By DIAA HADID, Associated Press Writer Diaa Hadid, Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM – A former Israeli soldier posted photos on Facebook of herself in uniform smiling beside bound and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, drawing sharp criticism Monday from the Israeli military and Palestinian officials.

Israeli news websites and blogs showed two photographs of the woman. In one, she is sitting legs crossed beside a blindfolded Palestinian man who is slumped against a concrete barrier. His face is turned downwards, while she leans toward him with her face upturned. Another shows her smiling at the camera with three Palestinian men with bound hands and blindfolds behind her.

The incident was a reminder of the fraught relations between Israeli soldiers and the West Bank Palestinians under their control.

Israeli soldiers have run into trouble on the social media sites like Facebook and YouTube before. Most recently a group of combat soldiers were reprimanded for breaking into choreographed dance moves while on patrol in the West Bank town of Hebron. The dance featured prominently on YouTube.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib condemned the photos and said they pointed to a deeper malaise — how Israel’s 43-year-old occupation of Palestinians has affected the Israelis who enforce it.

“This shows the mentality of the occupier,” Khatib said, “to be proud of humiliating Palestinians. The occupation is unjust, immoral and, as these pictures show, corrupting.”

The Israeli military also criticized the young woman, who Israeli news media and bloggers identified from her Facebook page as Eden Aberjil of the southern Israeli port town of Ashdod. No official confirmed her identity.

“These are disgraceful photos,” said Capt. Barak Raz, an Israeli military spokesman. “Aside from matters of information security, we are talking about a serious violation of our morals and our ethical code and should this soldier be serving in active duty today, I would imagine that no doubt she would be court-martialed immediately,” he told Associated Press Television News.

It was not clear whether the army could punish the woman, because she has finished her compulsory military service.

The comments by the woman and her friend in an exchange below one photograph suggested how casually the picture was treated, including jokes and sexual innuendoes.

“You’re the sexiest like that,” her friend wrote.

“I wonder if he’s got Facebook!” the woman in the photograph responded. “I have to tag him in the picture!”

Aberjil did not respond to reporters’ questions Monday.

The photographs were a reminder of snapshots taken in 2003 by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that showed Iraqi detainees naked, humiliated and terrified. In that case, some soldiers went to prison after the photos came to light.

The photographs of the Israeli soldier and the Palestinians, by contrast, show no overt physical abuse or coercion of the prisoners, although they are ridiculed in the comments between the soldier and her friends.

Palestinians are routinely handcuffed and blindfolded when they are arrested to stop them from trying to flee.

By: Ihsan Alkhatib, PhD, Esq.

Understanding the (mis)behavior of the Christian right wing
In writing about the Palestinian refugees’ suffering in Lebanon, the Lebanese weekly Al- Shiraa resurrected a quote for Hamid Frangieh, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Education from a 1948 speech before the Lebanese parliament: “We will welcome the Palestinian refugees regardless of their number. They can stay in Lebanon as long as they need to. We will not allow their mistreatment. We will share with them our last crumb of bread.” http://www.alshiraa.com/details.php?id=4479. Needless to say, the way the refugees were treated was always atrocious and never came close to the lofty promises of Hamid Frangieh.
Walid Jumblatt attempts change, parliament divides
Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt tried to change the sixty years of Palestinian suffering in Lebanon. The result was a scandalous division in the Lebanese parliament over the bills presented by his parliamentary bloc. These bills proposed to end policies of discrimination in housing ownership and employment. This Lebanese scandal came up in a phone conversation I had with a relative of mine, a Palestinian refugee from Syria. My relative was puzzled by the treatment of the refugees in Lebanon and by what happened in the parliament. The country of his family’s forced refuge, Syria, gives the refugees all the rights Syrians have except the right to vote and to run for office. “The world has moved away from such blatant discrimination, how could those so-called Cedar revolutionaries who speak of democracy and human rights shamelessly act the way they did?” he asked.
Any Muslim, any Arab but not a Palestinian Muslim
This phone conversation got me thinking of a situation that puzzled a friend of mine from Dearborn, a Muslim Palestinian attorney born in the US whose parents were from the West Bank, with no ties to Lebanon. Learning that Lebanon was seeking basketball players from overseas, this man wanted to take a break after law school and play basketball in Lebanon. He asked for my help. I called a Christian Lebanese friend of mine of Palestinian origin and asked him to help. He said his cousin works in recruitment of basketball talent and he would see what he could do. Then almost as an afterthought he asked me where the player was from. I told him he is an American born to a Palestinian Muslim family from the West Bank. There was an awkward silence. “It won’t work,” he said. A Muslim American of any other nationality would do, he said. A Christian Palestinian would do but not a Muslim Palestinian even if he and his family have nothing to do with Lebanon. “Sorry.”
Right- wing Christian Lebanese and the chosen hated other
Why a Christian Palestinian would be acceptable but not a Muslim one? If the Christian Lebanese right wing still has a vendetta from the civil war, why would a Christian Palestinian be ok and not a Muslim one, if the issue is the Palestinians as a people? This mystery is demystified by two interactions I had. On a flight from Amman to Beirut I was sitting next to a Lebanese Christian man. Our small talk, predictably, ended in politics. We talked about the war and the aftermath. We spoke about the different players in the civil war. To my surprise when he spoke about Palestinians he meant Muslim Palestinians. To him the Christian Palestinians were not “Palestinians.” This realization is validated by the treatment of Christian Palestinians during the civil war. I once asked a Christian Palestinian friend who lived in the Christian sector of the city if the Christian militias bothered his family. He told not at all. He thought a little bit and said the neighbor’s sometimes mocked his grandfather’s Palestinians dialect. But that was it. He was accepted in Christian Lebanon. Even the few Christian Palestinians who were not naturalized were accepted in the turf of the Lebanese Christian right.
The beginning and end of the war began with a myth ended with a founding lie
The civil war of Lebanon that broke out in the 1970s began with a myth and ended with a grand lie. The war began with the myth/blatant lie that the Palestinians want to “take over” Lebanon. It ended with the grand lie; the founding lie of the Taif Republic, that the Lebanese are innocent from the war and its atrocities and it’s the Palestinians’ entire fault. The Lebanese Christian right wing needed an “other” that draws attention away from Lebanese vicious disputes and conflicts. During the Lebanese civil war and the Syrian-imposed peace the right wing chose to have the “Palestinians” as the enemy within.
More importantly, the Lebanese civil war ended not because the Lebanese saw the light and resolved their disagreements. It ended by an imposed Syrian peace with Syrian troops and intelligence agents imposing order on the always feuding Lebanese factions. Unwilling to examine the war period, or to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to unearth crimes and bring war criminals to justice, the Taif Republic chose national amnesia , to “let bygones be bygones” as the late President Elias El Hrawi put it. Given that the Lebanese people, especially the youths who did not experience the war, needed a war narrative, a villain and a victim, there was a need for a unifying imagined history of the war era that deflects attention from unresolved Lebanese problems. The right-wing Christian narrative that carried the day was that the Palestinian was the villain and the Lebanese people the innocent victim of the “wars of others” and that the war “was a big conspiracy against the peaceful Lebanese.” Vindictive policies toward the Palestinians followed.
Christian Lebanon and Muslim Lebanon
At the heart of the division over the issue of the Palestinian refugees’ basic rights and the stupid policy toward the Palestinians is an existential question regarding Lebanon itself as a polity. Whose Lebanon is it? I worked in California with a Lebanese Christian of Syrian origin, a man who loved Lebanon, Syria and Palestine and considered them one homeland and one people despite the Sykes-Picot folly. He said that the religious divide in Lebanon is sickening. He related how in college a Christian Lebanese girl one time stated that she is annoyed by how “Muslims are acting as if they owned Lebanon.” My secular Syrian nationalist friend replied that Christians too act as if they own Lebanon. She replied, without hesitation, “We do!” Lebanese media report that the Palestinian issue divided the Lebanese in parliament along communal religious lines. The reality is that the Lebanese are divided along religious lines and the treatment of the Palestinians is a manifestation of this awful division. If the Lebanese truly believed and acted as if Lebanon is their country, regardless of sect and religion, these bills would not have been before parliament at all. The Palestinians would have been dealt with decently and honorably from their day one of forced refuge in Lebanon.

BY Samir Twair

        The Multi Ethnic Star Orchestra (MESTO) has performed in Cairo and Amman and on May 13, it was featured in Abu Dhabi’s “Rhythms from Arabia” festival in the emirate’s dazzling Abu Dhabi Theater.  The 45-member orchestra was transported from Los Angeles to the Gulf by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage.

        MESTO appeared on the seventh evening of the 11-day festival and immediately conductor Dr. Nabil Azzam was interviewed by major TV hosts in the Arab media who wanted to know more about his successful efforts to keep classic Arab music alive in the U.S.

        Moroccan singer Karima Skalli joined the Los Angeles orchestra which performed signature pieces of Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab and Farid al-Atrash as well as original compositions of Maestro Azzam.

        Dr. Azzam, who is from Nazareth and earned his Ph.D. degree in music at UCLA in 1990, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the works of Abd al-Wahhab whom he studied under in Cairo. A favorite of the audience was his violin solo from Abd al-Wahhab’s Unshudat al-Fann.

        Favorites sung by Skalli included Ya Habibi Ta’ala, LaMush Ana, and Inta ‘Umri. Al-Atrash’s Banadi Alaik was performed along with Abd al-Wahhab’s  “My Beloved Country” and “Eternal River.”

        Critics raved over the sensitive rendering of classic Arab compositions by non-Arab musicians who have been working under the baton of Dr. Azzam for a decade. The Abu Dhabi performance gave Dr. Azzam and his wife, Suheir, the opportunity to visit with their son, Salim, who is an international attorney based in the Emirate.

        MESTO will present its fall concert Oct. 30 in Zipper Hall, Downtown Los Angeles and a winter performance Dec. 3 in Santa Monica’s Broad Theater. Azzam’s new CD, “Full Moon” has just been released and another, entitled “Eclipse,” is slated for August.  For more information, please go to www.mesto.org.

By Amira Hass
The IDF’s Civil Administration destroyed a Palestinian village Monday morning that had earlier been cleared out when its water supply was cut off.
The IDF demolished about 55 structures in the West Bank village of Farasiya, including tents, tin shacks, plastic and straw huts, clay ovens, sheep pens and bathrooms. These structures served the 120 farmers, hired workers and their families who lived in the Jordan Valley village.
The Civil Administration said they had declared the area a live fire zone and posted eviction orders for 10 families in tents on June 27.
“Since no appeal was filed in the following three weeks, and given the danger posed by the location of the tents, they were removed,” they said in response.
The villagers made a living by sheep farming and working land owned by families in the town of Tubas. Some of them have been living in Farasiya for decades.
A packaging warehouse that was built together with Agrexco in the late 1970s was also torn down.
Atef Abu al-Rob, a photographer for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, who arrived at the village hours after the demolition, said mattresses, pipes and broken furniture were lying on the ground in the debris.
Since 1967, Israel has prevented Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley from growing, whether by cutting off their water supply, declaring large areas as live fire zones or banning all construction.
About a year ago the IDF set up hundreds of warning signs near Palestinian farming communities, marking them closed military areas. Such a sign was set up at the entrance to Farasiya.
The families had recently been forced to leave the village when the Israeli authorities cut it off from its water sources, said the popular committees’ coordinator in the valley, Fathi Hadirat. The villagers were forbidden to use the water wells the Mekorot Water Company had dug in the area.
Hadirat said a few years ago the Civil Administration destroyed the pipe the villages had laid from a nearby stream used for drinking water and irrigation.
Since then they have been watering the sheep and fields with water unfit for human consumption, pumped from a salt water source. They received drinking water in tanks.
About four months ago the IDF confiscated their pumps. On Sunday, 10 families from Bardala, a village north of Farasiya, were given demolition notices.
A farmer who owns 300 sheep was told to leave in 24 hours or his herd would be confiscated.

Israel’s security lies in regional peace

Ghassan Michel Rubeiz, Palm Beach Gardens, 4.24.10

On March 22 Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu defiantly declared to the world that: “there will be no freeze on construction in Jerusalem. Everyone knows it”. 

An enduring occupation requires a high level of arrogance and a poker face in rationalization of injustice.  The international community is well aware that Israel may have reached its limits in “digesting” the occupation demographically. Washington, in particular, is worried about Tel-Aviv’s denial of reality: for every Jew there is an Arab within post 1967 Israel controlled land.

The Israeli government is nervous about a serious shift in the US administration’s attitude towards an extended, worsening and hazardous occupation. The White House expects Israel to freeze illegal building of housing in occupied Palestinian territories and to come to the peace table. But Israel insists that it is not ready to stop building on “liberated” land. Tension between Tel Aviv and Washington is mounting.

The US relationship with Israel has been exceptionally close for years.  Many believe this relationship has in fact turned symbiotic; seemingly the interests of the two states are deemed to be identical.  Recently, however, the leadership of the US military and national security has voiced concerns over this level of closeness to Tel-Aviv and over Washington’s handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 Over the past six decades, Israel has partnered with the US, militarily and diplomatically, but the Zionist state has become too alienated from the region. Does Israel expect America to continue indefinitely to tolerate the occupation, offer massive aid, defend the Jewish state in the United Nations and ignore collective punishment of the Palestinians?

For their part, the Arab states have made a bad situation worse by irresponsible treatment of Palestinians, blaming Israel for all their troubles, refusal of much needed reform and counterproductive diplomacy.  But Israel’s enduring occupation cannot be rationalized as a necessity for security.

Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has been in doubt about its future.  The US has been supporting Israel unconditionally since the 1967 war, a cataclysmic event which bolstered Israel territorially but exposed it to endless risk.

Advocates of Israel interests call upon Obama to be “gentle” and “reassuring” with Israel, but advocates of Palestinian rights expect our president to be firm with a government which regards land annexation as land reclamation, sanctified by divine will. Building settlements on occupied land is illegal under the Geneva Conventions; for Palestinians, annexation is theft of their private properties.

Sentiment against Israel’s defiance of international law has been growing slowly within the US, and more so in Europe. In response, Netanyahu has been trying hard to shift world attention from Israel-Palestine to Iran. He has partially succeeded. By reviving the image of Iran as the center of the “axis of evil”, the Israeli occupation has been downplayed.  This diplomatic diversion paints Israel’s land-grab as a “tolerable” infraction, when contrasted with Iran’s nuclear threat, purportedly aimed at “vulnerable” Israel. US sanctions on Iran are tightening.

For some unclear and disturbing reason, Israel’s possession of a large stockpile of atomic bombs has been ignored in dealing with Iran’s crisis. The nuclear crisis is regional and not a recent emergency; it started in the early seventies when Israel was permitted in secret by the US to acquire the bomb. For the Middle East, there is a double standard regarding legitimacy of occupying foreign land and the possession of weapons of mass destruction.

The Arab and Muslim world see Zionism through their lens. Unconditional US support of Israel has tarnished America’s reputation in the Muslim world.  In recent months, some of Israel’s own friends have had second thoughts about the cost of the occupation and defense of settlement policy. Many wonder if Israel is risking its future in holding on to the occupation. US intelligence predicts dire demographic consequences for a state that swells in power and, yet shrinks in security.

The occupation of vast Palestinian and Syrian territory, annexation, settlements, a Berlin-wall like fence (deep inside the West Bank), endless check points and collective punishment (against a mixture of civil rebellion, military resistance and fading terrorism), all such measures erode Israel’s democracy.  Should Israel become an apartheid-like regime, as is expected in a decade or so, reverse migration of Jews may take place.  An alternative could be ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Palestinians. Both scenarios are nightmarish.

True friends of Israel should encourage the Jewish state to end the occupation by seeking peace.  Israel’s security will not improve through a new war with Iran.

Likewise, true friends of Palestinians should encourage them to unite around a platform of democracy and human rights.  Such supporters should also demand Arab political awakening to provide a climate in which a future Palestinian state could be viable and democratic.

An inclusive and comprehensive regional approach for US foreign policy should be based on treating Israel, Iran and the Arab world as equidistant stakeholders. Only such a balanced policy can help Israel to integrate within the region and relieve the US from the impossible task of securing a state with elastic borders.  

Lasting security for Israel can only be achieved through peace with neighbors.

By Jonathan Cook

 October 06, 2009  “Information Clearing House” – — Israel celebrated at the weekend its success at the United Nations in forcing the Palestinians to defer demands that the International Criminal Court investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Israel during its winter assault on the Gaza Strip. Read the full story

Israel restricts American travel

By Ann Perkins-Parrott
Staff Writer

According to the Consulate of the United States, Israel has begun to issue a new stamp for visas. In an unannounced move the new stamp has begun quietly appearing on the visas of people who arrive in Israel wishing to visit Palestinian areas. The new stamp may be used to restrict travel to areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority which comprises only 17% of the West Bank. Palestine is divided into three areas only one of which is under the Palestinian Authority. Other areas are controlled by Hamas and Israel.

The area under the Palestinian Authority is Area A which is divided into 13 non-contiguous areas. Travel between the areas requires entry into Israeli controlled Areas C, which lie between various Areas A. Since the visas stamp does not technically allow travel in Area C, it brings the question of how one gets from one Palestinian Authority area to another without being caught in an area not covered by the visa stamp.

Visas are also being issued for different lengths of stay, with at least one American being given only one week instead of the normal three month visa. Not only does Israel control the areas one may visit, they also dictate the time one may stay. These visas are not being issued by the Palestinian Authority to allow entry into areas they are supposed to control. Israel decides who gets a visa, where they may go and Read the full story

Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva, a veteran peace activist, branded Israel as an apartheid state and said that a boycott was "the only way to save it from itself." (Photo courtesy of amazon.com)

By Barak Ravid
Courtesy of Haaretz

Members of the Los Angeles Jewish community have threatened to withhold donations to an Israeli university in protest of an op-ed published by a prominent Israeli academic in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, in which he called to boycott Israel economically, culturally and politically.

Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, a veteran peace activist, branded Israel as an apartheid state and said that a boycott was “the only way to save it from itself.”

Gordon, a political scientist, said that “apartheid state” is the most accurate way to describe Israel today.

“3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967,” Gordon wrote, “and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews – whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel – are citizens of the state of Israel.”

“It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call to suspend cooperation with Israel,” he further wrote. “The words and condemnations from the Obama administration and the Read the full story

By Ray Hanania
Guest Writer

The release this week of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted mastermind of the 1988 bombing of PAN AM Flight 103 over Lockerbie, opens old wounds by also a debate that should have taken place years ago.

It’s understandable that Americans are angry with the decision. Many Americans were on board the flight and lost their lives in the bombing. What has never been understandable is the American indifference to the killing of innocent civilians who are Arab, Muslim or of other races by American terrorists.

The condemnation of al-Megrahi’s release is misguided and driven by selfish-emotion, understandably, but more so by longstanding hypocritical and one-sided American foreign policies that put no value on any lives except their own.

The release of al-Megrahi on humanitarian grounds – he is suffering from cancer — should put the past in true perspective; Americans must recognize that Lockerbie was not one incident in a vacuum but one of a chain of events that saw injustice, death and destruction on all sides.

On April 15, 1986, then President Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of the home Read the full story