Palestine Special: All Along Israel's West Bank Watchtower

From The Flying Carpet Institute:

A member of the FCI got the chance to tour the Separation Wall last Sunday, seeing the "realities on the ground", as Israeli governments have a habit of saying.

The most expensive project in the history of the state, the Wall or Fence (it is actually both, with the Fence-version suspiciously resembling its US-Mexican counterpart) is responsible for one of the biggest land grabs against Palestinian territory in the recent years. Even more permanent-looking behind it are the settlements, fortresses of the Israeli extreme right amidst a shrinking Palestinian landscape.

Palestine: Abbas “Show Political Will and Roll Back the Occupation”

The Wall is responsible for the arbitrary division of Palestinian land, an elaborate system of permanent surveilance (we had a "friendly visit" by an Israel Defense Forces jeep during the tour), the isolation of Palestinians from their places of residence, and a variety of psychological disorders in the Palestinian population, especially amongst children. The Wall is complemented by so-called Workers Terminals, policed by private security firms and designed to ease the access of Israeli goods to enclaves controlled by the Palestinian Authority, as well as the flow of cheap Palestinian labour to Israel.

But is it really "Apartheid"?



How did this term become so popular among Palestinians and international activists? Probably the reason is the direct optical reality. Seeing the Wall separate the Palestinian enclaves from a modern Israel brings to mind images of a prosperous, European Johannesburg and a "Third World" Soweto township. The Workers Terminals certainly bring to mind the thousands of black South Africans commuting everyday from their townships to the factories and diamond mines of white South Africa.

However, to quote socialist Israeli dissident Moshé Machover, to call this Apartheid is misleading. The situation is worse than Apartheid. The South African Apartheid dug its own grave by ending up as a system of a white ruling class exploiting a black working-class majority. While the Worker Terminals are intended to bring Palestinian labour into Israel, the proportion of Palestinians that are vital for the functioning of the Israeli economy is very small. In fact, a significant amount of workers employed in the factories set up along the barrier, as in Tulkarem, employ not only Palestinians but also migrant workers from countries such as Romania and Thailand.

So the Wall is not an effective high-tech policing operation intended to exploit Palestinian labour. Instead, it is seeks to suffocate economic and cultural activity by the Palestinians to the point of forcing them to leave, while settlements expand from the hilltops to the valleys. (If any doubts arise about this statement, then I suggest reading Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent statement that Israel (West Bank) is here to stay.) There is no Palestinian workers' strike that is able to paralyze the Israeli economy and force a significant change in current Israeli policy. Judging by the high levels of unemployment and cases of extreme alcohol abuse, the Palestinian Authority enclaves resemble Native American reservations in the United States.

So calling this Apartheid is a self-defeating statement. Apartheid does a favour to the Palestinians by assigning them a better status than the one they enjoy now.

Palestine: Abbas "Show Political Will and Roll Back the Occupation"

On Sunday, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, in an interview with The Guardian, said that Israel's continued activity in the West Bank was leading to a "one-state solution".

Abbas also said he would be prepared to resume full face-to-face peace negotiations if Israel froze all settlement construction for three months and accepted its June 1967 borders as the basis for land swaps. "These are not preconditions, they are requirements in the road map. If they are not prepared to do that, it means they don't want a political solution," Abbas explained.

UPDATED Israel: The Government Responds to the Goldstone Report on Gaza
Israel-Palestine: Abbas “We Are Considering the US Proposal” For Talks

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad then jumped in. He said that, unless Israel shows that it is rolling back its occupation (referring to continuing settlements), there will be no peace, which is the "only path to security for Israel". Fayyad added:

What is required is negotiations based on settled principles... We need to begin to see things that suggest to our people that indeed the occupation is on its way to being rolled back.

If settlements continue, the political question is how confident can we be that once relaunched, the political process will be able to deliver on permanent status issues.

Israel-Lebanon: Why the Talk of War?

According to State Department official Jeff Feltman, as quoted by the London-based Al-Hayat daily newspaper, Washington is concerned that the continued flow of arms to Hezbollah could prompt a war between Israel and Lebanon. Feltman said "many reports" describing the quantity and types of weapons being smuggled to the organization are proof of the failure of United Nations Resolution 1701, which put an end to the conflict in 2006 and demanded a weapons-free south Lebanon.

On Tuesday, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:

Hezbollah is in the Lebanese government and is developing a military force under the government.

These weapons are without doubt aimed at Israeli civilians. It is the responsibility of the Lebanese government to prevent attacks against Israel and its citizens.

Meanwhile, Iran's Press TV has declared that a secret meeting took between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, and Israeli officials on 28 January, in which Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Peled said that another confrontation with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was almost inevitable.

UPDATED Israel: The Government Responds to the Goldstone Report on Gaza

UPDATED 2 FEBRUARY: Haaretz reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to persuade Defense Minister Ehud Barak to accept an Israeli investigation into civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. However, officials said that both Barak and Gabi Ashkenazi, the Chief of Staff of Israel Defense Forces, refused to yield authority to investigators from outside the defense establishment.

"The prime minister knows what he wants to do on this matter - but he does not want to bring the matter to the cabinet," a senior source close to Netanyahu said.

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With the General Assembly convening on 5 February 5 to discuss progress on the Goldstone Report and its recommendations, Israel submitted its response to United Nations over last year's Gaza War.

Palestine: Hamas Refuses An Independent Commission on Gaza “War Crimes”

The committee will reportedly have the authority to summon everyone who was in charge of the IDF investigations and any civilian who took part in the main deliberations. However, it will not have the authority to question operational commanders. The committee is likely to take testimony of lower-ranked officials, ensuring that there is no basis to send officials to international courts.


The Israeli Government said it is preparing to appoint a committee focusing on two main areas: 1) the quality of the investigations conducted by the Israel Defense Forces into incidents and 2) decisions taken by the Cabinet, the Security Cabinet and the IDF General Staff over the use of force. The first area will establish whether the internal investigations met the relevant international standards and the second will determine whether there is a basis to Goldstone's claims that the operation was planned in advance as a punitive campaign against the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, announced  that he has decided to establish an independent panel of inquiry to evaluate the accusations on human rights violations carried out by his PA security forces during the Gaza War.

On the political front, Israel slammed the Goldstone Report's "misrepresentations" in a written response submitted to UN chief Ban Ki-moon, "Gaza Operation Investigations: Update":

As Israel has clarified before, Israel disagrees with the findings and recommendations of the Report, which reflect many misunderstandings and fundamental mistakes with regard to the Gaza Operation, its purposes, and Israel’s legal system.

Israel is committed to ensuring that every such incident is fully and fairly investigated, to ensure that lessons can be learned and that, if justified, criminal or disciplinary proceedings initiated.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak added that the Goldstone Report was "distorted, false, and irresponsible":

This morning we handed the UN a report of the investigations and operations that took place during Operation Cast Lead. This report stresses that the IDF is like no other army, both from a moral standpoint as well as from a professional standpoint.

All of the soldiers and officers whom we sent to battle need to know that the state of Israel stands behind them even on the day after.

Israel: A Response to Talk of Holocaust and Evil (Levy)

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Auschwitz (see separate entry) Haaretz's Gideon Levy responded sharply, declaring, "Holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda".

Israel's bigwigs attacked at dawn on a wide front. The president in Germany, the prime minister with a giant entourage in Poland, the foreign minister in Hungary, his deputy in Slovakia, the culture minister in France, the information minister at the United Nations, and even the Likud party's Druze Knesset member, Ayoob Kara, in Italy. They were all out there to make florid speeches about the Holocaust.

Israel: Netanyahu’s Speech on Evil at Auschwitz

Wednesday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and an Israeli public relations drive like this hasn't been seen for ages. The timing of the unusual effort - never have so many ministers deployed across the globe - is not coincidental: When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we'll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget.



It won't help much. International Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign.

On the eve of his departure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Yad Vashem. "There is evil in the world," he said. "Evil must be stamped out at the beginning." Some people are "trying to deny the truth." Lofty words, said by the same person who only the day before, not quite in the same breath, uttered very different words, words of true evil, evil that should be extinguished at the start, evil that Israel is trying to hide.

Netanyahu spoke of a new "migration policy," one that is evil through and through. He malevolently lumped together migrant workers and wretched refugees - warning that they all endanger Israel, lower our wages, harm our security, make us into a third-world country and bring in drugs. He zealously supported our racist interior minister, Eli Yishai, who has spoken of the migrants as the spreaders of diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, AIDS and God knows what else.

No Holocaust speech will erase these words of incitement and slander against migrants. No remembrance speech will obliterate the xenophobia that has reared its head in Israel, not only on the extreme right, as in Europe, but throughout government.

We have a prime minister who speaks about evil but is building a fence to prevent war refugees from knocking at Israel's door. A prime minister who speaks about evil but shares the crime of the Gaza blockade, now in its fourth year, leaving 1.5 million people in disgraceful conditions. A prime minister in whose country settlers perpetrate pogroms against innocent Palestinians under the slogan "price tag," which also has horrific historical connotations, but against whom the state does virtually nothing.

This is the prime minister of a state that arrests hundreds of left-wing protesters against the injustices of the occupation and the war in Gaza, while time grants mass pardons to the right-wingers who demonstrated against the disengagement. In his speech yesterday, Netanyahu's equating Nazi Germany with fundamentalist Iran was no more than cheap propaganda. Talk about "degrading the Holocaust." Iran isn't Germany, Ahmedinejad isn't Hitler and equating them is no less spurious than equating Israeli soldiers with Nazis.

The Holocaust must not be forgotten, and there is no need to compare it with anything. Israel must take part in the efforts to keep its memory alive, but in doing so it must show up with clean hands, clean of evil of their own doing. And it must not arouse suspicion that it is cynically using the memory of the Holocaust to obliterate and blur other things. Regrettably, this is not the case.

How beautiful it would have been if on this international day of remembrance Israel had taken the time to examine itself, look inward and ask, for example, how it is that anti-Semitism has reared its head in the world precisely in the past year, the year after we dropped white-phosphorous bombs on Gaza. How beautiful it would have been if on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu had declared a new policy for integrating refugees instead of expulsion, or lifted the Gaza blockade.

A thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world. As long as Gaza is under blockade and Israel sinks into its institutionalized xenophobia, Holocaust speeches will remain hollow. As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it.