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 Philip Giraldi

Mark Twain is credited with saying that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Today’s United States is often compared to other historic nations, whether at their prime or about to decline and fall depending on one’s own political perspective. Neoconservatives frequently eulogize Washington as a new Rome, promising a worldwide empire without end carried on the back of a Pentagon bristling with advanced weaponry. Other observers also cite Rome but are rather more sanguine, recalling how in the 5th century the empire failed dramatically and fell to barbarian hordes. Still others note the fate of the British Empire, which came apart in the wake of the Second World War, or the Soviets, whose collapse was brought about by 50 years of unsustainable military spending.

But the historical analogy that appears to be most apposite for post-9/11 Washington is that of the Weimar Republic. To be sure, any suggestion that the United States might be following the same course as Germany in the years that led to Nazism must be pursued with caution because few Americans want to believe that the descent into such extremism is even possible in the world’s most venerable constitutional republic. But consider the following: both the United States and Weimar Germany had constitutions in which checks and balances were integrated to maintain a multi-party system, the rule of law, and individual liberties. Both countries were on the receiving end of acts of terrorism that produced a dramatic and violent reaction against the presumed perpetrators of the crimes, so both quickly adopted legislation that abridged many constitutional rights and empowered the head of state to react decisively to further threats. The media fell in line, concerned that criticism would be unpatriotic.

Both the U.S. and Germany possessed politically powerful military-industrial complexes that had a vested interest in encouraging a militarized response to the threats and highly polarized internal politics that enabled politicians to obtain advantage by exploiting national security concerns. Both countries experienced severe financial crises and printed fiat currency to pay the bills, and both had jurists and political supporters who argued that in time of crisis the head of state must be granted special executive authority that transcends the limits placed by the constitution.

The Weimar Republic, which replaced rule by the German emperor in the aftermath of World War I, was a liberal democracy in the 19th-century sense, which means it had a constitution that guaranteed individual and group rights, multi-party systems, and free elections at regular intervals. It took its name from the city of Weimar, where the constitution was drawn up in a national assembly convened in 1919. From the start, Weimar was plagued by a failure to create a sustainable political culture because of the high level of polarization and violence instigated by both the major and fringe parties, even though the relatively moderate Social Democrats were normally dominant.

Adolph Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933. The chancellor was the head of government, but the head of state was President and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg was a hero of the First World War, and he despised the dangerous parvenu Hitler but foolishly thought he could control him. The National Socialist Party was, however, still a minority party in parliament with 33% of the popular vote when Hitler took charge, holding only three out of 11 cabinet positions. Strong socialist, Catholic, and communist parties actively contested the Nazis’ agenda. The media reflected the political divisions, with many papers opposing Hitler and his government.

Hitler benefited from the political paralysis of Weimar, which had forced his Reich chancellor predecessors to rule by presidential decree to bypass the logjam in parliament, but he could not actually legislate in that fashion and did not have a free ride. There was considerable resistance to his policies. All of that changed, however, when the seat of parliament in Berlin, the Reichstag, was burned down on Feb. 27, 1933. It was an act of terrorism that shocked the nation, and it was eventually attributed to an addled Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, though it was almost certainly carried out by the Nazis themselves. Hitler convinced President Hindenburg to sign a “Reichstag Fire Decree” on the following day, canceling the constitutional guarantees of habeas corpus and freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, and the privacy of communications. It authorized police search and seizure without any judicial warrant. It was no coincidence that the fire took place two weeks before parliamentary elections in which the Nazis, who beat and otherwise intimidated opponents and “monitored” the polling stations, won nearly 44% of the votes. The opposition, including the technically illegal communists, took 42% and Hitler was denied his majority, but he arrested socialist opponents, barred the communists, and was eventually able to form a government with his parliamentary allies.

Cajoling the Catholic parties to vote with him, Hitler subsequently passed the Enabling Act, which gave him the authority to ignore parliament and pass laws by decree. The full name of the Enabling Act was, in English, the “Act for the Removal of Distress from People and Reich.” Aided by leading jurists like Carl Schmitt, who argued that a powerful executive could ignore restraints imposed by bureaucrats and constitutions when required to cope with a “crisis,” and supported by conservatives and the army, Hitler quickly moved to consolidate power. The communist and socialist parties as well as any “new” parties were made illegal. In 1934, upon the death of Hindenburg, Hitler assumed the powers of the presidency, and the army began to swear allegiance to him rather than to the constitution. Germany became a dictatorship, and the rest is history. The March 1933 election was the last free election in Germany until the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949.

Fast forward 68 years. George W. Bush was president in 2001, a year after one of the most polarizing elections in U.S. history. There had been a gradual aggrandizement of the power of the U.S. presidency relative to the other branches of government since the Civil War, but most observers would have conceded that the constitutional separation of executive from legislative from judiciary remained largely intact. All of that was to change when the Twin Towers went down and the Pentagon was struck on 9/11. Though the Bush administration apparently had no hand in those events, the result was not too dissimilar to the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. A number of Bush Pentagon appointees, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, quickly mobilized to exploit the terror attack and pass legislation that would empower the White House and permit a massive military campaign directed against a number of countries that had been targeted for “regime change,” mostly in the Middle East. As a result, Iraq was eventually bombed and invaded even though it did not threaten the United States.

The first anti-terror legislation to pass was the USA PATRIOT Act, the full title of which is the “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” a euphemism oddly reminiscent of Hitler’s Enabling Act. The PATRIOT Act became law six weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers and was followed by the PATRIOT Act II of 2006. Together, the two laws diminished constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights were all discarded or abridged in the rush to make it easier to investigate, sometimes torture, and jail both foreigners and American citizens.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) followed, creating military tribunals for the trying of “unlawful enemy combatants,” including American citizens. Unlike in a civil or criminal court, the accused needs only a two-thirds vote by the commission members present to be convicted, resulting in a much higher conviction rate. The act suspends habeas corpus and Geneva Convention protections and permits the indefinite jailing of suspects in a military prison without charges or access to a lawyer. Hearsay or even information obtained overseas during torture can be used to obtain the conviction, while detainees do not have access to any classified information being used against them and cannot cross examine or even know the identity of witnesses.

Concurrent with the PATRIOT and Military Commission Acts, advocates of torture also emerged in Washington, not unlike the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s justification of the essentially lawless “Fuhrer State.” Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee declared torture legal because the president has the authority to do anything he deems necessary in time of crisis, the same argument that Hitler’s apologists made in discarding Weimar’s rule of law.

President Barack Obama has expanded the Bush portfolio, repeatedly citing state-secrets privileges to prevent any legal challenges while authorizing the assassination of U.S. citizens overseas based on suspicion, carrying out acts of war against countries with which Washington is not at war, and now, finally, signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which provides for indefinite military detention of anyone anywhere for any reason, including U.S. citizens in the United States, because the “whole world is the battlefield.” Did Hitler behave similarly in contravention of the Weimar constitution? He sure did. And if the expression “global war on terror” had been around in 1933, he likely would have used it auf Deutsch.

Sadly, on the verge of a new year, it is hard to argue that Washington in 2011 is much different from Weimar and Berlin in 1933. Last week, a man in Boston was convicted and sent to prison because he had traveled to Yemen and apparently wanted to join a terrorist group. He didn’t actually join the group; he just wanted to do it. So the age of the thought crime has arrived, something that even Hitler’s house jurist might have thought preposterous. Though we are not yet at the point where the president can declare opposition political parties illegal, Newt Gingrich might entertain the possibility if he were in charge. Pledges of personal loyalty to the leader, disenfranchisement of ethnic and religious minorities, and the burning of books by government fiat have not yet occurred either, but if one parses some of the rhetoric coming out of leading Republican presidential aspirants it is not inconceivable Muslim citizens will be subject to special security monitoring while a bonfire day featuring tracts on global warming and Darwinism might join Dixie Chicks CDs and french fries on the destroy-on-sight list.

While I jest to a certain extent, the power coupled with lack of accountability that has been assumed by the White House should be regarded as a deadly serious matter by every American citizen. If you think Weimar Republic Germany is a long time ago and far away so it can’t happen here, you are wrong. It can happen here, and unless something is done to stop it, it almost surely will happen here. It is happening already.

Article courtesy Philip Giraldi

By Max Blumenthal

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.

“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global war.”

Karen Greenberg the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”

Changing the way we do business

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues. Two former JINSA advisers who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.

Through its Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ State Police Superintendent, said after attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.

During a 2004 LEEP trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,” theNew York Times reported.

Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”

Some of the police chiefs who have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by 2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF, bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction from their Israeli counterparts.

PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview.

Lessons from Israel to Auschwitz

Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to “positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”

Through the ADL’s Advanced Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over 115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.

The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to official FBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”

Fighting “crimiterror”

Among the most prominent Israeli government figure to have influenced the practices of American law enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15 innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success, the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted” assassinations he has ordered.

Despite his dubious human rights record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was serving at the time as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston, Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller, who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”

A year after Dichter’s speech, he and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff signed a joint memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Demographic Unit

For the New York Police Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officer to Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government officials had committed war crimes.

Kelly returned to Israel the following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer, who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”

Back in New York, the NYPD set up a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan, and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”

The Israeli imprimatur on the NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”

Shop ‘til you’re stopped

At Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace themselves for five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day – but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme Court.

Though the Israeli system of airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi, an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Israeli techniques now dictate security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

One of the thousands who fell into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile, another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.

“I think that the threat of terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of American life,” Rozin remarked to American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the next paycheck.

“Occupy” meets the Occupation

When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counter-terrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.

Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”

“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, were in big trouble.”

By Michael Gillespie

Martha Hennessy, the seventh grandchild of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day and now a Catholic radical in her own right, visited Iowa and spoke in several venues in late September and early October.

In an exclusive interview following her presentation at the Des Moines Catholic Worker (DMCW) community’s 35^th anniversary celebration on September 30 at Trinity United Methodist Church, Hennessy told this reporter that she had found God in the Muslim world.

“You know, I’m a Christian, born in a so-called Christian nation, born Christian, baptized Catholic. I had to go to the Middle East to find God. I could not feel God here. The moment I stepped into Egypt, Morocco, all of those countries, the call to prayer was just rising up to the heavens and I was immersed in God,” said Hennessy.

Hennessy is soft spoken, but her words often surprise, electrify, and inspire.

“People there, Muslims, carry reverence for God in their everyday actions in a way that we here in this intensely materialistic society don’t. So, yes, I had to go to the Middle East to find God,” said Hennessy.

In response to a question during the Q&A following her presentation about growing up as Dorothy Day’s granddaughter, Hennessy talked about how her travels and experience in the Middle East and Southwest Asia inform her activism.

“I’ve tried to get into Gaza twice, but I have yet to get there. I went to Afghanistan in March with the Voices for Creative Nonviolence peace delegation with Kathy Kelly and others. We saw the refugee camps, we saw the destitution, we saw the malnutrition, we saw the utter breakdown of the social fabric,” said Hennessy.

“If we are going to be dropping bombs, if we are going to be making perpetual war, which we seem to be – our economy is a war economy – if we are going to maintain our standard of living, all of us, with war, then going to Afghanistan [to see the results of war] is appropriate.

“Afghanistan is an astounding place, a place of incredible beauty … also a place of incredible tragedy. We met with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, young people ages 12 to 21. We listened to them articulate what has happened to their country,” said Hennessy.

“One thing I clearly understood was the ignorance and arrogance on my part, on my country’s part, in terms of going into these places and then dictating to them what we think should happen. These boys, these teenagers, are more attuned than Obama or Gates or any of those people who are conducting these wars. … They would like to live without war. Their country has known nothing but war for 30 years.

“So we go there just to be with them and to look in their eyes and to listen. We don’t give them advice,” said Hennessy.

“Once you see what war is, you can’t remain silent about your role in it,” said Hennessy.

The Rev. Diane McClanahan, pastor of Trinity Methodist, welcomed about 75 people to the DMCW celebration and spoke of the long history of cooperation, “the troubles, the triumphs, the pain, and the joy,” that the church and DMCW had experienced together over the years. DMCW founder Frank Cordaro introduced Hennessy. Music was provided by Steve Jacobs of the Columbia, Missouri Catholic Worker community. A reception followed Hennessy’s presentation.

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 Michael Gillespie

The Interfaith Alliance of Iowa sponsored Common Ground, an interfaith commemoration service on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, at Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium in Des Moines on September 11.

Interfaith Alliance of Iowa Executive Director Connie Ryan Terrell told The Independent Monitor that the interfaith commemoration service was intended to address a number of issues and concerns.

Terrell said she began talking with the leaders of local faith communities about a commemorative service in July.

“Every single person I contacted said, ‘Yes, I want to help, I want to be a part of it,’ and no one said, ‘No.’ Everyone wanted to be a part of it,” said Terrell.

“We wanted to honor the people who died on 9/11 and pay respect to their families,” said Terrell, “and we wanted to bring together as many faith communities as we could get in a room and hold an interfaith service.”

Terrell said the planning committee knew there would be animosity toward the Muslim community around the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and decided to address that concern by focusing, “on the commonalities that we find across the spectrum of faith communities, not the differences.”

“There is enough that gets played out in media about differences in faith beliefs and traditions.  We felt the service should be about what we have in common.  That really became the theme,” said Terrell.

“We went through a very intentional process of building consensus,” said Terrell, “and every major decision was made by committee, which is a difficult thing to do, but we did it.

“Interfaith work can be difficult,” said Terrell, “and we had disagreement on a couple of different issues, but everybody stayed at the table and we came to consensus on everything that was discussed.”

“From the first meeting, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, Greek Orthodox, Unitarian Universalist, Sikh, Protestant, and Muslim, they were all there.  I won’t say that they were all at every meeting, because schedules didn’t allow for that, but they were all part of the conversation in a very detailed and important way,” said Terrell.

The event included music, poetry, and song.  Along with Terrell, the service participants included Ben Allaway, Music Director/Composer, First Christian Church; David Maxwell, President of Drake University; Pramod Mahajan, Hindu Community; Rabbi David Kaufman, Temple B’nai Jeshurun; Kyle Lechtenberg, Roman Catholic Diocese of Des Moines; Rev. Eido Bruce Espe, Des Moines Zen Center; Fr. Basil Hickman, Greek Orthodox Church of St. George; Rev. Mark Stringer, First Unitarian Church; Jasbir Singh and Baljit Singh Virdi, Iowa Sihk Association; Rev. Carmen Lampe Zeitler, American Baptist Church and Children and Family Urban Ministry of the United Methodist Church; Mohamad Kahn, Muslim Community Organization; Bishop Alan Scarfe, Episcopal Diocese of Iowa;  and Rev. Sarai Rice, Des Moines Area Religious Council.

A drum circle, Tina Manbeck, Jon Stafford, Eric Hedberg, Ben Alloway, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, and Thayne Henderson, offered the call to service and a reflection during the service.

Collaborative partners included Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, Des Moines Area Religious Council, Ecumenical Committee for Peace, American Friends Service Committee, and faith leaders from Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Unitarian Universalist, Sikh, Buddhist, and other faith communities.  More than 50 religious and community organizations lent their names in support of the event.

A representative of one group walked out in protest just minutes before the event began.

According to a September 13 article in the Des Moines Register, ”The Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines withdrew its support for a multifaith prayer service Sunday that marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks after event organizers declined to display a U.S. flag, said Mark Finkelstein, federation spokesman.”

Terrell declined The Independent Monitor’s request for comment regarding the protest.

Rabbi Kaufman, who was part of the planning process, told the Des Moines Register in part that, “there was no anti-American sentiment by not having the flag.”

A community leader who asked that his name be withheld characterized the last-minute protest as a potentially divisive publicity stunt that succeeded only in bringing Finkelstein’s motives into question.

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