By Brian Terrell

On the long flight to the Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain on February 10, I had been studying the Lonely Planet guide to the region in order to be able to explain at the airport, if needed, that I had come as a tourist. As it happened, while most passengers on our plane sailed through passport control, my travel companion Linda Sartor and I were pulled from the line and subjected to a closer examination. My sketchy knowledge of the historic and cultural sights that I had come to see was good enough to satisfy official scrutiny. We were granted tourist visas and sent on our way.

That we had come as tourists was true. We had intentionally neglected to mention, though, that we had been invited to Bahrain along with a few other international activists to monitor the government’s response to demonstrations marking the one year anniversary of Bahrain’s “Arab Spring” pro-democracy uprising on February 14. This demand for basic rights was brutally suppressed by Bahrain’s police and military backed by the army of Saudi Arabia.

We certainly would have been barred entry to the country had our full intent been told—but, as Daniel Berrigan once mused, “How much truth do we owe them?” In fact, our invitation from Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, came because the government had made it known that observers from established human rights organizations would not be granted visas until the next month and that access to the country by the international media was to be severely limited during that period. The regime’s resolve that there be no witnesses to the events surrounding the anniversary made our presence for those days all the more crucial.

The morning after our arrival, we met with local activists and the small group of U.S. citizens who had come before us. Before long we were in the streets of Manama, the capital city, accompanying a march to the Pearl Roundabout, the focal point of last year’s demonstration. This peaceful march of men, women and children was quickly set upon by police in full riot gear and dispersed with tear gas and percussion grenades. Our first encounter with the Bahraini police appeared to be vicious, but our local friends assured us that our presence was a restraining factor. Two of the Americans we had just met, Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath, were taken into custody at this march and later that evening deported, the government said, for activities not consistent with their status as tourists.

Our small group, called Witness Bahrain, grew over the next days, even as several friends who traveled to join us were turned away at the airport by a regime made even more hyper-vigilant after deporting Huwaida and Radhika. While being careful to remain at large at least until the events of the 14th, we toured Manama and the villages over the next couple of days, hearing testimony of government abuses and accompanying demonstrations and marches.

On February 13, Tighe Barry and Medea Benjamin of the peace group Code Pink joined us, and our Bahraini guide Wafa took some of us on a tour of the zoo and the National Museum. In the afternoon we witnessed a march of tens of thousands through the main thoroughfares of Manama.

This march was tolerated by the authorities until a large group split off to walk to the Pearl Roundabout. The police response was immediate and appalling. Tear gas in Bahrain is not used as a means of crowd control so much as collective punishment—crowds dispersed by gas are not allowed to escape but are pursued, cornered and gassed again. Many are injured by direct hits from gas canisters and percussion grenades.

We witnessed beatings and heard reports of injuries by birdshot and rubber bullets.

On the actual anniversary, the police had the country locked down. Patrols of armored cars sped through the streets of Manama and the roads out of the villages were blocked by tanks. Many hundreds still made it to the streets, many were injured, many arrested. Six more of us were taken by the authorities.

In my case, finally getting pinched by the Bahraini police was anticlimactic. Four of us Americans with a Bahraini friend were taking a back way along a quiet street to catch up with others to attempt reaching the roundabout when a passing police patrol stopped us and asked for identification. One more time, we explained that we were there as tourists. “If you are tourists,” we were asked, “why do you have gas masks?”

A few hours later we were in a police station where we met two more from our group who had been captured under more dramatic circumstances. One by one, we were summoned to talk with representatives from the Ministry of Information and were told that we would be put on a flight to London at 2 a.m. as our visas had been cancelled. Our claim to be tourists was regarded as a deception by the authorities. My protestations to the contrary were to no avail.

Bahrain is a tiny island kingdom that is home to about a million people—half of whom are not citizens—that is visited by 8 million tourists a year. Many of these, we were told, are Saudis drawn there by the night life and legal alcohol. Others visit the museums and beaches. In the brochures produced by the government, tourists are encouraged to meet the friendly people of Bahrain. This is what we did and it was for this that we were deported.

We were privileged to tour this beautiful and afflicted country and to live the reality of its people, if only for a little while. Not content with having our photos taken with camels, we spoke with emergency room doctors who, after treating victims of last year’s crackdown, were themselves tortured and charged with sedition. We met with mothers mourning their children who were killed or imprisoned, and workers barred from practicing their professions for being in favor of freedom.

We were in Bahrain as tourists, not of the malls and golf courses and museums but of the streets and villages where real people live and struggle. Anyone who visits Bahrain and never gets a whiff of tear gas is a poor tourist, indeed. To the police who arrested us, a tourist with a gas mask is a hopeless contradiction and proof of culpability. For the tourist who wants to learn the present reality of Bahrain, a gas mask is more indispensable than sunscreen.

The faithfulness and solidarity of the people of Bahrain will prevail over the perfidity and cruelty of its backward and crude monarchy, supported as it is only by the brute force of its sponsors, the governments of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. “Sumoud,” meaning be strong, hold fast, is the Arabic word by which the resisters in Bahrain greet and encourage one another. Their peaceful strength is a challenge and an inspiration as we continue our common struggle on the far ends of the globe.

Sumoud.

By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours

“I’m a Freedom Rider! I’m just trying to go to Jerusalem!” shouted Palestinian activist Huiwada Arraf Tuesday evening as a live Internet video feed showed Israeli police officers dragging her off a bus linking Israeli settlements in the West Bank to Jerusalem.

Arraf and five other Palestinian activists boarded segregated Israeli public bus number 148 — which connects the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel to Jerusalem — on Tuesday in an act of civil disobedience aimed to draw attention to Israeli colonial and apartheid policies and the lack of basic human rights Palestinians are afforded under this system.

After sitting peacefully on the bus at Israel’s Hizma checkpoint, just outside the northern entrance to Jerusalem, and nonviolently resisting attempts by the Israeli authorities to get them off the bus, all six “Freedom Riders” were eventually removed by force and arrested for illegally entering Israel without permits.

Another Palestinian Freedom Rider was also arrested while attempting to ride the segregated buses, and according to a Freedom Riders press release, was taken with the six other activists to Atarot police station (“Palestinian Freedom Riders On Their Way to Jerusalem Violently Arrested on Israeli Settler Bus”).

Their protest action was inspired by the Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement in the United States, who nonviolently challenged segregation in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s.

“It’s going to be a challenge for Palestinians and for every human being for their morality. It’s going to be a challenge for the whole world to really take action against the Israeli crimes,” Palestinian Freedom Riders spokesperson Hurriyah Ziada told The Electronic Intifada on Monday.

While Palestinians are not explicitly barred from boarding Israeli public transportation in the West Bank, since most buses pass through Israeli settlements that are off-limits to Palestinians, the system is de facto segregated.

“Our challenge is going to be on the ground dealing with the settlers, but on the other hand, we’re waiting for the peoples’ reactions and the world’s reactions. Enough talk; we need real action on the ground and for people to take a side, taking a rightful side against Israeli discrimination,” Ziada said.

Tense hours at the checkpoint

The Freedom Riders left RamallahTuesday afternoon and headed to a bus stop in the occupied West Bank, which serves Israeli settlers near the Israeli settlement of Psagot. After a few buses drove past the Palestinian activists without stopping, six Freedom Riders, and a large group of journalists, managed to board a bus.

The bus was reportedly followed along its route by Israeli soldiers and police, and was stopped shortly after arriving at the Hizma checkpoint. Once there, Israeli settlers who had been on the bus got off, and Israeli soldiers and police officers boarded to check passengers’ IDs, according to images broadcast on the Freedom Waves live Internet video feed.

“The Israelis can’t take the wait and so they are getting off the bus. Let them see what we have to go through and let them ask why this is happening, and why it has to happen this way in order to try to change things,” said Freedom Rider Huwaida Arraf, as the settlers stood up and began leaving the bus, as documented in the Freedom Waves video feed.

“Whether they’re corralled in pens at checkpoints or held up and detained, not told why, arrested, held for days, weeks, sometimes months without any kind of legal justification at all … this happens to Palestinians every day,” she said.

“I want people to see the apartheid system here”

The Electronic Intifada spoke directly with Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, one of the Freedom Riders, at approximately 4:20pm local time on Tuesday, as he sat on the bus at the checkpoint.

“We’re on the bus. They just moved us a few yards beyond the [Hizma] checkpoint. We are in a parking lot and the soldiers are asking us to come down from the bus. The people refuse to come down from the bus. They are telling [us] that [we] are detained and [we] have to come from the bus. We don’t know yet what they are going to do. They took one person from the bus. There’s [Israeli] special forces, border police, regular police and soldiers surrounding the bus,” Qumsiyeh said.

“I don’t know [what will happen] but I think we will be punished severely,” Qumsiyeh, who was later arrested with the five other Freedom Riders, added. “I want [people] to see that we have an apartheid system here. There are illegal, colonial settlements in our land. These settlements have their own buses and they get to Jerusalem without anybody checking them, yet we, the native Palestinians, are not allowed to get to Jerusalem.”

Freedom of movement severely restricted

Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are illegal according to international law, including the Geneva conventions. It is estimated that approximately 500,000 Jewish Israelis currently live in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem estimates that from 1967 — when Israel imposed its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — to mid-2010, the Israeli government established 121 settlements in the West Bank that were officially recognized by the Israeli Ministry of Interior.

In that same period, approximately 100 settler outposts, considered illegal under both international and Israeli laws, were erected, while twelve so-called “neighborhoods” of Jerusalem were built on land illegally annexed by Israel and are thereby also illegal under international law.

According to B’Tselem, Israel has created a system of “separation and discrimination, with two separate systems of law” in the occupied West Bank.

“One system, for the settlers, de facto annexes the settlements to Israel and grants settlers the rights of citizens of a democratic state. The other is a system of military law that systematically deprives Palestinian of their rights and denies them the ability to have any real effect on shaping the policy regarding the land space in which they live and with respect to their rights,” B’Tselem states on its website.

Restrictions on Palestinian freedoms do not end at the settlements themselves, however. Instead, Palestinians’ rights are also violated by the infrastructure built to accommodate Israeli settlers, especially private, Israeli-only roads. “In October 2010, there were 232 kilometers of roads in the West Bank that Israel classified for the sole, or almost sole, use of Israelis, primarily of settlers,” says B’Tselem.

“Israel also prohibits Palestinians from even crossing some of these roads with vehicles, thereby restricting their access to nearby roads that they are ostensibly not prohibited from using. In these cases, Palestinians travelers have to get out of the vehicle, cross the road on foot, and find an alternative mode of transportation on the other side,” according to the human rights group.

Veolia a boycott target for serving settlements

Egged, Israel’s largest public transportation company, operates the bus that the Freedom Riders boarded in the West Bank Tuesday. French company Veolia also operates bus lines serving illegal Israeli settlements throughout the occupied West Bank.

According to the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), which organizes around the 2005 Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel as a way to end Israeli violations of international law and promote Palestinian rights, Egged and Veolia “are complicit in Israel’s violations of international law due to their involvement in and profiting from Israel’s illegal settlement infrastructure.”

Palestinian Freedom Rides Spokesperson Hurriyah Ziada told The Electronic Intifada that promoting the BDS call — and the specific boycott of and divestment from Egged and Veolia — is a major aim of the Freedom Rides movement.

“We’re trying to support the BDS campaign,” Ziadah said. “Negotiations have been going for too long and we haven’t been achieving anything on the ground. Everybody knows that these settlements are illegal on our land, but nobody is doing anything. Israel is not paying any cost for any of its actions. They have to pay a price by people boycotting them and by highlighting how racist they are. We ask for human rights and freedom, justice and dignity.”

“In the civil rights movement, they were fighting against racism,” Ziadah added, “but we’re going to be fighting against racism, discrimination [and] occupation. We’re going to be fighting to exist.”

Jillian Kestler-D’Amours is a reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem.

Article courtesy of Electronic Intifada; Image courtesy Anne Paq / Active Stills

By Michael Gillespie – Contributing Editor

A Palestine-Israel conference at Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart (OLIH) Catholic Church in Ankeny, IA attracted a large and diverse audience on the weekend of October 14-15.

“US Policy in Palestine-Israel: Engaging Faith Communities in Pursuit of a Just Peace,” organized by Joe Aossey of Cedar Rapids and Kathleen McQuillen of American Friends Service Committee’s Iowa Middle East Peace Education Project, featured 16 speakers and workshop leaders from across the nation and around the world.

About 150 conference attendees gathered in the OLIH sanctuary on October 14 to hear Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, deliver one of two keynote addresses.

“The Arab Spring has challenged the existing order in ways that nothing else in recent history has,” said Bennis, “and in our own country in the last five or six years we’ve gone from the automatic assumptions that the US should be supporting Israel’s role in the Middle East, that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, that Israel is ‘our friend,’ sort of came with the territory … but all of that is beginning to change.  We have seen enormous change in how people think about these issues, in how people talk about these issues, and that is the starting point for change in policy and in how our children get educated on these issues,” said Bennis.

Two books, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby, broke the longstanding taboo against serious criticism of Israeli policy, said Bennis.

“They were able to do that because the discourse was already beginning to change, and they were able to push that change much further,” said Bennis.

During the 2008-2009 Israeli attack on Gaza, for the first time polls showed that American opinion was evenly split on the question of whether Israel or the Palestinians were responsible for the violence, said Bennis.

“If you take a step back and look at the disparities in the violence, that’s an outrage.  Fourteen hundred Palestinian [dead], overwhelmingly civilians, many of them children, many of them women, versus 13 Israelis, of whom all but three were soldiers,” said Bennis.

But compared to earlier polls, the shift in public opinion was “huge, 15 or 20 percent,” said Bennis.

Bennis also pointed to polls reflecting similar shifts in American public opinion regarding illegal Israeli settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

“The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign … has seen enormous victories.  Agrexco, the big Israeli agricultural export agency, is bankrupt, and they can’t even find a buyer in the private sector … because it can’t sell stuff anymore,” said Bennis.

A 2010 decision of the European Court of Justice ruled that products from Israeli settlements are not eligible for preferential trade tariffs under the EU Israel Agreement.

Israel has refused to differentiate between produce grown in Occupied Territories and produce grown in Israel, so EU countries are no longer allowing the import of produce from Israel, said Bennis.

“The lost their market,” said Bennis.

Bennis also noted that the city of Stockholm had cancelled a contract for the construction of a light rail system after BDS activists called attention to the French contractor, Veolia, which built an Israeli light rail system in the Occupied Territories.

Veolia has come under pressure across the EU and in the USA for its involvement in Israeli projects in the Occupied Territories.

Bennis compared the nascent OWS movement to the Palestinian Intifada, intifada meaning to shake up or shake off.

“Whatever happens with the Occupy Everywhere movement, it may get legs, it may become something more powerful than what it is now.  I hope so.  But whether it does or not, I think it will continue to shake up ordinary day-to-day life in this country, ordinary politics,” said Bennis.

“It’s shaking up our assumptions about what ordinary people can do,” said Bennis.

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is largely composed of “new people,” said Bennis, “people who for the first time are taking the power into their own hands to send a message that Wall Street has too much power, that the banks and their money is corrupting our government,” said Bennis,

“It’s an amazing moment!  We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.  Is the military in Egypt going to turn over power to an elected government?  Will that election be both free and fair?  What will happen to human rights under an Egyptian government?  What’s going to happen in Bahrain?  What’s going to happen in Libya, where a new government is fast coming to power backed by the US and NATO? What’s going to happen in Yemen, in Syria?  We don’t know the answers, but we know that the region has been shaken up by an intifada of a whole new kind, and that is what is so exciting about all of this,” said Bennis.

“Israel is more isolated than ever, not because people don’t think Israel has a right to exist. …  Countries don’t have rights; people have rights.  Peoples have rights to exist; Israelis like everyone else have a right to exist in safety and security. … Rights are for people, and in that context, Israel is losing the war for legitimacy because of its policies, because of its policies of apartheid, forced separation, ethnic cleansing, because of its policy of occupation, because of its policy of denying the right of return to refugees,” said Bennis.

It’s those policies that are losing Israel credibility around the world, that are making it so hard for Israel to find any supporters, except for our government.  That’s our big challenge.  The US and Israel are losing the moral high ground,” said Bennis.

Noting recent and wildly implausible claims by the Obama administration that Iran was involved in a plot to hire Mexican drug cartel assassins to bomb the Saudi ambassador to the US in a Washington restaurant, Bennis asked, “Who benefits from that?  … I don’t think we’re being told the whole story,” said Bennis.

The bottom line is that Israel is losing its moral high ground and has also lost its important strategic allies, Egypt and Turkey, “which it could count on, however grudgingly, to defend Israel against the opposition of their own people.  They’re not doing that anymore, Turkey largely because of the [Gaza humanitarian relief] flotilla incident, Israel’s failure to apologize and offer reparations, Egypt because there has been a revolution and you no longer have a government that is dependent solely on US military and economic aid,” said Bennis.

“How do we turn all of that into a shift of US policy?” asked Bennis.

Obama’s Cairo speech “was one for the ages, but his policies do not reflect it,” said Bennis, and “we have the obligation to make him” live up to it.

“It is no longer political suicide to criticize Israeli policy,” said Bennis, “but the politicians don’t know that.  That’s our job.”

“Our job is to make clear to members of Congress, the President, and the Senate, and the city councilors, and the governors, and the mayors, and the county boards of supervisors, and the university administrations that it is now political suicide to support Israeli policies, and if they continue to do so, that’s when they will lose their positions, their power,” said Bennis to sustained applause.

“It won’t be easy,” said Bennis, who explained that Americans now need to focus on their own government’s role in Israeli policy, rather than Israel’s policies.

The US must stop being “a co-conspirator, an enabler” of Israeli policies.  US aid to Israel is immoral, and America needs to stand on the side of international law and human rights, said Bennis.

“One of the first things people say to me is, ‘How do I do this work and make sure than I don’t get called an anti-Semite?’” said Bennis.

“And I say to them, ‘There’s no guarantee.  Don’t be an anti-Semite.  Call it out when you see it. … And don’t let the threat that somebody might call you an anti-Semite be an excuse to not do your work. … People used to get called anti-Semites all the time.  People like me used to get called self-hating Jews all the time. Now, it happens, but not nearly as much.  The Jewish Defense League shot into my house in LA 20 or 30 years ago because they didn’t like what I was doing.  They don’t do that anymore, not because they’re not violent creeps, but because they no longer think that they have the moral high ground and the majority is on their side, and they’re right,” said Bennis.

“Political discourse has changed and it is no longer on their side.  They are the ones who are out of step with the public, not us.  That is what has changed, and our job is to figure out how to galvanize the new public opinion and make it operative.  It means reclaiming our democracy,” said Bennis.

Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian freelance journalist, author, political analyst, and parent-of-two from Gaza, presented the second keynote address on October 15.  Plenary and workshop presenters included Yaser Abu Dagga, Jennifer Bing, Dr. Jeremy Brigham, Mohammed Fahmy, Mahmoud Hamad, Remi Kanazi, Liz Knott, Pat Minor, Rachel Orville, Lynn Pollack, Josh Ruebner, Ron Stone, Rev. Don Wagner, and Rev. David Wildman.

Co-sponsors and conferences supporters included Afifi, Adel, and Larry; AFSC Middle East Peace Education Project; Albert Aossey; Joe and Laila Aossey; Board of Church and Society, Board of Global Ministries, Iowa Annual Conference, United Methodist Church; Mary Caponi; Catholic Peace Ministry; Clinton Franciscan Center for Active Nonviolence and Peacemaking; Concerned Iowans for Middle East Peace; Darul Arqum Islamic Center; Des Moines Area Ecumenical Committee for Peace; Des Moines Catholic Worker House; Des Moines International Eucharistic Community; Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting; Eye On Palestine; First Presbyterian Church (in memory of Ruth Keraus and Jeff Koch); Holy Trinity Catholic Church Peace and Justice Committee; Iowa City Friends Meeting; Iowans for a Free Palestine; Islamic Center of Des Moines; Islamic Services of America; Israeli Coalition Against House Demolitions-USA; Jesus Christ, Prince of Peace Parish, Pax Christi; Margaret Kiekhaefer; Lois Olsen Memorial Fund, Iowa City Friends Meeting; Kathleen McQuillen; Methodist Federation for Social Action-Iowa; Evalee Mickey; Midamar Corporation; Jack Mithelman; OLIH Peace and Justice Committee; Palestine Human Rights Action Network; Paulina Friends Meeting; Peace Iowa; People for Justice in Palestine; Plymouth Congregational Church Peace Committee; Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice; Sabeel-North America; SE Iowa Synod Evangelical Lutheran Church; Sisters Council Leadership Team, DM Catholic Diocese; Sisters of Humility of Mary, Des Moines Region; Hugh Stone; Social Ministries Task Force of the Presbytery of Des Moines; Lee Tesdell; Western Iowa Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Westminister Presbyterian Church; and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Des Moines.

By Richard Falk

There is a natural disposition for supporters of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination to suppose that the Palestinian statehood bid must be a positive initiative, because it has generated such a frantic Israeli effort to have it rejected. Despite the high costs to United States diplomacy in the Middle East at this time of regional tumult and uncertainty, the US has committed itself to exercise its veto on Israel’s behalf if that turns out to be necessary. To avoid the humiliation of disregarding the overwhelming majority opinion of most governments in the world, the US has rallied the former European colonial powers to stand by its side, while leaning on Bosnia and Colombia to abstain, thereby hoping to deny Palestine the nine votes it needs for a Security Council decision, without technically casting a veto.

On the side of Palestinian statehood, one finds China, Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Gabon, the leading countries of the South, the main peoples previously victimised by colonial rule. Is not a comparison of these geopolitical alignments sufficient by itself to resolve the issue of taking sides on such a litmus test of political identity? The old West versus the new South.

Add to this the drama, eloquence, and forthrightness of Mahmoud Abbas’s historic speech of September 23 to the General Assembly, which received standing ovations from many of the assembled delegates. Such a favourable reception was reinforced by its contrast with the ranting polemic delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who insulted the UN by calling it “the theatre of the absurd” while offering nothing of substance that might make even mildly credible his strident rhetoric claim to support “peace,” “direct negotiations” and “a Palestinian state”. The deviousness of Netanyahu was made manifest when, a few days later, the Israeli government announced that it had approved 1,100 additional housing units in the major settlement of Gilo, east of Jerusalem. This was a bridge too far even for Hillary Clinton, who called the move “counter-productive” and which Europeans regarded as deeply disappointing and confidence-destroying – so much so that Netanyahu was openly asked to reverse the decision.

Security Council recommendation

There are a variety of other indications that additional settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing initiatives will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead. Are not such expressions of Israeli defiance that embarrasses even their most ardent governmental supporter enough reason by itself to justify a Security Council recommendation of Palestine statehood at this time? Would it not be worthwhile at this crucial moment to demonstrate the wide chasm separating increasing global support for the pursuit of justice on behalf of the Palestinian people from this domestically driven US reliance on its ultimate right of veto to block Palestinian aspirations? Would it not be well to remind Americans across the country, including even its captive Congress, that its own Declaration of Independence wisely counselled “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”?

If ever the use of the veto seems ill-advised and deeply illegitimate, it is in this instance, which the Obama administration seems to acknowledge. Otherwise why would it use its leverage to induce allies and dependent states to go along with its opposition to Palestinian membership in the UN?

Turning to the speech itself, the language of recognition may be more notable than the substance. Never before in an international forum had the voice of the Palestinian Authority spoke of Israel’s occupation policies so unabashedly – as “colonial”, as involving “ethnic cleansing”, as imposing an unlawful “annexation wall”, as creating a new form of “apartheid”. With admirable directness, Israel was accused of carrying out the occupation in a manner that violated fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, and cumulatively amounted to the commission of crimes against humanity.

In the course of his speech Abbas tried hard to reassure the Palestinian diaspora on two matters of deep concern: that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) will continue to represent the Palestinian people, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the most fundamental of Palestinian rights at stake, the right of self-determination. The issue here is lost on almost all observers of the conflict, that the Palestinian Authority (PA), of which Abbas is president, is a subsidiary body that was created by the PLO with a temporary mandate to administer Palestinian territory under occupation, and thus it was important to allay suspicions that the PLO was an intended casualty of the statehood bid – so as to territorialise the conflict and give the Abbas and PA leadership complete representational control over the Palestinian role at the UN.

Straightforward language

The deep concern here relates to the adequacy of representation relating to the Palestinians living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries or in exile around the world. In the Palestinian National Council, 483 of its 669 members are drawn from Palestinians not living under occupation. President Abbas used the clearest possible language to reaffirm the position of the PLO just prior to enumerating the five conditions guiding his leadership role: “I confirm, on behalf of the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, which will remain so until the end of the conflict in all its aspects and until the resolution of the final status issues…”

In the background of this representation issue is an anxiety that Palestinian refugee rights will be forgotten or marginalised in the course of striking a deal that is build around a “land for peace” formula. Again, Abbas inserted some reassuring language in his speech to the effect that peace will depend on “a just and agreed upon solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194,” which unconditionally affirmed a Palestinian right of return. Relevantly, Netanyahu in his speech alluded to the “fantasy of flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians”, which is his way of both dismissing the rights of Palestinian refugees, especially as derived from the massive dispossession of Palestinian in 1948, and insisting on the Palestinian recognition of Israel as “a Jewish state”. This insistence combines demographics with democracy, contending that ever since the promise of Lord Balfour on behalf of the British government to a leader of the Zionist movement in 1917 there were continual acknowledgements that Israel was a Jewish state.

Netanyahu made short shrift of the claims to dignity and equality of the 1.5m Palestinians existing under an array of discriminatory burdens – by saying merely that Israel treats its minorities in a manner that respects their human rights. It should be recalled that the Balfour declaration, a notoriously colonial disposition, did not promise the Jewish people a state, but rather “a national home”, and that it was to be established in a manner that did not interfere with the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Human rights and democracy have become significantly universalised during the past several decades. This development implies that the governing structures of society embodied in the state must renounce any claim of ethnic or religious particularity.

Religious declaration

Political legitimacy in the 21st century should not be accorded to any state that claims to be a Jewish state, an Islamic state, or a Christian state. Such statist neutrality should be set forth as an element of legitimate statehood by formal action at the United Nations. Such a declaration would impose a limit on the right of self-determination by denying to peoples the right to establish ethnic or religious states. In a globalising world, ethnic and religious diversity are present in every major state, and this needs to be respected by unfurling a banner of equality that grants religious freedom to all faiths and allows collective identities to be expressed without prejudice.

For some widely respected Palestinian activists and NGOs, these assurances were not enough. With the formidable intellectual support of Oxford professor, Guy Goodwin-Gill, the very idea of Palestinian statehood compromises the representational rights of diaspora Palestinians within UN arenas of decision – and potentially deforms future negotiations by according predominance to territorial priorities. Goodwin-Gill’s analysis was built around the general view that a state could never adequately represent people outside its borders.

Given existing realities, this would mean disenfranchising the Palestinian refugee and exile population that comprises a majority of “the Palestinian people” who are as a collectivity the holder of the overarching entitlement embodied in the right of self-determination. Such a view may be technically correct, and operationally prudent, but it overstates the clarity of the legal implications of Palestinian statehood and UN membership, while understating the degree to which what is being questioned are the psycho-political priorities of the current PA/PLO leadership.

To further strengthen and promote the unity of the Palestinian global solidarity movement, it is crucial to continue to seek accommodation between territorial and non-territorial dimensions of the Palestinian struggle, and thus to minimise intra-Palestinian divergences, including the ongoing rift with Hamas. Here again Abbas had some reassuring words to say about the future implementation of the reconciliation agreement reached between the PLO and Hamas in June, but the failure of Hamas to endorse the statehood/membership bid at this time raises doubts about whether cooperation between these two political tendencies of Palestinians living under occupation will be forthcoming in the future.

There are, against this background, some further grounds for concern that result from gaps or disappointing formulations in the Abbas speech. One glaring gap was the failure to address the accountability issues associated with the non-implemented recommendations of the Goldstone Report, arising out of war crimes allegations associated with massive attacks (Israeli code named “Operation Cast Lead”) on Gaza between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009. In an important statement issued by the Palestinian Centre of Human Rights, jointly with several respected human rights NGOs, the PLO was given responsibility for doing their best to see that these recommendations for referral to the International Criminal Court be carried out.

In the words of the statement: “Should the PLO choose not to pursue the accountability process initiated by the Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission – at the expense of the Statehood initiative – this will amount to the prioritisation of political processes over victims’ fundamental rights; indicating acceptance of the pervasive impunity that characterises the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.”

International law

Although implicit in the Abbas speech, the systematic refusal of Israel to comply with international law, was not accorded the emphasis in deserves. Given this reality, it was comic irony for Netanyahu to invoke international law in relation to the captivity of a single Israel soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit; of course, international law should be observed in relation to every person, but when Israel subjects the whole of Gaza to a punitive blockade that has lasted for more than four years, imprisons thousands of Palestinians in conditions below international legal standards, and refuses to implement the near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the World Court on the unlawfulness of its annexation wall, it has lost all credibility to rely on international law on those few occasions when it works to its advantage.

Even more disturbing, because so relevant to the present posture of the conflict, was the rather bland expression of willingness on the part of the PLO to resume direct negotiations – provided that Israel imposes “a complete cessation of settlement activities”. As there is no chance that this condition will be met, it may not be so important for Abbas to question the value of direct negotiations, given their repeated failure to move the parties any closer to peace during the past 18 years. In fact, Israel has cloaked settlement expansion, ethnic cleansing, and a variety of encroachments on what might have at one time become a viable Palestinian state, with the charade of periodic peace talks held under the non-neutral auspices of the United States.

What Abbas could have done more effectively, given the unlikelihood of an affirmative Security Council recommendation on UN membership, is to couple the statehood/membership bid with the demand of a new framework for future negotiations which includes both Israeli commitments to abandon settlement expansion in East Jerusalem as well as the West Bank, and more importantly, selects a state or regional organisation to provide non-partisan auspices for the talks. Such a demand would have made clear that the PLO/PA was no longer willing to play along with the Oslo game that has more than doubled the settler population and allowed Israel to invest in an expensive settler-only infrastructure that is unlikely to be ever voluntarily dismantled. It is past time to declare the Oslo framework of direct negotiations as terminally ill, futile, and illegitimate, and incapable of drafting a roadmap that leads anywhere worth going. For the UN to be one of the four Quartet members, especially given the American hegemonic control over the diplomacy on the conflict, also warranted a harsh comment by Abbas.

What the future holds is more uncertain than ever. The mainstream media has tended to criticise both Israel and the PA/PLO asif their respective behaviour was equivalent. For instance, the Palestinian statehood/membership initiative is treated as equally provocative as the Israeli announced intention to expand the unlawful Gilo settlement. Such an attitude does belong in the “theatre of the absurd”, equating a completely legal, arguably overdue plea to be given an upgraded status at the UN with a criminal encroachment on basic Palestinian rights associated with territory under occupation, as recognised by Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The equating of what is grossly unequal is a common form of misrepresentation in relation to the Israel/Palestine conflict, making Israeli violent forms defiance of international law somehow no more objectionable than Palestinian nonviolent pursuit of diplomatic options.

Whether Israel will follow through on its threats to “punish” the PA for undertaking this completely legal initiative remains to be seen. Already there is troublesome indications of widespread settler violence in the West Bank that is either unopposed or backed by Israeli military and security units. As has been observed by the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, Israel will never have a more moderate partner for peace than the Ramallah leadership, and if it undermines its viability it will be demonstrating once again that it has lost its capacity to promote its national interests. It has shown this aspect of decline most dramatically by picking a fight with a resurgent Turkey, and then missing one opportunity after another to repair the damage, which is what Ankara hoped would happen.

As regional developments move toward greater support for the Palestinian struggle, Israel is allowing what might have been a historic opportunity for a sustainable peace to slip away. An acute problem with extremism, whether of the Likud or Tea Party variety, is that it subordinates interests and rationality to the dictates of an obsessive and emotive vision that is incapable of calculating the balance of gains and losses in conflict situations, being preoccupied with all or nothing outcomes, which is the antithesis of diplomacy. This is a path that inevitably produces acute human suffering and often leads to disaster. It is time for Israelis to abandon such a path, for their own sake, and for the sake of others.

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades. His most recent book is Achieving Human Rights (2009). He is currently serving his fourth year of a six-year term as a United Nations special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Article and photo courtesy Al Jazeera English online

By Patrick Cockburn

As one of 20 Bahraini doctors and nurses given up to 15 years in prison, Dr Roula al-Saffar recalls with outrage the tortures inflicted as police tried to force her and other medical specialists to confess to “a doctors’ plot” to overthrow the Bahraini government.

“It was a nightmare,” Dr Saffar, the 49-year-old president of the Bahraini Nursing Society, told The Independent in a phone interview from Bahrain, on the day that she had originally been told she would go to prison – a fate that now appears to have been briefly postponed. “They gave me electric shocks and beat me with a cable. They did not let me sleep for three or four days.”

She was given only a single bottle of water to drink in the course of a week-long interrogation. Even being given permission to go to the toilet depended on the mood of the police who were abusing her.

She was horrified to see school girls in shock who had been threatened with rape by interrogators, and she still fears that some of them may have been sexually abused but are too frightened to admit it. She said: “They had bruises all over their bodies.” In the course of her five months’ imprisonment, she believes she saw as many as 250 detainees, some of them aged between 13 and 16 years old, who were thrown into cells with their injuries untreated.

She herself was dragged one night from the cell where she was sleeping on the floor “to a room full of men who were all smoking”. She said: “I had heard the call to prayer so it must have been about 3.30am. They told me they were going to rape me there and then if I did not confess.”

Never were there more unlikely revolutionaries than the doctors and nurses, all specialists in their fields, whom the Bahraini government claims had turned the Salmaniya Hospital Complex in Manama, the capital, into a base for rebellion. “We are completely innocent,” Dr Saffar said. “All we did was to treat our patients.”

Dr Saffar, educated in the US and with a long list of degrees and medical qualifications, is now waiting to see if she will be re-arrested to start her sentence before her appeal is heard on 23 October. She is not hopeful about the outcome, after spending 156 days in prison. “Knowing what has happened in Bahrain, they can do anything,” she says.

Her imprisonment started on 4 April when she was summoned to a police station. She was immediately handcuffed and blindfolded. “There were beatings and electric shocks and a piece of paper was put on my back saying that anybody could do anything to me,” she remembers. This went on for a week. She was made to listen to the screams of colleagues being tortured.

She says she was especially targeted by a woman police officer, a member of the al-Khalifa royal family, who beat her and used electric shocks on her. “When I first arrived [the woman] said, ‘Welcome. I have been waiting for you since 2005 and you have been under the microscope’.” This turned out to be a reference to a campaign led by Dr Saffar to increase nurses’ pay and improve their working conditions.

The account by Dr Saffar of her interrogation and mistreatment tallies so closely with that of other detainees that there seems to have been a common procedure, beginning with seven days of severe torture, including sleep deprivation and confinement in a cell with the air conditioning turned down to freezing. One obsession of her questioners was to force a confession that she and other doctors had taken bags of blood from the hospital blood bank to give to protesters to pour over themselves, to lend credibility to false claims that they had suffered injuries at the hands of the police. These and other charges, Dr Saffar said, were completely ridiculous.

Article courtesy of The Independent (UK), photo courtesy AP

By Richard Falk

Even if nothing further were to happen, the proposed Palestinian initiative for statehood, combined with the furious negative responses in Tel Aviv and Washington, has given a much-needed visibility to the ongoing daily ordeal of the Palestinian people, whether living under the rigours of occupation, consigned for decades to miserable refugee camps, or existing in the stressful limbo of exile.

The only genuine challenge facing the world community of states and the UN is how to end this ordeal – which has lasted now for 63 years – in a manner that produces a just and sustainable peace. It is the entanglement of geopolitics with this unmet challenge that signifies the moral, legal, and political inadequacy of the contemporary world order.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict, along with the continued presence of nuclear weaponry and the persistence of world poverty, exhibits the failure of international law and morality, as well as of common sense and enlightened realism, to guide the behaviour of leading sovereign states.

In the face of this failure, the frustrations, injustice, and extraordinary suffering experienced by the Palestinian people has come to dominate the moral and political imagination of the world. No issue has generated this level of solidarity among the peoples of the world since the anti-apartheid campaign toppled the racist regime in South Africa more than twenty years ago.

To the surprise of many and the comprehension of few, it is not only Israel that opposes this initiative of the Palestinian Authority (PA). A crucial part of the background is the division among Palestinians as to the wisdom and effects of the statehood initiative at the UN.

Criticism of the bid

Palestinian critics consider the statehood application diversionary and divisive, arguing that it will shrink the dispute to territorial issues, place approximately seven million Palestinian refugees and exile communities in permanent limbo, and allow Israel to treat the outcome of this UN shadow play as the end game in their long effort to transform what was to be a temporary occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank into a condition of permanent, if de facto, annexation.

The question that underlies this debate is whether the diplomatic claim of statehood in this form legitimately represents the Palestinian people in their several dimensions, or merely fulfills, at a price, the ambitions of the PA. In the background is the organisational complexity of the Palestinian community, with the future of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) drawn into question.

Whereas the councils of the PLO include representatives of the Palestinian diaspora, the PA is a political formation intended to address the circumstances of occupation in the post-Oslo period, and has as its primary goal the promotion of the withdrawal of Israeli occupying forces. To carry out this mission it has been seeking with some success (achieving favourable progress reports from the World Bank and IMF) to demonstrate that it possesses the institutional capabilities needed for stable governance, including maintaining security and preventing anti-Israeli activism.

How this sense of political priorities relates to the claims of refugees confined in camps in neighbouring Arab countries, as well as the several million Palestinians living around the world, seems to be the deepest issue dividing the Palestinian people as a whole. A closely related concern, but one that is more widely appreciated, is the refusal of Hamas to lend support to this initiative, despite the fanfare surrounding the unity agreement brokered by Egypt in early June.

What Palestinian opponents of the statehood bid most fear is that the issue of representation will be wrongly resolved from their perspective. This issue of representation lies at the political core of the internal Palestinian struggle to achieve their rights under international law, above all to define the Palestinian “self” that is entitled to self-determination.

There are worries among Palestinians living outside of the occupied territories that the statehood bid, whatever its outcome, will have an adverse spillover effect on the still-unresolved representation issue. In addressing this concern, the non-participation of Hamas in this kind of Palestinian diplomacy cannot be ignored, nor can Hamas be dismissed due to its alleged refusal to accept an Israel that lies within its 1967 borders.

It should be appreciated, without necessarily being accepted as reliable, that Hamas leaders have periodically indicated a willingness to sign onto a long-term coexistence agreement of up to 50 years if Israel withdraws completely to the Green Line that was treated as Israel’s border until the 1967 War.

Such an agreement is highly unlikely to overcome genuine Israeli anxieties or correspond to Israeli perceptions of Hamas and its intentions; furthermore, its implementation would thwart Israel’s territorial ambitions by requiring the dismantlement of the settlements. At the same time, the realisation that what has been tried has not worked suggests that this admittedly imperfect alternative to negotiations in the search for a sustainable peace should not be unconditionally rejected.

Doesn’t Israel want peace?

Against such a background, how can we explain the furious Israeli and US opposition to this Palestinian initiative? Should not Israel and the United States welcome, even encourage, this PA initiative as a way of reducing the conflict to its land-for-peace dimensions, maybe getting rid of the right of return issue once and for all?

Joseph Massad has perceptively analysed the statehood bid as presenting Israel with a win/win situation. Even so, the intensive US efforts to thwart the bid by vetoing or getting a majority to vote against it in the Security Council is easy to understand.

On any question that comes before the UN in which Israeli policy is seriously questioned or its behaviour is subject to criticism, the United States leaps to Israel’s defense, regardless of the merits, whenever necessary using its veto power in the Security Council. This has been true during the Obama presidency on UN efforts to censure unlawful settlement expansion, to carry forward the accountability recommendations of the Goldstone Report, or to allow civil society to break the unlawful blockade that has entrapped the people of Gaza for more than four years.

Casting a veto here or working behind the scenes to cobble together a majority, as the respected international law expert Balakrishnan Rajagopal has noted in a recent column in the Huffington Post, is both politically imprudent and unmindful of UN members’ responsibility to uphold the legal rights of every political community to enjoy the privileges of statehood if it qualifies as a state.

It is a tribute to the UN that the most important of these privileges is now access to the United Nations system with the status of a sovereign state. It should be observed that another highly-regarded international jurist, John Quigley, in a scholarly book published by Cambridge University Press two years ago, argued that Palestine was already a state from the perspective of international law, and had been so recognised by well over 100 governments.

This diplomatic crusade to block Palestinian statehood also undermines confidence in US claims to serve as a world leader promoting the global public good. This primacy of hard-power geopolitics will raise serious questions about the capacity of the UN to serve as a vehicle for the realisation of global justice and to uphold the basic rights of peoples.

‘We the hegemon’

Need we be reminded once again that the inspiring opening words of the UN Charter, “we the peoples”, has always given way to “we the governments”? More starkly since the end of the Cold War, as this controversy sadly highlights, it has been replaced by “we the hegemon”.

We should by now understand that the United States government does whatever Israel wants it to do, but why does Israel seem to mind so much if the Palestinian initiative were to succeed? After all, even the Netanyahu leadership claims it supports Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution.

And if the Palestinian critics of the PA are even partially correct, would not the further territorialisation of the conflict and its narrowing of the negotiating agenda serve Israeli interests?

This interpretation seems reinforced by Mahmoud Abbas’ reassurances that PA security forces will prevent any Palestinian violence targeting Israelis, that the path to direct negotiations is more open than ever, and that this initiative in no way is meant to challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Since the events of the Arab Spring, Israel has shown almost no capacity to act in support of its real interests in the region, as exemplified by its botched relations with Turkey and Egypt, and perhaps this response at the UN is just one more illustration. Such an explanation cannot be ruled out, but there are more sinister interpretations that seem more plausible given Israel’s overall pattern of behaviour.

By insisting that only “direct negotiations” can produce statehood Israel is providing itself with a gold-plated pretext for refusing to negotiate at all for years to come. Netanyahu almost comically suggested that the delay could last 60 years. And for what reason? Another line of explanation gives the settler leadership its own veto power, and it has already vowed to carry out provocative “sovereignty marches” into the West Bank during the UN discussions.

In this conflict, time has never been static, or neutral. Each extra day of occupation, refugee status and involuntary exile, in effect, lengthens a prison sentence imposed on the entirety of the Palestinian people. This is bad enough, but, in addition, Israel has taken consistent advantage of the passage of time to expand its unlawful settlements, alter the demographics of East Jerusalem in its favour, build a separation wall found to be a violation of international law by a vote of 14 to 1 in the World Court, and to isolate Gaza from the rest of the Palestinian territories and the world.

‘Creating facts on the ground’

During the Oslo peace process that gave rise to the mantra of direct negotiations or nothing, Israel has more than doubled the settlement population, and steadfastly refuses to impose even a temporary freeze on expansion in the West Bank during negotiations, and has never been willing even to consider a freeze on settlement construction in East Jerusalem.

Israeli leaders talk openly, even boast, about “creating facts on the ground”, more discreetly referred to by Hillary Clinton as “subsequent developments”, and more realistically understood as the ratification of massive illegality. Such a political posture exposes the lie beneath an Israeli claim of a commitment to “direct negotiations” as a path to peace. Direct negotiations for almost 20 years have brought the parties no closer to peace, and arguably have had as their main effect the undermining of the conditions for a sustainable two-state solution.

What direct negotiations have done is to buy time for Israel’s unacknowledged ambitions and to calm international criticisms of this prolonged and cruel occupation.

Unfortunately, however the diplomatic confrontation unfolds, little is likely to be resolved. The charade of direct negotiations remains on the table. Parties on all sides ignore the revelations of the Palestine Papers, published a few months ago by Al Jazeera English, that showed beyond reasonable doubt that even the supposedly more moderate Olmert government of Israel seemed totally disinterested in a resolution of the conflict, even in the face of repeated PA concessions on fundamental issues made in confidential backroom talks at the highest levels.

Add to this the mockery of fairness that arises from allowing the United States to play the role of intermediary, the “honest broker” in such negotiations. Imagine trying to settle a marriage breakup by asking the elder brother of the wealthy husband to arbitrate a fight over assets with his penniless wife. How could such a framework ever hope to achieve peace that is just and sustainable? And what seems deeply flawed in theory has been shown to be even worse in practice. The parties are further from peace than ever: Palestinian rights and expectations have been continuously shrunk as time passes, and the occupation helps to consolidate a permanent Israeli presence.

Gallows humour

In the end, these questions of tactics and principle bearing on the right of self-determination need to be resolved by the Palestinian people.

Neither Israel, the United States, nor even the United Nations can displace this fundamental Palestinian responsibility for selecting a road that they believe will lead to peace with justice. But it is a display of gallows humour to expect most Palestinians to look with favour at the resumption of peace talks under the framework that has been used since the Oslo framework was agreed upon in 1993.

It has repeatedly demonstrated the futility of direct negotiations, especially given the continuing refusal of Israel to make even the most minimal gestures of real commitment, such as suspending settlement expansion indefinitely and dropping their deal-breaking insistence on being confirmed as “a Jewish state”, a claim that flies in the face of the presence in Israel of a Palestinian minority numbering more than 1.5 million.

If Israel is to retain its claim to be a democratic state, it must not insist on such an exclusivist formal identity. There is no way for claims of ethnic or religious exclusivity to be reconciled with the legal, moral, and political promise of human rights that have become the main signifiers of legitimate government at this time in history.

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades. His most recent book is Achieving Human Rights (2009).

He is currently serving his fourth year of a six-year term as a United Nations special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Article and photo courtesy Al Jazeera English online

By William Pfaff

Most Americans would likely agree that the main shock delivered to Americans and the American government by the 9/11 attacks was that of vulnerability. Another such shock is impending. It is the national vulnerability that will be revealed this month by the American veto of a Palestinian demand for full United Nations membership.

During the century and a half preceding 9/11, Americans enjoyed national and individual invulnerability to devastating foreign attack, unlike the people of any other major nation. Much has been made in recent years of how nuclear dread lay over the land in the 1950s. My own experience was that even the Cuban Missile Crisis was not what it subsequently was made out to have been. I am sure that the people actually making decisions in Washington quaked in their boots and prayed, which is why nothing happened. The menace was on the one hand so great that there was nothing to do about it (crouching under a table or possession of a shovel notwithstanding), but on the other hand no one in power was so stupid as to initiate a nuclear attack.

The American conviction of national invulnerability marched on. The Vietnam outcome threatened it, but it was easy for Americans, especially those who were not in authority, to say well, yes, but of course we could have won if we had really wanted to use our power.

Iraq is not today really perceived by public opinion as a defeat, only as mistake, muddle and incompetence, and, besides, our troops will (supposedly) be gone by 2012, and what’s past will be past.

In Kabul, Gen. David Petraeus in 2009 promised Barack Obama and the nation that the United States Army could be relied upon for victory in 2010. Now Petraeus has left the army to pursue higher aspirations. Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Obama presidential transition team and dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkrley, said that the team deemed the President-elect, with no military experience, vulnerable to official blackmail on national security and retroactive Bush administration justice issues, and so advised him to do whatever military and security officials proposed. Public confidence in President Obama on Middle Eastern issues may not be high today, while confidence in the Republicans seems even lower, but few Americans feel vulnerable to Middle Eastern risk. Least of all do they feel threatened by Israel’s actions.

This is likely to prove a serious mistake. National vulnerability has returned. A State Department official has confirmed that the United States intends to veto the expected Palestinian demand for U.N. Security Council recognition as a member state. The U.S. Congress, moreover, under pressure from Israel’s American friends, has declared that it will then cut off funding for the Palestinian Authority.

Egypt and the Arab governments will be angry, but the Arabs have been angry before with the invulnerable United States, and nothing has come of it—except for the 9/11 attacks and a war “on terror” that has gone on for a decade.

Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence and former ambassador to the U.S., has rather desperately been trying to warn America. He has published his warning in articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and circulated it on the Web. He writes that, if Washington vetoes the Palestinian petition, “American influence will decline further, Israeli security will be undermined and Iran will be empowered, increasing the chances of another war in the region.”

A veto will provoke uproar among Muslims everywhere. Everyone already knows this, but the Obama administration ignores it.

Al-Faisal indirectly forecasts that, in the case of a veto, the American “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia will come to an end, and says that the Saudis will “adopt a far more independent and assertive foreign policy”—as Turkey already has done, one notes. The Saudi kingdom would oppose the American-supported Maliki government in Iraq, refuse to open an embassy there, and possibly end its support for American policy in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Al-Faisal also says that Saudi Arabia, by far the largest supporter of the Palestinian Authority, would be unable to give the Palestinians all of the financial aid and religious and political legitimacy that they would need to deal with Israel in such changed circumstances. He notes that, in recent polls, 70 percent of Palestinians anticipate a new intifada if they are vetoed at the U.N.

He warns that the region and the nations principally involved are far better served by continuing cooperation and good will between longstanding allies Saudi Arabia and the United States, and that “Saudi Arabia is willing and able to chart a new and divergent course if America fails to act justly with regard to Palestine.”

The American nation and economy, and its relations with nations far beyond the Middle East, are deeply vulnerable to the political catastrophe against which al-Faisal warns.

However, what al-Faisal does not say is that the U.S. is the only nation to possess the strength and opportunity to act preemptively to solve this crisis. Israel now is incapable of rescuing itself because of its quasi-permanent internal political deadlock.

President Obama could spectacularly reverse policy and save the day. He could declare that the U.S. will vote in support of Palestine’s full membership in the U.N. It will use all of the means at its disposal to support Israeli withdrawal of illegal settlements from territory designated as part of the Palestinian state in the 1948 U.N. partition of Mandate Palestine. It will do all in its power to impose the solution that everyone—including realistic Israelis and the Palestinians—understand to be the inevitable, permanent and just solution of this problem.

The world would be dazzled. Barack Obama’s place in history would be assured.

Article courtesy William Pfaff and Truthdig

By Stephanie Nebehay

Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip violates international law, a panel of human rights experts reporting to a U.N. body said on Tuesday, disputing a conclusion reached by a separate U.N. probe into Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship.

The so-called Palmer Report on the Israeli raid of May 2010 that killed nine Turkish activists said earlier this month that Israel had used unreasonable force in last year’s raid, but its naval blockade of the Hamas-ruled strip was legal.

A panel of five independent U.N. rights experts reporting to the U.N. Human Rights Council rejected that conclusion, saying the blockade had subjected Gazans to collective punishment in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

The four-year blockade deprived 1.6 million Palestinians living in the enclave of fundamental rights, they said.

“In pronouncing itself on the legality of the naval blockade, the Palmer Report does not recognize the naval blockade as an integral part of Israel’s closure policy toward Gaza which has a disproportionate impact on the human rights of civilians,” they said in a joint statement.

An earlier fact-finding mission named by the same U.N. forum to investigate the flotilla incident also found in a report last September that the blockade violated international law. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says the blockade violates the Geneva Conventions.

Israel says its Gaza blockade is a precaution against arms reaching Hamas and other Palestinian guerrillas by sea.

The four-man panel headed by former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer found Israel had used unreasonable force in dealing with what it called “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers.”

Turkey has downgraded ties with Israel over the incident.

Richard Falk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and one of the five experts who issued Tuesday’s statement, said the Palmer report’s conclusions were influenced by a desire to salve Turkish-Israeli ties.

“The Palmer report was aimed at political reconciliation between Israel and Turkey. It is unfortunate that in the report politics should trump the law,” he said in the statement.

About one-third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 percent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israeli military measures, said Olivier De Schutter, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, another of the five.

At least two-thirds of Gazan households lack secure access to food, he said. “People are forced to make unacceptable trade-offs, often having to choose between food or medicine or water for their families.”

The other three experts were the U.N. special rapporteurs on physical and mental health; extreme poverty and human rights; and access to water and sanitation.

Article courtesy Reuters – Photo courtesy Gulf News

By Ahmed Moor

Israel is under pressure. The decline of American influence in the Middle East has combined with the Arab revolutions, Turkey’s regional ascendancy and the Palestinians’ statehood bid at the UN, to erode its global position.

Additionally, an increased awareness of Israeli apartheid around the world has worked to undermine the historically sufficient “security” argument used to justify the occupation of Palestine. It has been a short 20 years since the theatrical Arafat-Clinton-Rabin lawn party, and Israel has already traversed most of the distance to comprehensive global isolation.

Israeli analysts were right in their assessments of the consequences of the revolution in Egypt. In that country, most people are sensitive to the Palestinian point of view. Many of them believe that Zionism, which is Jewish nationalism in historical Palestine, is only the most recent iteration of European colonialism.

They are unsympathetic to the argument that it was necessary to ethnically cleanse Palestine in order to establish Israel. Moreover, they believe apartheid – the system by which Israel governs the Occupied Territories - is an atrocity.

For decades an imperious Egyptian dictatorship worked to protect Israel from popular opinion in Egypt. Its primary inducement was American money – about $2bn of it annually. But the revolution capsized Hosni Mubarak’s American jackboot and today Israel is forced to confront the irrepressible Egyptian call for Palestinian freedom.

Now Hosni Mubarak is on trial and the Egyptian-Israeli relationship is being similarly scrutinised. The Israeli ambassador’s recent flight from Cairo is a reasonable indication of where the relationship stands today. It is also probably a forward indicator.

History blindsided the Israelis in February; there was nothing they could do to preserve their strongman in Cairo. With Turkey, however, Israel’s political leadership worked with bizarre zealousness to undermine a reliable ally. By orchestrating a series of moves that showcased Israel’s contempt for Turkish lives, pride, property and humanitarian concerns, Tel Aviv succeeded in poisoning the only normal relationship it had with a Muslim-majority country.

Significantly, this occurred as Turkey sought to play a greater leadership role in the region.

Ignoring all the signals

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan signalled in 2009 – during Israel’s war on Gaza, which killed 1,400 Palestinians – that Israeli attacks on civilians would not be tolerated. The following year, Israeli commandos killed eight unarmed Turkish civilians and an American on international waters. The Turkish response was to demand an apology and compensation for the victims’ families. The Israelis refused, further incensing the Turkish leadership.

The relationship between the two countries worsened in recent weeks with the leak of a UN report on the flotilla. The report had been pushed by the Americans, who sought to use it as a vehicle for mending Ankara’s relationship with Tel Aviv. Significantly, it was to have been published after the Israelis apologised for the deaths of eight of the nine civilians (Obama has not asked Netanyahu to apologise for killing the American teenager).

Absent the apology, however, the report appeared to absolve Israel of its responsibility for the deaths, even going so far as to justify its illegal maritime siege of the Gaza Strip. The Turks reacted angrily and instructed the Israeli ambassador to return to Tel Aviv. The Israeli diplomatic mission was formally downgraded, and Turkey suspended all military ties between the two countries. Ankara also announced that Turkish naval vessels would accompany the next humanitarian mission to Gaza. The move is a direct challenge to de facto Israeli control of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Tel Aviv’s serial miscalculations vis-a-vis Ankara can be attributed to a myopic analytical scope.

The Israelis failed to successfully interpret macro-level developments in Europe and their impact on Turkey’s regional alignment; the advantages of joining the European Union have steadily declined as the financial crisis has grown more severe.

Simultaneously, the prospect of playing a regional leadership role has grown to outweigh the bit-player role Europe seemed to offer. NATO, of which Turkey is a member, has decreased in strength and influence, permitting the Turkish leadership to exercise greater national autonomy.

It is understandable, then, that the Israelis have reacted to an insistent Turkey with bewilderment. Historically, US influence in both Ankara and Cairo insulated the Israelis from the consequences of their boastful and bellicose self-regard.

Today, however, hegemonic decline means that for the first time in decades Washington cannot rescue Israel’s leaders from their own bad decisions. That reality continues to go unrecognised in Israel, where the leadership persists in making bad decisions.

Last week, for instance, Israeli Major General Eyal Eisenberg threatened the region with “all-out total war“ and the “possibility of weapons of mass destruction being used“ (Israel is the only country in the region with nuclear armaments). More recently, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested that Israel ought to arm and support PKK terrorists in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians are taking action on their own behalf.

The Palestinian observer delegation at the United Nations formally submitted its bid for statehood this week – a move that has long been anticipated by observers. The Americans, who still enjoy defending Israeli belligerence, have promised a veto. Despite that, the vote will result in greater Israeli isolation internationally due to widespread recognition that apartheid is wrong.

Most indications suggest that Israel’s increased global isolation will continue apace. The new Egyptian leadership – no matter who it is comprised of – will continue to object to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. An increasingly assertive Turkey will not be mollified by American entreaties and will continue to apply pressure on behalf of the Palestinians, who will pursue their right to freedom through international forums.

Indeed, the only way for Israel to gain acceptance in the broader Middle East is by ending the occupation. But that is a decision the Israelis don’t appear ready to make.

Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American freelance journalist based in Cairo. He was born in the Gaza Strip, Palestine.

Article courtesy English Al Jazeera.net

By Stephen Lendman

Palestinians must use their legal rights for statehood, whether or not Washington or Israel approve.

Palestinians worldwide want it. So do supporters and up to 140 countries. They comprise more than enough to ensure it and full de jure UN membership.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) can petition the General Assembly directly. It has sole admittance power, not the Security Council only able to recommend.

UN Charter Article 80(1) and others empower the General Assembly to recognize Palestinian statehood and take all necessary measures to end Israel’s illegal occupation.

If Washington invokes its Security Council veto, the GA can override it under the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution 377.

The choice is in Mahmoud Abbas’ hands. Later this month, he can either support his own people or don his collaborationist hat. His recent comments and body language suggest the latter, whatever his next moves.

Hopefully enough pressure will push him in the right direction to back long denied recognition and justice for millions deserving more than they’re now getting.

On September 8, Mohamed Elshinnawi headlined his Voice of America article, “Palestinians and UN – Statehood or Stalemate?” saying:

Palestinians seek General Assembly recognition, “but the final vote could fall short of the two-thirds majority required for final passage.”

False! As explained above, up to 140 countries express support, including China, Russia, Brazil, India, Japan, and most others, well more than enough needed for a simple two-thirds majority of voting members. Abstentions and no-shows don’t count.

Abbas is expected to address the General Assembly on September 23 when he’ll submit his request. Law Professor Francis Boyle explains practical membership benefits, saying:

“With admitting the Palestinian state as a full member in the UN, it will be able to file formal state-to-state complaints against Israeli officials….” If it “ratif(ies) the Genocide Convention, (it can) sue Israel at the International Court” for redress.

Theoretically it may be able to halt settlement construction entirely, and automatically make all diaspora Palestinians citizens of a new state they’re free to return to as international law mandates, including Resolution 194’s Article 11, stating:

“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

He said Palestine’s upgraded status would provide a strong incentive for Israel to negotiate in good faith and reach the much promoted two-state solution to end the conflict.

He also argued that statehood would incentivize Israel to negotiate in good faith, to end years of conflict and agree to an equitable two state solution within 1967 borders as Palestinians demand – 22% of sovereign Palestine.

Former Israeli UN ambassador Gabriela Shalev said Israel should understand invoking Resolution 377 is possible. In 1956, when France and Britain vetoed a Security Council resolution, condemning their attack on Egypt, General Assembly members used the measure to override.  Passed in 1950 during the Korean War, it came when Washington wanted power to circumvent Soviet Russia’s Security Council veto power.

It lets the General Assembly recommend various “collective measures,” including sanctions and use of force if permanent Security Council members can’t reach unanimity, and “there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.”

Former US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Schifter said General Assembly members involved Resolution 377 in 1981 to advance Namibian independence. It called on member states:

“to render increased and sustained support and material, financial, military and other assistance to the South West Africa People’s Organization to enable it to intensify its struggle for the liberation of Namibia.”

It also urged members to cease “all dealings with South Africa in order totally to isolate it politically, economically, militarily and culturally.”

Why not do the same for Palestine if America invokes its veto. The power is there to be used for long overdue rights too important to kick down the road and delay, even if risk US and Israeli hostility.

Many other allies are supportive, so the power of numbers may compensate, especially for the world’s newest state, millions don’t want to end up stillborn.

On September 9, Ma’an News said Palestinians “on Thursday began a campaign in support of their UN membership bid, as their senior leaders met to fine-tune the plan to become the UN’s 194th member state.”

Abbas met with senior Palestinian representatives including Fatah central committee members, the PLO’s executive committee, and leaders of various Palestinian political parties.

At issue is finalizing details of the likely bid to be submitted to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon later this month.

In Ramallah, a solidarity march to UN headquarters was held to present a letter, requesting his support. Campaign coordinator Ahmed Assaf said:

“Today we began our campaign on the ground and we chose the UN building because it represents the United Nations and we expect them to respond to our demands.”

“We are no less important than the other 193 states in the United Nations, and our message will ask for our state to be 194.”

He added that campaigning for statehood will continue until “Palestine is finally admitted as member state number 194.”

Latifa Abu Hamid, mother of seven sons who spent time in Israeli prisons (Israeli forces killed her eighth one), said:

“I’m delivering this message to the UN to say we have a right to our own state just like everyone else in the world and we have a right to see the end of the occupation.”

The letter called on Ban to “stand by justice and do right by our people.”

“The admission of the state of Palestine to the UN is an important step towards ending the occupation and achieving Palestinian independence and realizing a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East.”

“We hope that you will join the international consensus and support the Palestinian bid for its long overdue recognition.”

About 100 marchers chanted, “We want our identity. We want a state.” We want as many supportive states globally as possible.

On September 9, Ban Ki-moon said it. Does he mean it, affirming support for Palestinian statehood, but added that member states must decide.

Washington will invoke its veto. According to State Department spokesman Victoria Noland:

“It is not a surprise that the US will veto the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN in the city of New York. A Palestinian state can only be established through direct peace talks with Israel. So, yes! We are going to use the veto against the Palestinian bid.”

On September 8, New York Times writer Isabel Kershner headlined, “Palestinian Leader Says US Is ‘Too Late’ on UN Bid,” saying:

Abbas said America’s last-ditch efforts “to prevent the Palestinians from applying for membership in the United Nations this month were ‘too late.’ ”

As of now, they’ll petition the Security Council first. If America invokes its veto, General Assembly affirmation will be sought.

However, if the quartet arranges a settlement construction freeze and agreement on using pre-1967 borders based on land swaps, Palestinians “will go to the United Nations and we will return back to talks.”

Israel offered them with no preconditions, meaning they’re stillborn before getting started and worthless.

It’s time to move forward for full recognition, whether or not Washington and Israel approve.

The power of numbers solidly backs what’s long been denied. This time perhaps it’s enough for full recognition by invoking Resolution 377 if necessary.

Article courtesy OpEd News