Coming soon to a Knesset near you

Published on February 20, 2009 in Israel, Middle East and Palestine. 0 Comments Tags: .

avigdor-lieberman
Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party received the most overall votes in Israel’s February 10 elections, but the real winner may have been Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) Party, which surged to third place, outpolling the Labor Party with fifteen seats.

Gideon Levy provides the background on the man dubbed the Israeli Mussolini.

Rabbi Meir Kahane can rest in peace: His doctrine has won. Twenty years after his Knesset list was disqualified and 18 years after he was murdered, Kahanism has become legitimate in public discourse. If there is something that typifies Israel’s current murky, hollow election campaign, which ends the day after tomorrow, it is the transformation of racism and nationalism into accepted values.

If Kahane were alive and running for the 18th Knesset, not only would his list not be banned, it would win many votes, as Yisrael Beiteinu is expected to do. The prohibited has become permitted, the ostracized is now accepted, the destestable has become the talented – that’s the slippery slope down which Israeli society has skidded over the past two decades.

There’s no need to refer to Haaretz’s startling revelation that Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman was a member of Kahane’s Kach party in his youth: This campaign’s dark horse was and is a Kahanist. The differences between Kach and Yisrael Beiteinu are minuscule, not fundamental and certainly not a matter of morality. The differences are in tactical nuances: Lieberman calls for a fascist “test of loyalty” as a condition for granting citizenship to Israel’s Arabs, while Kahane called for the unconditional annulment of their citizenship. One racist (Lieberman) calls for their transfer to the Palestinian state, the other (Kahane) called for their deportation.

Now the instigator of the new Israeli racism will apparently become the leader of a large party once again in the government. Benjamin Netanyahu has already pledged that Lieberman will be an “important minister” in his government. If someone like Lieberman were to join a government in Europe, Israel would sever ties with it. If anyone had predicted in Kahane’s day that a pledge to turn his successor into an important minister would one day be considered an electoral asset here, they would have been told they were having a nightmare.

But the nightmare is here and now. Kahane is alive and kicking – is he ever – in the person of his thuggish successor. This is not just a matter of disqualifying Yisrael Beiteinu; it is not even a matter of this party’s growing strength to terrifying proportions, becoming the fulcrum that will decide who becomes prime minister. This is a matter of legitimization. All society bears responsibility for it.

Kahane was ostracized; Lieberman is a welcome guest in every living room and television studio. Imagine: Ehud Barak does not rule out a coalition with him; Uzi Landau, considered a “democrat,” is now Lieberman’s number two; a former senior ambassador and a retired police major general also adorn the list. Did we know that Israel was being represented in Washington by an avowed racist in the person of Daniel Ayalon? Did we know that former Border Police chief and deputy police commissioner Yitzhak Aharonovich was one, too? They have come out of the closet, these racists, breaking out of the heart of the establishment to the despicable right, and the attitude toward them has not changed a bit.

Lieberman and his soldiers are borne on the tides of hatred for Arabs, hatred of democracy and the rule of law, and the stink of nationalism, racism and bloodthirstiness. These have turned, horrifically, into the hottest electoral assets on the market. Like all others of his political ilk, he cynically fans these base urges, particularly among the weaker classes, the rejected, the poor and the immigrants. But not just there. Many young people, among them brainwashed soldiers, will give him their vote, and no one ostracizes them. He chose an easy, relatively weak target, Israel’s Arabs, and sets his supporters on them. But his doctrine has seeped in much deeper than that.

Lieberman is the voice of the mob, and the mob craves hatred, vengeance and bloodshed. A useless war in which hundreds of children were killed was received here sympathetically, if not happily. The parties from the right and center have tried to disqualify the Arab parties; these lists are also excluded ahead of time in every political calculation. And Arab students cannot rent an apartment.

When the intifada of Israel’s Arabs breaks out here one day, we will know whom to blame – those who criminally incited against them and, no less, those who turned this incitement into something acceptable and legitimate. This cancerous growth has spread to all parts of society; it remains only to issue a desperate last call: Keep away from this abomination. Anything but Yisrael Beiteinu, lest it really become Israel, our home.

And if that were not bad in enough here are some notable highlights from his political career to date:

  • In 1998, Lieberman called for the flooding of Egypt by bombing the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Egyptian support for Yasser Arafat.
  • In 2001, as Minister of National Infrastructure, Lieberman proposed that the West Bank be divided into four cantons, with no central Palestinian government and no possibility for Palestinians to travel between the cantons.
  • In 2002, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Lieberman in a Cabinet meeting saying that the Palestinians should be given an ultimatum that “At 8am we’ll bomb all the commercial centers … at noon we’ll bomb their gas stations … at two we’ll bomb their banks …”
  • In 2003, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Lieberman called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide the buses to take them there.
  • In May 2004, Lieberman proposed a plan that called for the transfer of Israeli territory with Palestinian populations to the Palestinian Authority. Likewise, Israel would annex the major Jewish settlement blocs on the Palestinian West Bank. If applied, his plan would strip roughly one-third of Israel’s Palestinian citizens of their citizenship. A “loyalty test” would be applied to those who desired to remain in Israel. This plan to trade territory with the Palestinian Authority is a revision of Lieberman’s earlier calls for the forcible transfer of Palestinian citizens of Israel from their land. Lieberman stated in April 2002 that there was “nothing undemocratic about transfer.”
  • Also in May 2004, he said that 90 percent of Israel’s 1.2 million Palestinian citizens would “have to find a new Arab entity” in which to live beyond Israel’s borders. “They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost,” he said.
  • In May 2006, Lieberman called for the killing of Arab members of Knesset who meet with members of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

Guess who’s been hiding weapons in holy places?

Published on February 9, 2009 in Israel, Middle East and Palestine. 0 Comments

Guess who’s been hiding weapons in holy places?

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Weapons from Israel’s pre-independence era were discovered Thursday in a large synagogue in Hod Hasharon, in central Israel.

The location, which synagogue elders say served as a meeting place for members of the Haganah in the 40s, believe that the arms have not been touched since Israel’s War of Independence.

They said that the dozens of worshippers who frequent the synagogue, located near the area’s business center, were most likely unaware of the existence of the armaments.

The cache was discovered when caretakers of the building decided to clean out an adjoining supply shed on the second story of the synagogue. The weapons – three stun grenades, a Sten rifle, magazines and a steel helmet – were stored in a wooden trunk in the room.

At this point, it is unclear whether the arms cache belonged to the organization or whether it was merely a private stash belonging to one of the members.

Guess who’s been using human shields?

Published on February 6, 2009 in Israel, Middle East and Palestine. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Guess who’s been using human shields in Gaza?

EZBT ABED RABBO, Gaza Strip — The Israeli soldiers outside Majdi Abed Rabbo’s home were after the three Hamas fighters holed up next door, and they wanted Abed Rabbo to be their point man.

For the next 24 hours, Abed Rabbo said, the soldiers repeatedly forced him to walk through the battle zone to see whether the militants were dead or alive.

Abed Rabbo wasn’t alone. Eight other residents in this northern Gaza Strip neighborhood told McClatchy in separate interviews that Israeli soldiers had conscripted them to check homes for booby traps, to smash holes in the walls of houses so that soldiers could use them as escape routes or to try to pull dead Palestinian militants from the rubble.

Conscripting Palestinians during the recent fighting in Gaza would appear to violate not only international law, but also Israel’s court-imposed ban on using civilians as human shields.

“The laws of war make it clear you must distinguish between civilians and combatants and you cannot force a civilian to take on a combat role,” said Daniel Reisner, a legal scholar who spent nearly a decade as the head of the Israeli military’s international law department. “Using a human shield is illegal.”

The issue is especially charged in Israel because its government has said that Hamas fighters put innocent Palestinians in harm’s way by hiding in crowded Gaza neighborhoods and using civilian homes, schools and mosques to stage attacks on Israeli forces.

The Israeli military told McClatchy that it’s investigating a variety of allegations about its Gaza operation but it categorically rejected suggestions that soldiers forced any Palestinians to work for them.

“Of course we don’t use human shields,” Israeli military spokesman Capt. Elie Isaacson said. “Just the opposite. We do everything in our power to avoid harm to civilians, bearing in mind that we know Hamas purposely puts them in harm’s way.”

U.S. and Israeli human-rights groups dispute that.

“There is powerful evidence that Israel used the tactic that they are accusing Hamas of using,” said Fred Abrahams, a Human Rights Watch senior researcher who’s investigating what happened in Gaza during the recent Israeli military offensive, which killed more than 1,200 Palestinians.

The Abed Rabbo case also is under investigation by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem, which led a long campaign that eventually persuaded the Israeli Supreme Court to order the Israeli military in 2005 to stop using Palestinians as human shields.

“The testimony seems pretty extensive and presents grave suspicions that Israeli soldiers forced Palestinians to perform dangerous tasks,” said B’Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli. “And the fact that we’re seeing these allegations on such a wide scale leads us to suspect that this was policy and not the decisions of one or two random soldiers.”

Abed Rabbo’s appears to be the most extreme of the cases that the two human rights groups are investigating.

Abed Rabbo, whose extended family dominates the neighborhood that bears its name, is a 40-year-old personal guard for the Palestinian Authority intelligence agency, which Hamas forces ousted from Gaza in 2007. He said he was at home on Jan. 5 with his wife and son when there was a knock on his door.

Mohammed Daher, a 23-year-old neighbor, was standing outside with Israeli soldiers, and he said they’d forced him to help them check the area for militants.

Daher, a graduate of Gaza City’s Fatah-leaning Al Azhar University, said that soldiers already had compelled him to use a sledgehammer to break through house walls in the neighborhood so the Israelis could avoid any booby-trapped doors.

Then, Daher said, the soldiers led him down a narrow dirt alley between the neighborhood mosque and a three-story apartment building where Israeli forces suspected that militants were holed up. As they slowly proceeded, Daher said, one of the soldiers kicked a small, remote-controlled explosive buried in shallow dirt.

The soldiers rushed into Abed Rabbo’s home and, guns trained on Daher and him, eventually ordered the two Palestinians upstairs.

On the roof, the soldiers directed Abed Rabbo to smash a hole in the wall so the group could crawl onto the roof of the neighboring building with the militants inside.

“They were holding a gun to my head as we walked down the stairs,” Abed Rabbo said.

When one of the soldiers apparently spotted the militants inside, the group quickly fell back to Abed Rabbo’s roof. Abed Rabbo and Daher said the Israeli unit grabbed them both, rushed down the street and took refuge with them in the mosque as a firefight broke out.

After a series of intense Israeli assaults using heavy-caliber machine guns, Abed Rabbo said, an officer told him that the fighters were dead. The officer ordered Abed Rabbo to go into the house to collect the fighters’ clothes and weapons, Abed Rabbo said.

As Abed Rabbo crept through the hole on his roof and down the stairs, he called out to the fighters. Surprisingly, the three men were still standing.

The fighters, one of whom appeared to be wearing a suicide vest, wore Hamas bandannas and told Abed Rabbo to carry a message back to the Israeli soldiers: “We’re still alive.”

When Abed Rabbo returned with the news, Israeli forces fired guided missiles at the building and then ordered the increasingly reluctant Abed Rabbo to go back inside.

The apartment was on fire, but the militants were still alive. Abed Rabbo said he took back a new message from the militants: “If you are real men, come and face us yourselves.”

The Israeli forces called in an Apache helicopter, which mistakenly hit Abed Rabbo’s empty house. A second strike hit the militants’ building, Abed Rabbo said.

Sent back yet again, he said, he found the militants trapped by rubble but still alive.

The standoff had dragged on for more than 12 hours. The Israeli soldiers were growing angry and began to suspect that Abed Rabbo was lying to them, he said. One of the soldiers taunted the militants over a loudspeaker, telling them that their leaders had abandoned them and they should give up.

At dawn, the soldiers sent Abed Rabbo in yet again. He returned with the same news: The militants were alive.

The Israeli officer, Abed Rabbo said, exploded in anger and grabbed two other men from the neighborhood.

One of them, Zaher Zidane, said the officers gave him a digital camera and told them to go into the house to take pictures of the militants.

The 27-year-old taxi driver said the soldiers threatened neighbor Jamal Qatari and him, leaving them no real choice.

Inside, Zidane said, he, too, found the Hamas fighters badly injured but alive.

Eventually, the Israelis ended the standoff by calling in a bulldozer to bring the building down on top of the Palestinian fighters, Daher and Abed Rabbo said.

After the building collapsed, Daher said, the soldiers ordered another man and him to pull the bodies out of the rubble. The dead militants, however, were trapped under the wreckage.

Daher, Abed Rabbo and Zidane weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood who said they were forced to work for the Israeli forces.

Sami Rashid Mohammed, a 45-year-old police officer for the Palestinian Authority, said that Israeli soldiers forced him to enter houses to check for fighters and booby traps.

At one point, Mohammed said, Palestinian militants opened fire on the Israeli soldiers he was with as they crept through a small orchard. Mohammed said the Israeli forces kept him trapped in the middle of the firefight and used him as cover.

“The spent bullets were flying over my shoulder,” Mohammed said.

Rashad Abu Saffi, a 60-year-old businessman who runs a livestock feed business that Israeli forces destroyed during the military operation, said Israeli soldiers forced him to lead them into the neighborhood mosque to check for militants and booby traps.

When the soldiers later ordered Abu Saffi, his wife and two of their friends to leave the neighborhood, he said, soldiers opened fire on the group. Abu Saffi and neighbor Hani Al Mabhooh said that one shot hit Abu Saffi’s wife in the hip and leg.

The two men said they dragged the wounded woman through the empty streets until they found safety in a friend’s home nearby.

In another section of Ezbt Abed Rabbo, Castro Abed Rabbo said that Israeli forces sent him to check homes for fighters and booby traps before they sent in specially trained dogs with high-tech surveillance equipment.

Legal scholar Reisner said that if the allegations were true, they should be the subject of a serious investigation by the Israel Defense Forces.

“Israel had a policy in the past called the ‘neighbor policy,’ where soldiers would ask neighbors to persuade terrorists to come out of their houses,” he said. “The Supreme Court reviewed this procedure and ruled that this was unlawful. The answer is very clear: It is illegal. The IDF should look into such charges.”

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