What is happening in Gaza? Has the world forgotten?
Monthly Archive for September, 2006
BEIRUT - A Hezbollah member of parliament has criticised a report by Amnesty International that said the armed wing of the Lebanese political party committed a “serious violation of humanitarian law” in its recent conflict with Israel.
Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah was quoted by the BBC as saying the London-based rights group should analyse the number of civilians killed on each side, before accusing Hezbollah of war crimes.
The Amnesty report concluded that Hezbollah had violated the 1949 Geneva Convention by deliberately targeting civilians when it fired thousands of Katyusha rockets loaded with ball bearings at urban areas in northern Israel.
“Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel amounted to deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, as well as indiscriminate attacks - both war crimes under international law,” the report said.
An earlier Amnesty report in August accused Israel of committing war crimes by deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in Lebanon.
Continue reading ‘Hezbollah criticises Amnesty report accusing it of war crimes’
Amira Hass
Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because “God chose us.” Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.
But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz, August 21).
Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?
Amir Ben David, Ma’ariv, 22 June 2006
[Editor — The following article was published by the Israeli daily Ma’ariv on 22 June 2006, indicating a formalized policy of expelling witnesses to Israel’s practices in the occupied West Bank]
Israel is preparing to prevent the “Summer of Peace” event planned by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian group operating in the territories on behalf of the Palestinians. Israeli security forces will try to prevent extreme left-wing activists from getting to the events planned near the village of Bilan and in Tel Rumeida.
The police are preparing to prevent entry of members of the ISM and to expel those who manage to get in. European and American members of the group have been active in opposition to the separation fence, were holed up in the mukataa when Arafat was besieged there by the Israeli army, and were inside the Church of the Nativity which armed Palestinians had broken into as they fled from the Israelis. They have also stayed with wanted Palestinians in an attempt to protect them.
Continue reading ‘Ma’ariv: “ISM foreign protestors to be expelled”’
Anthony Loewenstein
Jamie Glassman is a British Jewish writer on The Ali G show, a comedy program known for intentionally offending deserving establishment figures. Glassman recently attended the Edinburgh Arts Festival and was disturbed. He wrote in the London Times:
“There have always been anti-Semitic jokes. But you know times are changing when you go along to a stand-up show at the Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe and you hear audience members shouting ‘Throw them in the oven’ when the comic suggests kids should stop playing Cowboys and Indians and replace it with Nazis and Jews.â€
His conclusion was perhaps understandable but thoroughly inaccurate. There was, he noted:
“a growing trend among left-thinking people in this country and around the world to accept as dogma that those on the Left should hate Bush, Blair, American imperialism, Israel and, while we’re at it, the Jews. It is a cultural trend that I’ve found increasingly evident but never before has the Jew-hating element been so overt. This week has confirmed that my Jewish paranoia is not entirely unfounded. As the old saying goes: ‘Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.’â€
How often do we hear that the Left is infected with a vicious Jew-hatred? And how often do Jews tell each other that every criticism of Israel is driven by a pathological rejection of Israel’s right to exist? I’m here to tell those Jews that it’s time to stop living like it’s 1948. Israeli actions in Palestine and Lebanon are directly contributing to worldwide legitimate criticism of the Zionist state. For a growing number of global citizens, Israel is a pariah. It’s about time we discovered why.