who were waging peaceful protests but were living under siege, surrounded by hundreds of armed police, were being lathi-charged and fired at. I said that local people thought long and hard before deciding what strategy of resistance to adopt. I spoke of how people who lived deep inside forest villages could not resort to Gandhian forms of protest because peaceful satyagraha was a form of political theatre that in order to be effective, needed a sympathetic audience, which they did not have. I asked how people who were already starving could go on hunger strikes. I certainly never said anything like “it ought to be an armed movement.” (I’m not sure what on earth that means.)

I went on to say that all the various resistance movements today, regardless of their differences, understood that they were fighting a common enemy, so they were all on one side of the line, and that I stood with them. But from this side of the line, instead of only asking the government questions, we should ask ourselves some questions. Here are my exact words:

“I think it is much more interesting to interrogate the resistance to which we belong, I am on this side of the line. I am very clear about that. I don’t care, pick me up, and put me in jail. I am on this side of the line. But on this side of the line, we must turn around and ask our comrades questions.”

I then said that while Gandhian methods of resistance were not proving to be effective, Gandhian movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan had a radical and revolutionary vision of “development” and while the Maoists methods of resistance were effective, I wondered whether they had thought through the kind of “development” they wanted. Apart from the fact that they were against the Government selling out to private corporations, was their mining policy very different from state policy? Would they leave the bauxite in the mountain – which is what the people who make up their cadre want, or would they mine it when they came to power?

I read out Pablo Neruda’s “Standard Oil Company” that tells us what an old battle this one is.

The PTI reporter who had made it a point to take permission from the organizers to record cannot claim his or her version to be a matter of ‘interpretation’. It is blatant falsification. Surprisingly the one-day-old report was published by several newspapers in several languages and broadcast by TV channels on June 4th, many of whose own reporters had covered the event accurately the previous day and obviously knew the report to be false. The Economic Times said: “Publicity seeking Arundhati Roy wants to be Aung San Su Kyi”. I’m curious – why would newspapers and TV channels want to publish the same news twice, once truthfully and then falsely?

That same evening (June 4th), at about seven O’clock, two men on a motorcycle drove up to my home in Delhi and began hurling stones at the window. One stone nearly hit a small child playing on the street. Angry people gathered and the men fled. Within minutes, a Tata Indica arrived with a man who claimed to be a reporter from Zee TV, asking if this was “Arundhati Roy’s house” and whether there had been trouble. Clearly this was a set up, a staged display of ‘popular anger’ to be fed to our barracuda-like TV channels. Fortunately for me, that evening their script went wrong. But there was more to come. On June 5th the Dainik Bhaskar in Raipur carried a news item “Himmat ho to AC kamra chhod kar jungle aaye Arundhati” (If she has the guts Arundhati should leave her airconditioned room and come to the jungle) in which Vishwaranjan, the Director General of Police of Chhattisgarh challenged me to face the police by joining the Maoists in the forest. Imagine that- the police DGP and me, Man to Man. Not to be outdone, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Chhattisgarh, Ms Poonam Chaturvedi announced to the press that I should be shot down at a public crossroad, and that other traitors like me should be given the death sentence. (Perhaps someone should tell her that this sort of direct incitement to violence is an offense under the Indian Penal Code.) Mahendra Karma, Chief of the murderous ‘peoples’ militia the Salwa Judum which is guilty of innumerable acts of rape and murder, asked for legal action to be taken against me. On Tuesday June 8th the Hindi daily Nayi Duniya reported that complaints have been filed against me in two separate police stations in Chhattisgarh, Bhata Pada and Teli Bandha, by private individuals objecting to my “open support for the Maoists.

Is this what Military Intelligence calls psyops (psychological operations)? Or is it the urban avatar of Operation Green Hunt? In which a government news agency helps the home-ministry to build up a file on those it wants to put away, inventing evidence when it can’t find any? Or is PTI trying to deliver the more well-known among us to the lynch mob so that the government does not have to risk its international reputation by arresting or eliminating us? Or is it just a way of forcing a crude polarization, a ridiculous dumbing down of the debate-if you’re not with “us” you are a Maoist? Not just a Maoist, but a stupid, arrogant, loudmouthed Maoist. Whatever it is, it’s dangerous, and shameless, but it isn’t new. Ask any Kashmiri, or any young Muslim being held as a “terrorist” without any evidence except baseless media reports. Ask Mohammed Afzal, sentenced to death to “satisfy the collective conscience of society.”

Now that Operation Green Hunt has begun to knock on the doors of people like myself, imagine what’s happening to activists and political workers who are not well known. To the hundreds that are being jailed, tortured and eliminated. June 26th is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Emergency. Perhaps the Indian people should declare (because the government certainly won’t) that this country is in a state of Emergency. (On second thoughts, did it ever go away?) This time censorship is not the only problem. The manufacture of news is an even more serious one.

By Arundhati Roy

General Stanley McChrystal wasn’t fired for the name calling and sarcasm in the recent Rolling Stone article, or for a lack of military decorum and good discipline. He was fired for telling the truth about the mission in Afghanistan in a statement he made in March.

“We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.” This statement is the most embarrassing and potentially crippling to Obama’s AFPAK effort, for it brings attention to how badly the war is going with a focus on the killing of innocent people.

McChrystal’s statement is candid admission of the futility and failure of the so called counter-insurgency campaign. Troops are supposed to be protecting more civilians by defending them and their villages, but with the price of that security coming in part from paying off warlords, and an Afghan military with shifting allegiances, the resulting chaos ensures lots of innocents who happen to look like the ”insurgents” are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And with simultaneous JSOC missions and drone attacks and bombardments, the human debris of collateral damage is piling up.

It’s a big enough pile to bury McChrystal and move in Petreaus, ostensibly to make the “surge” work. But it could also bring more public attention to, and scrutiny of, the US/NATO mission in South Asia.

Are recent Pentagon press releases about vast, untapped mineral reserves in Afghanistan, the timing of which is probably no coincidence, an attempt to put a positive, albeit mercenary spin on our involvement in the region?

Interestingly, earlier this month, before the McChrystal incident, we witnessed General David Petraeus’s fainting episode at a Senate Armed Services hearing on progress in Afghanistan. Dehydration was blamed but was his syncope also his body’s reaction to some very bad back channel news he had just received regarding the PR disaster in Afghanistan and the imminent firing of McChrystal?

Was McChrystal’s published candor regarding the truth of the situation just irresponsible verbal meanderings or were they words he mouthed from a script DoD prepared to reverse the spin kick-started by his boots on the ground?

Let his own words from the statement in March further illuminate, and give perspective to, what likely got the Commander of NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces, Afghanistan sacked:

“I do want to say something that everyone understands. We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there’s danger, they’re asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn’t mean I’m criticizing the people who are executing. I’m just giving you perspective.”

Sources:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/gen_mcchrystal_weve_shot_an_amazing_number_of_peop.php

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_Redacted_092109.pdf

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127839824

In response to the Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla on Monday, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khomeini issued a statement on Tuesday in which he strongly condemned Israel’s blatant disregard of human rights and flagrant breach of international law.

Following is an excerpt of Ayatollah Khomeini’s statement:

The outrageous attack the Zionist regime conducted on the humanitarian aid flotilla represents another link in the chain of numerous crimes this wicked regime has committed and which the seventh decade of its ignoble existence is filled with.

This is an example of the brutal acts of violence that Muslims in this region and the Palestinian people in particular have endured for decades.

The aid flotilla was not an Islamic or Arab convoy. Rather it represented international public opinion and humanity’s conscience in general. This outrageous attack provides irrefutable proof that Zionism is the new face of fascism and that it is being helped by the so-called upholders of human rights and freedom.

The United States, Britain, France, and some other European governments are rendering political, economic, military, and media assistance to this born criminal and constantly lend their support to its atrocities.

What does the three-year blockade of food and medicine imposed on 1.5 million Palestinian men, women, and children actually mean? How are the massacre, imprisonment, and daily torture of young Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank justified?

Palestine is no longer an Arab issue. It is not even an Islamic issue any more. Rather, it is the most important human rights issue of the modern world.

The symbolic act of dispatching humanitarian assistance convoys to Gaza should be repeated in dozens of other forms and shapes. The bloodthirsty Zionist regime and its supporters should sense the indomitable power of awakened human consciousness across the globe.

The Arab nations are facing a difficult test. The Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League should not be satisfied with anything less than a complete lifting of the blockade of Gaza, a total freeze in construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank, and prosecution of war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.

The Palestinian people should also know that their evil enemy is weaker and more vulnerable than ever before. Divine providence is premised upon the fact that wicked criminals determine their own destiny and bring themselves to their demise with their own hands.

Brothers and sisters of Palestine, put your trust and faith in God, believe in your power, and know that the ultimate victory is yours

02 June 2010

Statement by Ayatollah Khomeini

On the high seas, outside territorial waters, the ship was stopped by the navy. The commandos stormed it. Hundreds of people on the deck resisted, the soldiers used force. Some of the passengers were killed, scores injured. The ship was brought into harbor; the passengers were taken off by force. The world saw them walking on the quay, men and women, young and old, all of them worn out, one after another, each being marched between two soldiers…

The ship was called “Exodus 1947”. It left France in the hope of breaking the British blockade, which was imposed to prevent ships loaded with Holocaust survivors from reaching the shores of Palestine. If it had been allowed to reach the country, the illegal immigrants would have come ashore and the British would have sent them to detention camps in Cyprus, as they had done before. Nobody would have taken any notice of the episode for more than two days.

But the person in charge was Ernest Bevin, a Labour Party leader, an arrogant, rude and power-loving British minister. He was not about to let a bunch of Jews dictate to him. He decided to teach them a lesson the entire world would witness. “This is a provocation!” he exclaimed, and of course he was right. The main aim was indeed to create a provocation, in order to draw the eyes of the world to the British blockade.

What followed is well known: the episode dragged on and on, one stupidity led to another, the whole world sympathized with the passengers. But the British did not give in and paid the price. A heavy price.

Many believe that the “Exodus” incident was the turning point in the struggle for the creation of the State of Israel. Britain collapsed under the weight of international condemnation and decided to give up its mandate over Palestine. There were, of course, many more weighty reasons for this decision, but the “Exodus” proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I am not the only one who was reminded of this episode this week. Actually, it was almost impossible not to be reminded of it, especially for those of us who lived in Palestine at the time and witnessed it.

There are, of course, important differences. Then the passengers were Holocaust survivors, this time they were peace activists from all over the world. But then and now the world saw heavily armed soldiers brutally attack unarmed passengers, who resist with everything that comes to hand, sticks and bare hands. Then and now it happened on the high seas – 40 km from the shore then, 65 km now.

In retrospect, the British behavior throughout the affair seems incredibly stupid. But Bevin was no fool, and the British officers who commanded the action were not nincompoops. After all, they had just finished a World War on the winning side.

If they behaved with complete folly from beginning to end, it was the result of arrogance, insensitivity and boundless contempt for world public opinion.

Ehud Barak is the Israeli Bevin. He is not a fool, either, nor is our top brass. But they are responsible for a chain of acts of folly, the disastrous implications of which are hard to assess. Former minister and present commentator Yossi Sarid called the ministerial “committee of seven”, which decides on security matters, “seven idiots” – and I must protest. It is an insult to idiots.

THE PREPARATIONS for the flotilla went on for more than a year. Hundreds of e-mail messages went back and forth. I myself received many dozens. There was no secret. Everything was out in the open.

There was a lot of time for all our political and military institutions to prepare for the approach of the ships. The politician consulted. The soldiers trained. The diplomats reported. The intelligence people did their job.

Nothing helped. All the decisions were wrong from the first moment to this moment. And it’s not yet the end.

The idea of a flotilla as a means to break the blockade borders on genius. It placed the Israeli government on the horns of a dilemma – the choice between several alternatives, all of them bad. Every general hopes to get his opponent into such a situation.

The alternatives were:

To let the flotilla reach Gaza without hindrance. The cabinet secretary supported this option. That would have led to the end of the blockade, because after this flotilla more and larger ones would have come.

As our governments have always done, when faced with the choice between several bad alternatives, the Netanyahu government chose the worst.

Anyone who followed the preparations as reported in the media could have foreseen that they would lead to people being killed and injured. One does not storm a Turkish ship and expect cute little girls to present one with flowers. The Turks are not known as people who give in easily.

The orders given to the forces and made public included the three fateful words: “at any cost”. Every soldier knows what these three terrible words mean. Moreover, on the list of objectives, the consideration for the passengers appeared only in third place, after safeguarding the safety of the soldiers and fulfilling the task.

If Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, the Chief of Staff and the commander of the navy did not understand that this would lead to killing and wounding people, then it must be concluded – even by those who were reluctant to consider this until now – that they are grossly incompetent. They must be told, in the immortal words of Oliver Cromwell to Parliament: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

THIS EVENT points again to one of the most serious aspects of the situation: we live in a bubble, in a kind of mental ghetto, which cuts us off and prevents us from seeing another reality, the one perceived by the rest of the world. A psychiatrist might judge this to be the symptom of a severe mental problem.

The propaganda of the government and the army tells a simple story: our heroic soldiers, determined and sensitive, the elite of the elite, descended on the ship in order “to talk” and were attacked by a wild and violent crowd. Official spokesmen repeated again and again the word “lynching”.

On the first day, almost all the Israeli media accepted this. After all, it is clear that we, the Jews, are the victims. Always. That applies to Jewish soldiers, too. True, we storm a foreign ship at sea, but turn at once into victims who have no choice but to defend ourselves against violent and incited anti-Semites.

It is impossible not to be reminded of the classic Jewish joke about the Jewish mother in Russia taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve the Czar in the war against Turkey. “Don’t overexert yourself’” she implores him, “Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…”

“But mother,” the son interrupts, “What if the Turk kills me?”

“You?” exclaims the mother, “But why? What have you done to him?”

To any normal person, this may sound crazy. Heavily armed soldiers of an elite commando unit board a ship on the high seas in the middle of the night, from the sea and from the air – and they are the victims?

Somewhere, a new Leon Uris is planning to write his next book, “Exodus 2010”. A new Otto Preminger is planning a film that will become a blockbuster. A new Paul Newman will star in it – after all, there is no shortage of talented Turkish actors.

MORE THAN 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson declared that every nation must act with a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. Israeli leaders have never accepted the wisdom of this maxim. They adhere to the dictum of David Ben-Gurion: “It is not important what the Gentiles say; it is important what the Jews do.” Perhaps he assumed that the Jews would not act foolishly.

Making enemies of the Turks is more than foolish. For decades, Turkey has been our closest ally in the region, much more closer than is generally known. Turkey could play, in the future, an important role as a mediator between Israel and the Arab-Muslim world, between Israel and Syria, and, yes, even between Israel and Iran. Perhaps we have succeeded now in uniting the Turkish people against us – and some say that this is the only matter on which the Turks are now united.

This is Chapter 2 of “Cast Lead”. Then we aroused most countries in the world against us, shocked our few friends and gladdened our enemies. Now we have done it again and perhaps with even greater success. World public opinion is turning against us.

This is a slow process. It resembles the accumulation of water behind a dam. The water rises slowly, quietly, and the change is hardly noticeable. But when it reaches a critical level, the dam bursts and the disaster is upon us. We are steadily approaching this point.

“Kill a Turk and rest,” the mother says in the joke. Our government does not even rest. It seems that they will not stop until they have made enemies of the last of our friends.

(Parts of this article were published in Ma’ariv, Israel’s second largest newspaper.)

By Uri Avnery

Gilad Atzmon considers the deep religious and psychotic roots of the genocidal impulses of Israelis, as most recently demonstrated in the cold-blooded murder of humanitarian activists aboard the Gaza-bound international aid flotilla, and warns of the implications for humanity unless urgent decisive action is taken against the rogue Jewish state.

“…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2)

“…do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord your God has commanded you…” (Deuteronomy 20:16)

I am here to announce as loud as I can: There is no need for any “international”, “impartial” or “independent” inquiry into the latest Israeli massacre on the high seas. Although the Israeli opposition to such an inquiry suggests that the Israelis have much to hide, the truth of the matter is actually deeper. If you want to grasp what underlies the deadly Israeli barbarism, all you have to do is open the Old Testament.

Although it is certain that there is no ethnic or racial continuum between the biblical Israelites and the Khazarians who lead the Jewish state and its army, the similarities between the murderous zeal described in Deuteronomy and the current string of lethal Israeli actions cannot be denied. Israel’s is a murderous society not because of any biological or racial lineage with its imaginary “forefathers” but because it is driven by a fanatical tribal Jewish ideology and fuelled by a merciless, poisonous psychotic biblical zeal.

The Jewish state is beyond the law. It doesn’t follow any recognized universal value system either. In recent years Israel flattened Lebanon (2006) and left more than 3,000 civilians dead; it managed to shell a United Nations Relief and Works Agency shelter with white phosphorus (2009); and it left Gaza with 1,500 fatalities, most of them women, children and elderly people. Earlier this year it carried out an assassination in Dubai using forged foreign passports, and last week we saw the kosher navy slaughter peace activists in international waters.

The emerging forensic reports of the massacre suggest Israeli executions on board the Turkish aid ship, the Mavi Marmara. Viewed together with the eyewitness accounts of the Turkish survivors and the Israeli spokesmen’s justifications for their killing squad’s actions, this leaves no room for doubt. The Israeli society has past the no return zone. In fact, it must have drifted away from humanity a long time ago. Also, it would be reasonable to argue that the initial Zionist attempt to “build a new civilized Jew” should be regarded as a total failure. In fact, the Israeli Jew is the most brutal of them all, even more deadly than the fictional character depicted by Tarantino’s film, Inglorious Bastards.

One way to explain the rapid moral deterioration of the Jewish state is to point out that Zionists have never really been committed to ethics. They were quick to learn that rather than truly internalizing the meaning of humanism, a spin would serve their cause as effectively.

The entire hasbara (propaganda) project is grounded on a dissemination of lies. For years the hasbara project, which has been supported by sayanim all along, was there to present Israel as a “Western”’ and “democratic” nation in a “sea of Arabs”. All that time the Jewish state was inflicting pain on its neighbours, murdering, starving and ethnically cleansing the indigenous people of the land.

Enough is enough! It is time to name and shame every Israeli and Zionist infiltrator within political circles, the media and academia. This shouldn’t be complicated at all because until very recently those sayanim and traitors within our midst were doing it all in the open.

From aggression to victimhood

However, the Israelis are not just an ordinary murderous collective. As much as they were enthusiastic to unleash hundreds of their most brutal military unit (Fleet 13) against unarmed peace activists, the Israelis also insist on regarding their commandoes as innocent victims. It was amusing to follow Israeli officials and representatives talking about their “lynched commandos” who were “attacked” as soon as they were dropped from helicopters. “What did the commandoes expect pro-Palestinian activists to do once they boarded the ships – invite them aboard for a cup of tea with the captain on the bridge?” asked a Guardian newspaper editorial just one day after the massacre.

The inability of the Israelis to understand that they were the aggressors in a military raid that they themselves initiated is symptomatic of the Jewish political incomprehension of the notion of history and of historical causality. From a Jewish perspective, history always starts where a Jewish suffering is detected. For the Israelis, the event on the Mavi Marmara started only when the first kosher commando faced resistance on the upper deck. In the Israeli press, the fact that Israeli commandos were actually the attackers was completely ignored. They in fact took part in a criminal military raid; they were dropped from Israeli military helicopters; they landed on a civilian ship carrying humanitarian aid in international waters. For the Israelis, the Mavi Maramara massacre event was isolated from the conflict or any understanding of the conflict.

Within the discourse of Jewish politics and history there is no room for causality. There is no such a thing as a former and a latter. Within the Jewish tribal discourse, every narrative starts to evolve when Jewish pain is established. This obviously explains why Israelis and some Jews around the world can think only as far as “two- state solution” within the framework of the 1967 borders. It also explains why for most Jews the history of the Holocaust starts in the gas chambers or with the rise of the Nazis. I have hardly seen any Israelis or Jews attempt to understand the circumstances that led to the clear resentment of Europeans towards their Jewish neighbours in the 1920s-1940s.

I am pretty convinced that Israel and the Jewish national project will not recover from this last massacre on the high seas. The reason is simple. In order to save itself from its doomed fate, Israel would need to look in the mirror. This is not going to happen. By the time Israel looks in the mirror it will become a self-hater. Israel won’t take the risk.

Instead of looking in the mirror the Jewish tribal agitator reverts to spin. The hasbara man releases a clumsily produced video that can be easily dismissed.

In case some Westerners have failed to see it until now, it is not just the Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims who fall victims to the deadly biblical practice. In fact, Zionism doesn’t really distinguish between goyim [gentiles]. From a Zionist perspective, every gentile is a potential enemy. This must explain why Israel possesses so many nuclear bombs.

As one may guess, an atomic bomb is not exactly something you use against your next-door neighbour. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is not there to deter the Palestinians or the Syrians. The Israeli bomb is there for us, the Britons, the Turks, the French, the Russians, and the Chinese – in short, the rest of humanity. Israel’s nuclear arsenal should be realized in reference to the Masada, the first century fortified kosher bunker where a few Jewish extremists committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.

The new Israelites have an Armageddon scenario in mind. Their philosophy is pretty simple. From Auschwitz they took the “never again” (like a lamb to the slaughter) slogan. From the Masada they deduced their survival motto: “if we are going down, this time we take everyone with us”. This is in fact the true Israeli interpretation of the story of Samson, the biblical genocidal murderer who pulled down a Philistine shrine on himself together with some 3,000 children, women and elderly people.

I guess that with Israeli nuclear submarines stationed in the Gulf and last week’s slaughter on the high seas, other nations do not need any more warnings. In fact, there is no way of getting the Israeli nation “off the tree”. What world leaders must do is decide together how to dismantle this morbid collective without turning our planet into dust.

Jewish Ideology and Psychosis – A Danger to World Peace

By Gilad Atzmon

The docile White House Press Corp has got steamed up about something and finally taken a scalp as a result. It seems the Capitol Hill cocktail set who usually sit and preen themselves like pampered Pomeranians while asking pre-screened, pre-approved, Obama-friendly questions have forced a resignation.

So what provoked them and who were they gunning for? Was it one of Obama’s aids caught lying – may be some political sleaze or even another Watergate in the making? Could they have been making a final stand for journalistic integrity and freedom over the Administration’s plans to prosecute and imprison investigative reporters who refuse to reveal their sources?

Well sorry to disappoint – it was none of the above.

It seems the most famous gaggle of journalists in the world finally got steamed up about a comment made by one of their own … against Israel.

And their target just happens to be an 89-year-old columnist who has nailed more US Presidents with her hammer-blow questions than any other member of the White House Press Corps.

The formidable grand dame of the WHPC has now been forced to quit her much coveted front row seat – from where she made no less than 10 US Presidents sweat with her probing questions.

Helen Thomas resigned just before the White House Correspondents Association announced it was considering stripping her of her prime position.

No doubt some of these are the same gutless scribes who gave President George W Bush such an easy ride over Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, water boarding etc.

Now had Helen Thomas blasted: “Palestinians should get the hell out of Israel,” she would have been feted.

Instead, what the redoubtable Ms Thomas, a lifelong critic of Zionism said, was that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany and Poland “or wherever they came from.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnALLK5g–I&hd=1

Ms. Thomas, a columnist for Hearst Newspapers apologized almost immediately for her off-the-cuff comments she made to a rabbi who was conducting a video interview with her outside the White House during a recent celebration of Jewish heritage.

Now the decision to retire her, with immediate effect, was announced by Hearst Newspapers, which syndicates her column. The announcement was made just weeks ahead of her 90th birthday on August 4.

The board of the correspondents association which recently gathered to consider how to respond to her controversial remarks issued this very wordy statement:”Helen Thomas’ comments were indefensible and the White House Correspondents Association board firmly dissociates itself from them. Many in our profession who have known Helen for years were saddened by the comments, which were especially unfortunate in light of her role as a trail blazer on the White House beat. While Helen has not been a member of the WHCA for many years, her special status in the briefing room has helped solidify her as the dean of the White House press corps so we feel the need to speak out strongly on this matter.

“We want to emphasize that the role of the WHCA is to represent the White House press corps in its dealings with the White House on coverage-related issues. We do not police the speech of our members or colleagues. We are not involved at all in issuing White House credentials, that is the purview of the White House itself. But the incident does revive the issue of whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front row seat in the WH briefing room. That is an issue under the jurisdiction of this board. We are actively seeking input from our association members on this important matter, and we have scheduled a special meeting of the WHCA board on Thursday to decide on the seating issue”.

What a gutless, feckless collective of cabestros*.

Just a few days ago no less than 60 journalists on board the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla were shot at, abused, beaten up and robbed by the military representing the Zionist State of Israel.

Was there one word of anger, one word of recrimination, or a statement released about the treatment of fellow journalists who were on board a series of ships which were attacked in international waters?

Israeli soldiers destroyed and stole their cell phones, confiscating video footage and photographic equipment. The later unauthorized use of journalists’ footage shows the contempt that the Israeli authorities have for journalism. By showing old photographs and edited footage there was a clear violation of journalist ethics.

Such blatant attempts at control of news coverage are nothing new. The same strategy was carried out during Israel’s last invasion of Gaza.

But what do these Washington scribes know?

However, what they have proved by their swift action against Helen Thomas is that while Israel conducts a military occupation in Palestine it is conducting a political occupation of The White House Corps.

By Yvonne Ridley

Yvonne Ridley is a founder member of Women In Journalism and has been a member of the National Union of Journalists for 34 years. She presents two political shows The Agenda and Rattansi & Ridley for Press TV

* The castrated bullocks that accompany fighting bulls to keep them docile.

Expanding on the Jerusalem master plans of 2006 and 2008, the Jerusalem Planning Committee of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior has released the text of a new ‘master plan’ which they are scheduled to approve in the coming weeks.

The plan includes the large-scale expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, to be replaced by Jewish neighborhoods and tourism centers. Even areas that had been previously designated as ‘green areas’, such as places like Ir David, in order to justify the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in those areas, have been re-designated as Jewish settlements in the new Jerusalem master plan.

The plan is subject to a public comment period of 60 days, after which it will go into effect and the Israeli government will implement all parts of the plan. Impacted Palestinians have no say, however, as they are unrepresented in the Israeli government or planning process.

The new Jerusalem master plan flies in the face of previous tentative steps taken by the Israeli government toward a partial settlement freeze, instead vastly expanding Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. The U.S. government had requested a settlement freeze last year, but then backed off from this request after the Israeli government refused to adhere.

Most of the planned development will take place in East Jerusalem, which is where the majority of Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents live. In addition, this area is east of the ‘Green Line’, which was the border set between Israel and Palestine in 1967. Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups point out that this planned expansion violates international law and signed agreements with the Palestinians, as well as the ‘road map’, prepared as part of the peace process in 2000.

By Saed Bannoura

Successive Israeli cabinets have worked to enforce on the ground in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories a situation that they could present as irreversible. Have they now reached the point where the biblical book of Daniel’s prophecy is once again relevant?

Negotiating in good faith

Abba Eban, the most sophisticated foreign minister Israel ever had, is said to have declared in 1973, after the aborted Peace Conference that was convened in Geneva in December of that year: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The saying accords with Eban’s speech at this conference when, after emphasizing that “a new opportunity is born,” he declared: “We have no way of knowing whether this opportunity will be fulfilled or wasted. … Israel for its part is resolved to seize the chance.”

Those were the times when Israel could present itself as a seeker of peace confronted by Arab governments and political forces that were still reluctant to negotiate with it, let alone conclude a peace. Syria indeed boycotted the Geneva Conference, although the gathering was cosponsored by its patron, the Soviet Union. Its attitude was not altogether negative, however, and soon after, in May 1974, Damascus signed a military disengagement agreement with Israel. In the following years, the boldest initiatives in seeking a Middle East peace agreement were indisputably taken by Arab leaders.

Whereas a maverick Abie Nathan had flown from Israel to Egypt on February 28, 1966, requesting to meet President Gamal Abdel-Nasser only to be deported back to Israel and arrested there, it was Nasser’s successor himself, President Anwar El-Sadat, who flew from Egypt to Israel on November 19, 1977, extending the hand of peace to the Israeli Knesset and power elite in scenes that looked almost unreal. The world watched Sadat descending the staircase from his plane in the same state of stupefaction, if not more, with which it had watched a few years earlier the first man walking on the moon.

And it was with similar astonishment that the world learned of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s secret negotiations with the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in Oslo, Norway, and their conclusion of a peace deal signed in Washington in October 1993 – in another surreal ceremony that raised much hope. In both cases, Israel conceded none of its fundamental interests: it gave back to Egypt the Sinai that it had occupied in 1967, while making sure that this vast stretch of semi-desert land remained under surveillance and devoid of Egyptian army troops. Sadat, for his part, broke with all Arab states as he violated their principles of collective negotiations and collective peace, undercutting fellow Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Palestinians.

Likewise, Arafat concluded the Oslo deal behind the backs of most members of the PLO executive committee. He recognized Israel officially and accepted an outcome that did not provide for any of the basic demands of the Palestinians – not even a freezing of Zionist settlements in the Occupied Territories, let alone their dismantlement. The Israeli concessions that he obtained in return were only implementing the plan that Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon had designed for the perpetual control of the West Bank, shortly after Israel invaded it in June 1967. It was indeed during the early negotiations on the implementation of the Oslo accords, in 1994, that Rabin’s government started building what would become the Separation Wall.

As for the only spectacular Israeli so-called peace initiative of all those years, the evacuation of Gaza ordered by Oslo-opponent turned into Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005, it was part of a ‘unilateral disengagement’ purposely avoiding striking a deal with the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. Sharon did not want a precedent that could be invoked for the West Bank. Indeed he never hid the fact that he was willing to concede to the Palestinian Authority much less of the occupied West Bank than the area his Laborite predecessors were willing to give up. In the same year as the unilateral Gaza disengagement, he revised the route of the Separation Wall, annexing de facto a larger portion of the West Bank to Israel. After consigning Yasser Arafat to forced residence under siege from 2002 until the Palestinian leader’s death in 2004, Sharon did his best to undermine the credibility of Abbas, thus facilitating the electoral victory of Hamas in January 2006 – the month Sharon went into a coma.

The truth is that it is Israel – not the Arabs – that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to conclude a real peace with its neighbors. And this has been true since the outset. Claims, like that of Abba Eban’s, about Arab intransigence are usually buttressed with a reference to the founding act of the creation of Israel in international law: the UN General Assembly’s vote on the partition of Palestine in November 1947, at a time when the majority of UN member states were western and western-dominated countries. The Arabs and the Palestinians are blamed for having rejected this partition, which would have granted them a larger portion of Palestine than the one they – more accurately the Jordanian accomplice of the Zionist movement, King Abdullah – ended up controlling after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. In other words, the Arabs are blamed for having rejected a deal that granted 56% of the territory of Palestine west of the Jordan River to Jewish inhabitants, who constituted one-third of its total population – most of them immigrants/refugees who had arrived from Europe during the previous fifteen years.

The UN 1947 partition resolution could not have been reasonably accepted by any Arab leader – or by any people in their shoes, for that matter. Accepting it would have amounted to capitulation without battle and relinquishment of fundamental rights. As for sympathy for the plight of Jewish Holocaust survivors, the Arabs, let alone the Palestinians, could legitimately say that they had already accommodated much more than their fair share of them, compared with the rest of the world, especially the victors of World War II. On the other hand, the League of Arab states had made a peace offer that is hardly mentioned in the propagandistic literature that prevails on this topic. Their proposal was summed up by the UN Special Commission on Palestine in September 1947:

1. That Palestine should be a unitary State, with a democratic constitution and an elected legislative assembly,
2. That the constitution should provide, inter alia, guarantees for
   1. i.          the sanctity of the Holy Places and, subject to suitable safeguards, freedom of religious practice in accordance with the status quo
   2. ii.          full civil rights for all Palestine citizens, the naturalization requirement being ten years’ continuous residence in the country
   3. iii.          protection of religious and cultural rights of the Jewish community, such safeguards to be altered only with the consent of the majority of the Jewish members in the legislative assembly
3. That the constitution should provide also for
   1. i.          adequate representation in the legislative assembly of all important communities, provided that the Jews would in no case exceed one-third of the total number of members [that is, the proportion of Jews in the Palestinian population in 1947, regardless of the date on which they immigrated]
   2. ii.          the strict prohibition of Jewish immigration and the continuation of the existing restrictions on land transfer, any change in these matters requiring the consent of a majority of the Arab members of the legislative assembly
   3. iii.          The establishment of a Supreme Court which would be empowered to determine whether any legislation was inconsistent with the constitution.

This proposal was congruent with the perspective of a binational state in Palestine as advocated by pacifist “cultural” Zionists – the likes of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes – and, officially at least, by leftwing Zionist organizations such as Hashomer Hatzair. It was flatly rejected by the Zionist leadership, dedicated to the project of a Jewish State in Palestine. In reality, the Ben-Gurion Laborite leadership of the Zionist movement was always much closer to its rightwing rivals of Revisionist Zionism founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky than to the “cultural Zionists” and the radical left. In essence, the statist project of Ben-Gurion matched Jabotinsky’s aspiration, albeit in a more ‘realistic’ and tactical fashion. Thus Jabotinsky said openly and loudly what the others thought as well, but did not want to proclaim lest it spoil their Machiavellian maneuvering.

The Iron Wall

The most commented-on essay by Vladimir Jabotinsky is certainly his 1923 piece entitled “The Iron Wall.” It is rightly regarded as a premonitory statement of what actual Zionist policies in Palestine/Israel would become and why they missed no opportunity of missing an opportunity to make peace with the Palestinians. While affirming that the Arabs are culturally “500 years behind us,” the man whom Laborite Zionists denounced as a fascist teased them by expressing more respect for the Arabs than he attributed to them:

 ny native people – it is all the same whether they are civilized or savage – views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. … And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs… Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.

Hence, Jabotinsky’s assertion of the Iron Wall doctrine:

Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Eventually, added Jabotinsky, the Arabs will come to peace under Zionist conditions, when they have no other choice left:

All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people make such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. … But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This view informed the action of Jabotinsky’s heirs in the Likud toward the Palestinians, ever since they took the helm of the Israeli state in 1977. Having secured Egypt’s neutralization, Menachem Begin thought he could force the Palestinians to capitulate by occupying their last stronghold in Lebanon in 1982. The occupation of Lebanon proved a very costly undertaking for Israel, which was compelled to complete the evacuation of the country 18 years after, in 2000. Meanwhile, squeezed financially by its traditional Arab backers among the oil states and facing what, after 1991, looked like a solid US hegemony in the Middle East, a Yasser Arafat who was both hopeless and naively hopeful seemed willing to make the “enormous concessions” that Jabotinsky foresaw. He had become hopeless about his goal of securing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a regional deal under international auspices; and he lured himself into believing that his Israeli interlocutors would grant him such a state if he showed them, and showed their sponsors in Washington above all, how compliant he could be.

Successive Israeli cabinets from both Labor and Likud – Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak – took advantage of the Oslo framework and the end of the first Intifada in order to considerably intensify the building and expansion of settlements in the West Bank, thus enforcing on the ground a situation that they could present as irreversible in order to justify Israel’s annexation of a substantial part of that remaining 22% of Palestinian territory. As a result, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank – excluding the Jerusalem area, the largest settlement of all – which had built up to 112,000 in the 26 years from the beginning of the occupation until 1993, doubled in the six years between 1994 and 2000, the year the Oslo process came to its explosive end; and has increased to 305,000 since then. At the same time, these successive cabinets were building the Separation Wall, thus fulfilling literally Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall vision.

When Likud’s foremost firebrand Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001, he reversed the Oslo process by bloodily reoccupying the territories under Palestinian control, and accelerated the construction of the wall while revising its route in order to expand the amount of territory annexed. This policy continued under Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s successor at the head of Kadima, the party that Sharon founded out of a split from Likud, and then under Likud’s Netanyahu, now heading a cabinet that brings together Zionist parties ranging from Labor to the racist far-right party of Avigdor Lieberman. Simultaneously, the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza have been facing the most tragic period in their history, enduring the most desperate conditions since they came under Israeli occupation in 1967. The cruel assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 moved the world’s conscience – a conscience that Judge Richard Goldstone admirably embodied, thus provoking the fury of Israel’s rulers.

Oslo Contradictions

For all that, the Palestinians are not any closer to accepting Israel’s land grab in the West Bank and the less-than-Bantustan “state” that Israel’s rulers are offering them. If any of them were willing to make such ‘enormous concessions’, however, they know that they would be isolated and repudiated by the overwhelming majority of their people. That is where Jabotinsky got it wrong indeed: his vision foreshadowed the Zionists’ policies, but not the Palestinians’ stance. For behind the apparently higher consideration in which Jabotinsky held the Arabs, he still despised them too much to understand that their self-pride and sense of justice would never allow them to accept demeaning surrenders. His lack of realism combined with his racist view of the Arabs prevented him from facing the truth: given the sheer fact of numbers and geographic extension, there is no way by which Israel could subjugate the Palestinians and the Arabs to the point of getting them to accept its inflexible conditions.

Oslo was based on contradictory calculations. Israel’s rulers seem to have tried to test whether the Palestinians are “some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains.” Confronted with the failure of this expectation, they increased their repression of the Palestinians – to little avail. Even the extremely ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas – who is seen as a traitor by part of his people – proved unable to deliver what the Israelis wanted from him without substantial Israeli concessions in return. The increasing violence of Israel’s rulers in applying the Iron Wall doctrine, far from reaching its goal, only succeeded in increasing resentment and the desire for revenge among Palestinians, and beyond – far beyond.

Over the last decades Israel has managed to antagonize a formidable range of forces that were not part of its enemy spectrum until then. It has already lost quite a few teeth in attempting to subdue Lebanon, where it faced the firm resistance spirit of Hezbollah combatants resorting to their ‘asymmetric’ advantage as guerrilla fighters in defending their land against a conventional army. The increasing levels of hatred sown in the whole Middle East by western invasions, as well as by Israeli violence, are fostering the rise of an ‘apocalyptic terrorism’ that contemplates resorting to weapons of mass destruction as another ‘asymmetric’ means of offsetting the overwhelming military superiority of its enemies. Last but certainly not least, Israel is now facing the prospect, in the short or medium term, of a nuclear-armed Iran – a development that would bring the region dangerously close to a nuclear holocaust if Israel keeps threatening to launch military strikes.

Coda

Jabotinsky should have remembered that the image of the wall is associated in the Jewish tradition with bad omens. His present disciples would be well advised to anticipate the impending catastrophe, before it is too late: they would be well advised to reverse their colonizing and aggressive policies, stop trying to dictate to the Palestinians who should represent them, and renew the kind of attitude that Israeli negotiators displayed in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that were held in Taba in early 2001. And, they should completely lift their criminal blockade on Gaza to start with. For they do not need a new interpreter of the writing on the wall that they are building on the West bank with so much hubris: the biblical Daniel’s interpretation has become relevant again.

Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin: the days of your kingdom are numbered; you have been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom will be divided and lost. The last word Pharsin carried a dual meaning: it was interpreted as referring also to the Persians, who took over Babylon when King Belshazzar was assassinated little after the writing appeared on the wall. Persia, of course, is the former name of Iran.

by Gilbert Achcar 

About the author

Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His most recent book is Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Saqi 2010.

29 June 2010

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