White House position: Two sides or one side? Equal blame, or one and a half sided blame?

We know the White House always supports the right of Israel to defend itself. No matter Republican or Democrat we get the message ad nauseum, day or night. It's also an unqualified endorsement; never a question raised. Kill 100 plus people in Gaza in response to a barrage of WWII vintage (in terms of technological sophistication) rockets that for all practical purposes don't kill anyone? Sure! Why not?

Is Israel's so-called self-defense, in reality, done in defense of it's illegal subjugation and theft of land from Palestinians in the West Bank, and its policy in Gaza where, since 2006, it has used a blockade and regular air, ground and sniper attacks to strangle it into submission? Washington is pledged to never allow that question to be raised.

Jen Psaki, speaking for the State Department, is OK with Israel's indiscriminate killings in Gaza, but not with Gaza's firing rockets back. When questioned about the Palestinian's right to defend themselves she sputtered, dodging the comparison of two sides exchanging fire. Insisting that Israel is an established government and Gaza is a haven for terrorists, she indicated that the USA does not see two sides with rights, but only Israel has any rights and Palestinians who respond to Israeli killings of their people are terrorists, not a "side."

So, in this case there's only one side. But sometimes the Palestinians get to be a "side."When negotiations fail Washington says "both side are to blame," even when the Palestinian side represented by Abbas capitulates to nearly every demand by Netanyahu.

So if the US feels compelled to criticize Israel for anything, then the Palestinians get to be one of two sides so they can be chastised too. If Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza stand up to the normal, regular every-day conditions of occupation and murder with impunity by the IDF or settlers that's terrorism. If they submit and don't fight back against Israel's long standing violent policy of ethnic cleansing, then all is peaceful and Palestinians are being reasonable.

A corollary of the White House's stand on Israel/Palestine is that any incident involving violence is always started by terrorists among the Palestinians never by Israel.

The killings of the three teenaged Jewish settlers near Hebron is seen as the ground zero of violence. According to Israel and the US State department all was calm until then. Shortly before the settlers were killed two Palestinian teens attending a protest rally marking the anniversary of the destruction of Palestinian society 1n 1947 (the Nakba)were shot down and killed by IDF snipers in front of thousands of witnesses and news media video cameras. Any repercussions? Of course not! The IDF can kill Palestinians with impunity. This has been the ground rule for decades. Any connection between this event and the killing of the three settler youth? Misguided revenge, but at least we can see a motivation to avenge murdered Palestinians. Oh no! This is terrorism just to satisfy Palestinian blood lust.

The fact that five Palestinians were killed by the IDF during the search for the three abducted Jewish teenagers hasn't been newsworthy or merited comment by the White House. These weren't shoot outs, but killings of unarmed civilians. But this doesn't rise to the level of violence in the eyes of our State Department spokesperson. Just normal life in Greater Israel. (There is ample evidence the Israelis authorities knew they were already dead before they started the "search," which gave them an opportunity to conduct mass arrests and terrorize they populace of Palestinian cities)

The "who started it?" question always falls on the Palestinians, not the Israelis. Before, during and after any rockets were ever launched from Gaza, Israel has been bombing from the air, shelling from the land and sea and making ground incursions and sniper attacks across the Gaza-Israel border. Israel makes constant (unreported) war on Gaza. This is normal peaceful behavior. The normal "war is peace" is disturbed only when fire is returned from Gaza.

Reality is starting to push and strain against the false paradigm that has been created by Israel and the USA to explain what is happening in occupied Palestine. Can reality be suppressed forever? Hopefully not. But it's a big task to educate the public and disseminate truthful information: this is about a colonial Zionist settler state, enabled by the world's (current) super power, working to subjugate and expel an entire people to guarantee the continued future of a single-ethnic/religious state that is the dominant power in the Mideast. This is not a viable long-term project, but that reality isn't stopping the State of Israel from bending every effort to achieve that result.

Did Israel really think Hamas would turn the other cheek? What exactly are 1.5 million people supposed to live on? Is there anyone who can explain why the blockade, even if partial, of Gaza continues?

from Haaretz

By Gideon Levy | Jul. 10, 2014 | 2:44 AM | 8

Following the kidnapping of three teenaged Israelis in the territories and their murders, Israel wildly arrested some 500 Palestinians, including members of parliament and dozens of freed prisoners who had no connection at all to the kidnapping. The army terrorized the entire West Bank with a dragnet and mass arrests, whose declared aim was “to crush Hamas.” A racist campaign raged on the Internet and led to a Palestinian teenager being burned alive. All this followed Israel’s punitive campaign against the effort to establish a Palestinian unity government that the world was prepared to recognize, its violation of its commitment to release prisoners, a halt of the diplomatic process and a refusal to propose any alternate plan or vision.

Did we really think the Palestinians would accept all this submissively, obediently, and calmly, and that peace and quiet would continue to prevail in Israel’s cities?

What exactly were we thinking? That Gaza would live forever in the shadow of Israeli (and Egyptian) caprice, with the restraints sometimes loosened a bit, or sometimes painfully tightened? That the biggest prison in the world would carry on as a prison? That hundreds of thousands of its residents would remain cut off forever? That exports would be blocked and fishing restricted? What exactly are 1.5 million people supposed to live on? Is there anyone who can explain why the blockade, even if partial, of Gaza continues? Can anyone explain why its future is never discussed? Did we think that all this would continue and Gaza would accept it submissively? Anyone who thought so was a victim of dangerous delusions, and now we are all paying the price.

But please, just don’t act surprised. Just don’t raise hell about the Palestinians raining rockets on Israeli cities for nothing – such luxuries are no longer acceptable. The dread that Israeli citizens are feeling now is no greater than the dread felt by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who in recent weeks waited in terror for the soldiers to break down their doors and invade their homes in the middle of the night, to search, trash, destroy, humiliate, and then snatch a member of their household. The fear we’re experiencing is no greater than the fear felt by Palestinian children and teens, several of whom were killed needlessly by Israeli Defense Forces fire in recent weeks. The trepidation Israelis feel is certainly less than that felt by Gaza residents, who have no Color Red warnings, no “secure spaces,” and no Iron Dome to save them, only hundreds of scary sorties by the Israel Air Force that end in destruction and the death of innocents, including the elderly, women, and children, who have already been killed during this operation, as it during all its predecessors.

The operation already has a childish name, “Protective Edge.” But Operation Protective Edge started and will end like all previous operations – giving us no protection and no edge. The media and public opinion want Palestinian blood and destruction, with the center-left supporting this, of course, as it always has at the beginning. But what comes next has already long been written in the chronicles of all the senseless and bloody Gaza operations through the ages. What’s amazing is that from operation to operation, nobody seems to learn anything, and nothing changes except the weapons.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indeed acted with restraint at first, and was duly praised for it – but it was impossible for him to hold back in the face of the Gaza rocket fire. Everyone knows Netanyahu wasn’t interested in this confrontation.

Is that so? If he really wasn’t interested in it, then he should have seriously pursued diplomatic negotiations. But he didn’t, so it’s clear that he really was interested in confrontation. The headline of his newspaper, Israel Hayom, declared, “Take it to the finish.” But Israel will never achieve the insane “finish” desired by Israel Hayom, certainly not by force.

“There’s no way to evade punishment for what’s been happening here for almost 50 years,” writer David Grossman told the Israel Conference on Peace this week. That was only a few hours before the next punishment in the series of crimes and punishments landed on Israeli civilians, who are so innocent and blameless.

When Will Palestine’s Leaders Change Their Tactics?

from The Palestine Chronicle
Jul 9 2014 / 4:44 pm

Palestinians need a leadership that is not focused on maintaining Israel’s security.

By Samah Sabawi
As Israeli air strikes rain death and destruction on Gaza, and as protests rage in Palestinians cities and camps throughout the West Bank as well as inside Israel’s 1948 borders, an op-ed appearing in Haaretz written by the president of the Palestinian Authority clearly reveals that the chasm between the Palestinian people and their leadership could not be wider.
Mahmoud Abbas, begins the op-ed by reminding Israel that 26 years have passed since Palestinians endorsed the two-state solution, and in effect conceded 78% of their historic homeland, agreeing to have a Palestinian state on what remains of Palestine inside Israel’s 1967 borders. Abbas ends his oped by assuring Israel he remains “totally committed to the vision of a two-state solution, normalization and peace with our neighbor – Israel”.
Abbas knows that for Palestinians and Israelis to be neighbours there must be two independent states, Palestine and Israel, both with clearly defined borders. This is no longer feasible given the facts on the ground that Israel has created. Israel does not plan to live next door, it plans to continue existing on top of all of Palestine, crushing it, inhaling its oxygen, removing its indigenous population while stealing its natural resources.
Palestinians are not as Abbas would like to imagine, neighbours of Israel, Palestinians are Israel’s captive occupied population and they have had enough. They are calling for an uprising and are building their resistance with or without the PA.
The brutal murder of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was burned alive inside and out by three Israelis after being forced to drink gasoline, is the trigger for much of the uprising we see today. Thousands of people came to Abu Khdeir’s mourning tent while tens of thousands marched in his funeral.
His fate captured the imagination of Palestinians and brought home the brutality and vengeful nature of Israel. Abu Khdeir’s murder came amidst various other kidnapping attempts of Palestinian children by Israeli settlers, as well as Israeli attacks on Palestinians on buses and in the streets.
While Israel apologists tried to justify these attacks claiming they are a direct response to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens on 12 June, the reality is Palestinians have faced death and destruction at the hands of Israel on a daily basis for decades and most of it often goes unreported. According to statistics by the Ministry of Information in Ramallah, 1,518 Palestinian children were killed by Israel’s occupation forces between September 2000 and April 2013. This means that for the past 13 years, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israeli forces every three days.
Reeling in Gaza
Even though Hamas – often not shy of claiming responsibility – denied its involvement in the kidnapping of the Israeli teens on 12 June, the Israeli government has insisted, without any solid evidence, that Hamas is responsible. This gave Israel the opportunity to conduct hundreds of arrests. Reneging on a deal it had with Abbas to release the Palestinian prisoners, Israel rounded up prisoners recently released, including Hamas politicians, once again proving that “gains” made at the negotiating table were easily reversible by Israel. This further undermined the Palestinian Authority and their commitment to negotiations.
The move by Israel to hold Hamas responsible resulted in what we are now witnessing: a large scale Israeli military assault on the besieged and trapped people in Gaza. The situation in Gaza has become unsustainable both for the population and for the political leadership of Hamas. Hamas’s increased isolation following the seven year siege and the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has forced it to move toward reconciliation with the PA.
However, Israeli pressure on the PA and the PA’s failure to address the economic hardship of the Palestinian civil servants in Gaza, including the explosive problem of the salaries for civil servants appointed by the Hamas government, have torpedoed the potential for real reconciliation and for a unified leadership for the Palestinian people.
What Palestinians Need
Abbas writes in his op-ed in Haaretz that negotiation can be a powerful tool for bringing about peace but he makes the mistaken assumption that negotiations with Israel have failed because Israel did not have ‘a stated goal and known parameters’. While this is true, Israel has refused to define its borders and has used the negotiations to provide a cover to its aggressive settlement expansion, the reality is the main obstacle preventing Palestinians from succeeding in their negotiating efforts is first and foremost the lack of leverage they had every time they came to the table.
Abbas quotes international law constantly when speaking of Palestinian rights, but quoting international law is one thing, actively pursuing its implementation by addressing Israel’s war crimes at the intentional court of justice is another. To have justice on the Palestinian side is not enough to compel Israel to change its brutal and racist policies, what is needed are tactics that can work to bring about pressure, massive amounts of international pressure, that can force Israel to consider changing its course.
What Palestinians need today is a unified leadership that is not focused on maintaining Israel’s security, but on challenging the legitimacy of its action in the International Court of Justice. What is needed is a leadership that is able to support the Palestinian internal popular resistance and the international solidarity calls for boycotts divestments and sanctions in order to leverage diplomatic support.
As Albert Einstein once said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Mahmoud Abbas cannot continue to do the same thing while expecting his people to believe that he will be delivering different results. Palestinians are out in the streets calling for active resistance.
They are standing up to the Israeli Occupation soldiers. They are challenging the submissive quiet that was imposed on the Palestinian Occupied Territory for years. They are rebelling against Israel’s “economic peace” while demanding a peace that is based on freedom, justice and equality for all. They are calling for Boycotts Divestments and Sanctions. When will the Palestinian leadership change its dead end tactics and join them?
- Samah Sabawi is a playwright, poet, political analyst and human rights advocate. She has written and produced the critically acclaimed plays Cries from the Land and Three Wishes as well as having co-authored the book Journey to Peace in Palestine. She is also Policy Adviser to Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network. (This article was originally published in the Middle East Eye.)

Netanyahu Government Knew Teens Were Dead As It Whipped Up Racist Frenzy

By Max Blumenthal

“Cursed be he who says, ‘Avenge!‘ “
—Chaim Bialik, from “On The Slaughter”

July 10, 2014 "ICH" - "The Electronic Intifada" - From the moment three Israeli teens were reported missing last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military-intelligence apparatus suppressed the flow of information to the general public. Through a toxic blend of propaganda, subterfuge and incitement, they inflamed a precarious situation, manipulating Israelis into supporting their agenda until they made an utterly avoidable nightmare inevitable.

Israeli police, intelligence officials and Netanyahu knew within hours of the kidnapping and murder of the three teens that they had been killed. And they knew who the prime suspects were less than a day after the kidnapping was reported.

Rather than reveal these details to the public, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency imposed a gag order on the national media, barring news outlets from reporting that the teens had almost certainly been killed, and forbidding them from revealing the identities of their suspected killers. The Shin Bet even lied to the parents of the kidnapped teens, deceiving them into believing their sons were alive.

Instead of mounting a limited action to capture the suspected perpetrators and retrieve the teens’ bodies, Netanyahu staged an aggressive international public relations campaign, demanding sympathy and outrage from world leaders, who were also given the impression that the missing teens were still alive.

Meanwhile, Israel’s armed forces rampaged throughout the occupied West Bank and bombarded the Gaza Strip in a campaign of collective punishment deceptively marketed to Israelis and the world as a rescue mission.

Critical details that were known all along by Netanyahu and the military-intelligence apparatus were relayed to the Israeli public only after the abduction of more than 560 Palestinians, including at least 200 still held without charges; after the raiding of Palestinian universities and ransacking of countless homes; after six Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces; after American-trained Palestinian Authority police assisted Israeli soldiers attacking Palestinian youths in the center of Ramallah; after the alleged theft by Israeli troops of $3 million in US dollars; and after Israel’s international public relations extravaganza had run its course.

The assault on the West Bank arrived on the heels of the collapse of the US-led framework negotiations, for which the US blamed Netanyahu, and immediately after Hamas’ ratification of a unity deal with the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu was still smarting from the US recognition of the unity government when news of the kidnapping reached him. Never one to miss an opportunity to undermine the Palestinians, he and his inner circle resolved to milk the kidnapping for maximum propaganda value.

Weeks after the incident, it is now clear that the Israeli government, intelligence services and army engaged in a cover-up to provide themselves with the political space they required for a military campaign that had little to do with rescuing any kidnapped teens.

The disinformation campaign they waged sent a heavily indoctrinated, comprehensively militarized population into a tribalistic frenzy, provoking a wave of high-level incitement, the shocking revenge killing of an innocent Palestinian teen and rioting across East Jerusalem.

Where the chaos will end and how far it will spread is unknown. But its origins are increasingly clear.

Gagging the media, lying to teens’ parents

On 12 June, three Jewish Israeli youths, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, went missing while hitchhiking from Kfar Etzion, an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. At 10:25pm, Shaar placed a panicked call to Israeli police.

During the eerie call lasting two minutes and nine seconds, the supposed kidnappers can be heard ordering the youths to keep their heads down. Israel Radio plays in the background as Shaar repeatedly appeals for help. Then several gunshots can be heard followed by celebratory singing as the kidnappers remark, “We got three.” The teens had been killed.

It took until the next morning for the police to connect the call to a missing persons report filed by the youths’ parents. In a meeting with Shin Bet officials that day, the teens’ parents listened to a recording of the phone call.

Bat Galim Shaar, the mother of Gilad Shaar, demanded investigators explain to her why gunshots can be heard in the background, and if this meant that her son was dead.

According to Bat Galim Shaar, police claimed the bullets were “blanks.” When the car used by the alleged kidnappers was discovered burned by a roadside, the Shin Bet told her no DNA was found. In fact, bullets and blood were present throughout the interior of the car. The Shin Bet had lied to the parents of the missing teens in order to stoke false hopes that their sons were alive.

“When [the Shin Bet] told me finally at 6:00am Friday that the army was on the job, I felt better — as if we were in good hands,” Bat Galim Shaar told Israel’s Channel 10. “I was naïve, I told everyone Gilad would be home before Shabbat.”

Having deceived the victims’ parents, Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus moved to conceal the truth from the general public, imposing a gag order that barred the country’s media from reporting on the sound of gunshots in the recorded call to police.

According to the text of the gag order, which was first published in English at Mondoweiss, the military had forbidden Israeli reporters from publicizing “All the details of the investigation” and “All details that might identify the suspect.”

Not only did all involved in the investigation — Netanyahu, the Shin Bet, the military — know right away that the three missing teens were almost certainly dead, they had identified the two men they believed were responsible for the crime little more than a day after it occurred.

To legitimize the military’s wider goals, they withheld this information as well.

Hiding the suspects

On 17 June, Arabic-language news site Rai Al Youm reported that Israeli police and Shin Bet agents had raided the homes of Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Eishe, the main suspects, near the southern West Bank city of Hebron. As a Palestinian news outlet based in London, Rai Al Youm was not subject to the Israeli military’s gag order and was therefore free to publish the names of the two accused kidnappers.

Citing a report in the Israeli online news outlet Walla! which was either scrubbed due to the gag order or otherwise rendered inaccessible, Rai Al Youm summarized an account by the father of Abu Eishe as follows: “On Saturday at dawn [two days after the alleged kidnapping was reported], special forces of the Israeli army stormed into the house and interrogated sons of the family trying to find any information that could lead them to his whereabouts but they were unsuccessful.”

Abu Eishe’s father added that the Shin Bet had also arrested his son’s wife to interrogate her about his whereabouts. An uncle of Qawasmeh remarked that four of his nephew’s brothers and his wife were arrested the day after the alleged kidnapping and interrogated.

Rai Al Youm added: “several of the military correspondents in the Hebrew media have reported last Friday on a statement attributed to a Palestinian security official in which he said that the PA [Palestinian Authority] is tracking two Hamas personnel who disappeared last Thursday [the day of the kidnapping] and that the security forces of the PA have given the information they have to Israel. And now it’s clear that this story was true and that Israel is looking for them and has charged them with being behind the kidnapping.”

Allison Deger, a correspondent for Mondoweiss, visited the Qawasmeh home and confirmed that the army and Shin Bet brought several male members of the families in for interrogation on 14 June.

In a normal high-profile criminal investigation, the names of fugitive suspects are widely publicized. Investigators prominently display posters of the wanted criminals in public spaces while police officials stage press conferences appealing for help from the public. In this case, however, Israel’s intelligence services chose to keep their suspects’ identities a closely-held secret for two weeks.

While Netanyahu and his top deputies blamed the entire membership of Hamas for the kidnapping, the Shin Bet gag order suppressed all information relating to the identities of the suspects until 26 June. As far as the Israeli public knew, the kidnappers could have been anywhere in the West Bank, in any schoolhouse or coffee house or hen house where anyone remotely affiliated with Hamas congregated.

Having manipulated an exceptionally suggestible population through the careful management of information, the military had all the political latitude it needed to rampage through cities far from the scene of the crime.

During a raid of Birzeit University near Ramallah, Israeli troops seized hundreds of Hamas flags, carting them away in trucks as though they had obtained valuable evidence. When the army bombarded the Gaza Strip, the only justification it needed was that the besieged coastal territory was governed by Hamas.

A poll released on 2 July revealed that 76 percent of Jewish Israelis approved of the army’s actions and expressed overwhelming support for the Shin Bet.

In the near term, the gag order had produced its intended result.

Rogue element

Though Qawasmeh and Abu Eishe were widely identified as veteran members of Hamas’ military wing, they comprised a rogue element that likely acted without the knowledge and against the wishes of Hamas leadership.

According to Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, members of the Qawasmeh clan of Hebron have earned a reputation for attacking Israeli civilian targets during ceasefires between Hamas and Israel.

While an extended family of over 10,000 can hardly be blamed for the actions of some of its members, it is notable that attacks carried out by fighters from the family were privately criticized by top Hamas leaders, as Eldar explains. Hamas leadership regarded the operations as self-destructive acts of freebooting and often paid for them in the form of Israeli assassinations. In each case, the violence shattered ceasefires and inspired renewed bouts of bloodshed.

“The same is true now,” Eldar writes. “Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Eishe have taken Hamas to a place where its leadership never intended to go.”

Hamas leadership has yet to take responsibility for the kidnapping and likely had no knowledge of its planning. As Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel notes, “So far, there is no evidence that Hamas’ leadership either in Gaza or abroad was involved in the kidnapping.” Harel adds that the fallout of the kidnapping “effectively froze the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.”

Why would Hamas leadership have authorized an operation that so clearly threatened to unravel the movement’s political achievements, wrecking the vaunted unity deal and leaving Abbas without rival in the West Bank?

The Israeli government’s propaganda blitz drowned out sobering questions like these. In turn, the gag order obstructed the flow of information that would have complicated the propaganda.

Determined to reframe the international media’s narrative around Israel’s plight at the hands of Palestinian terrorism, Netanyahu went on the offensive.

#BringBackOurBoys

On 17 June, the same day the Israeli army forcibly confiscated CCTV cameras in Beitunia that captured footage of its soldiers killing two unarmed Palestinian boys during a Nakba Day protest, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor appeared behind a lectern at the UN Mission in New York City.

“It has been five days since our boys went missing,” Prosor thundered, “and I ask the international community, where are you? Where are you?!”

Referring to the Fatah-Hamas unity government, Prosor added: “All those in the international community who rushed to bless this marriage should look into the eyes of the heartbroken parents and have the courage to take responsibility by condemning the kidnapping. The international community bought in to a bad deal and Israel is paying for it.”

Beside Prosor stood a large placard displaying the smiling faces of the three missing teens beneath a hashtag reading #BringBackOurBoys. Israel’s propaganda blitz was approaching its apex.

For days, leaders of Israel’s trained online propaganda brigades — from the Israeli army spokesperson’s unit, to the Jewish Agency, to the Prime Minister’s Office — flooded social media with the #BringBackOurBoys hashtag. Mimicking Michelle Obama’s promotion of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag that aimed to raise awareness of the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamist militants, the Israeli prime minister’s frowning wife, Sara, posted a portrait of herself on Facebook holding a card that read, #BringBackOurBoys.

In a normal high-profile criminal investigation, the names of fugitive suspects are widely publicized. Investigators prominently display posters of the wanted criminals in public spaces while police officials stage press conferences appealing for help from the public. In this case, however, Israel’s intelligence services chose to keep their suspects’ identities a closely-held secret for two weeks.

While Netanyahu and his top deputies blamed the entire membership of Hamas for the kidnapping, the Shin Bet gag order suppressed all information relating to the identities of the suspects until 26 June. As far as the Israeli public knew, the kidnappers could have been anywhere in the West Bank, in any schoolhouse or coffee house or hen house where anyone remotely affiliated with Hamas congregated.

Having manipulated an exceptionally suggestible population through the careful management of information, the military had all the political latitude it needed to rampage through cities far from the scene of the crime.

During a raid of Birzeit University near Ramallah, Israeli troops seized hundreds of Hamas flags, carting them away in trucks as though they had obtained valuable evidence. When the army bombarded the Gaza Strip, the only justification it needed was that the besieged coastal territory was governed by Hamas.

A poll released on 2 July revealed that 76 percent of Jewish Israelis approved of the army’s actions and expressed overwhelming support for the Shin Bet.

In the near term, the gag order had produced its intended result.

Rogue element

Though Qawasmeh and Abu Eishe were widely identified as veteran members of Hamas’ military wing, they comprised a rogue element that likely acted without the knowledge and against the wishes of Hamas leadership.

According to Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, members of the Qawasmeh clan of Hebron have earned a reputation for attacking Israeli civilian targets during ceasefires between Hamas and Israel.

While an extended family of over 10,000 can hardly be blamed for the actions of some of its members, it is notable that attacks carried out by fighters from the family were privately criticized by top Hamas leaders, as Eldar explains. Hamas leadership regarded the operations as self-destructive acts of freebooting and often paid for them in the form of Israeli assassinations. In each case, the violence shattered ceasefires and inspired renewed bouts of bloodshed.

“The same is true now,” Eldar writes. “Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Eishe have taken Hamas to a place where its leadership never intended to go.”

Hamas leadership has yet to take responsibility for the kidnapping and likely had no knowledge of its planning. As Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel notes, “So far, there is no evidence that Hamas’ leadership either in Gaza or abroad was involved in the kidnapping.” Harel adds that the fallout of the kidnapping “effectively froze the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.”

Why would Hamas leadership have authorized an operation that so clearly threatened to unravel the movement’s political achievements, wrecking the vaunted unity deal and leaving Abbas without rival in the West Bank?

The Israeli government’s propaganda blitz drowned out sobering questions like these. In turn, the gag order obstructed the flow of information that would have complicated the propaganda.

Determined to reframe the international media’s narrative around Israel’s plight at the hands of Palestinian terrorism, Netanyahu went on the offensive.

#BringBackOurBoys

On 17 June, the same day the Israeli army forcibly confiscated CCTV cameras in Beitunia that captured footage of its soldiers killing two unarmed Palestinian boys during a Nakba Day protest, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor appeared behind a lectern at the UN Mission in New York City.

“It has been five days since our boys went missing,” Prosor thundered, “and I ask the international community, where are you? Where are you?!”

Referring to the Fatah-Hamas unity government, Prosor added: “All those in the international community who rushed to bless this marriage should look into the eyes of the heartbroken parents and have the courage to take responsibility by condemning the kidnapping. The international community bought in to a bad deal and Israel is paying for it.”

Beside Prosor stood a large placard displaying the smiling faces of the three missing teens beneath a hashtag reading #BringBackOurBoys. Israel’s propaganda blitz was approaching its apex.

For days, leaders of Israel’s trained online propaganda brigades — from the Israeli army spokesperson’s unit, to the Jewish Agency, to the Prime Minister’s Office — flooded social media with the #BringBackOurBoys hashtag. Mimicking Michelle Obama’s promotion of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag that aimed to raise awareness of the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamist militants, the Israeli prime minister’s frowning wife, Sara, posted a portrait of herself on Facebook holding a card that read, #BringBackOurBoys.

As they did after the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens, the Shin Bet imposed a gag order on the investigation, seemingly hoping to delay the news that Abu Khudair was the victim of Jewish extremism. And as before, the police flooded Israeli media with disinformation, this time by insinuating the murdered teen had been killed by members of his own family for being gay.

The Electronic Intifada has obtained CCTV footage showing the faces of the alleged killers of Abu Khudair just as they abducted him. The video was concealed for several days from the Israeli public under a new Shin Bet gag order. When the police finally arrested the suspected killers of Abu Khudair, they curiously staged a simultaneous press conference about an unrelated killing a young Jewish woman, suggesting without any clear evidence that she had been the victim of a Palestinian terrorist.

On 4 July, an autopsy revealed that Abu Khudair’s killers had burned him alive. Protest and rioting spread from Shuafat across East Jerusalem and into areas of northern Israel. Meanwhile, Jewish nationalists took to Facebook to organize more lynch mobs.

Netanyahu surfaced briefly the day before at an Independence Day ceremony at the US consulate in Jerusalem. With US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro seated by his side, the Prime Minister was forced to confront the binge of racism that he helped inspire.

Speaking in English for the consumption of his American hosts, Netanyahu declared, “Murder, riots, incitement, vigilantism — they have no place in our democracy. And it is these democratic values that differentiate us from our neighbors and unite us with the United States.”

Outside, the chaos showed no sign of ebbing.

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected since original publication to clarify that two popular Facebook pages calling for revenge were created after the Israeli teens’ disappearance; the article originally mentioned only one page.

Max Blumenthal is an award winning journalist and bestselling author. His latest book is Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013, Nation Books).

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Large demonstration against Israeli occupation & indiscriminate killing of Gazans NYC, 42ndst & 2nd Ave 7/9/14

"Democratic" debate in Israeli Knesset: Palestinian MK thrown out for the crime of truth telling

JPost.comDiplomacy & Politics
Arab MKs removed from plenum for accusing IDF of war crimes By LAHAV HARKOV
07/09/2014 16:37


MK Ahmed Tibi(UAL-Ta'al) accuses IDF of killing innocent women and children in Gaza; MK Stern says such statements are incitement. Ahmed Tibi at Israel Institute of Democracy forum
Ahmed Tibi at Israel Institute of Democracy forum Photo: Courtesy IDI
Arab lawmakers were removed from the Knesset plenum after calling the IDF war criminals and murderers on Wednesday.

MK Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al) said the army was “committing war crimes in Gaza, including blowing up houses and killing entire families intentionally, [among them] innocent children and women.”

Later, in the plenum, UAL -Ta’al MK Ibrahim Sarsour read names of Palestinians who had been killed in the Gaza Strip since Operation Protective Edge began, saying they were “murdered by IDF soldiers.”

Deputy Knesset Speaker Moshe Feiglin (Likud) called Knesset ushers to remove Sarsour from the stand. Sarsour resisted, and they had to force him off.

“I wouldn’t want to speak in front of a fascist Nazi like you anyway,” Sarsour told Feiglin.

Tibi later took the stand and started reading names. When MK Orit Struck (Bayit Yehudi) interrupted him, he shouted, “Shut up while I’m reading names of people you killed with missiles! Are you not ashamed? The IDF is committing war crimes.”

UAL -Ta’al MK Masoud Gnaim echoed his fellow party members’ sentiments.

“You are so proud of your moral army, but you are immoral,” Gnaim said. “You massacred and murdered in Gaza, and you have an army of murderers.”

Feiglin had Gnaim removed from the plenum as well.

Hatnua MK Elazar Stern, who took the stand to speak after Gnaim, commented that “calling IDF soldiers murderers is incitement.”

How long can Israel depend on Mizrahi docile loyalty? Smadar Lavie asks in new book

from mondoweiss

Sylvia Schwarz on July 7, 2014 46

Smadar Lavie’s new book, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, by Smadar Lavie. Berghahn Books, April 2014, $39.95

Smadar Lavie’s most recent book, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, is an anthropological study of a group of marginalized women, written by a member of this marginalized group, and written for Westerners who, for the most part, know nothing about intra-Jewish racism in Israel.

In the short but packed volume, Lavie describes the demographics of Israel, the power structure, classism and sexism. She tells some of the history of political movements involving the ethnic majority in Israel (Mizrahi Jews), showing how the minority elite (Ashkenazi Jews) suppress political demands. She includes anthropological descriptions and statistics, describes reasons that the majority ethnic group leans politically to the right, and quotes from her diary, giving compelling testimony to the truly bureaucratic torture that impoverished single mothers must suffer in Israel.

Mizrahi Jews, or Mizrahim (pl. Hebrew), are 50% of the population of Israeli citizens. Ashkenazim make up 30% and Palestinians are the remaining 20%. Most Mizrahim have roots in Arab countries, such as Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and Morocco. Many Jews from those countries were generally forced to leave during the 1950s after Israel became a state. In some cases this may have been a response by those countries to the new Zionist state, or the emigration may have been precipitated by the Israeli government, or they chose to leave, but the creation of about 600,000 Jewish refugee immigrants served Israel’s purposes. Israel needed to bring in Jews to replace the 750,000 Palestinians it had forcibly removed from their homes, both to justify the removal of the Palestinians and to replace the labor that had been forced out. Mizrahi means Eastern, but it has come to mean a Jew from a country in which the Jewish population did not speak Yiddish. The term therefore includes Ethiopian Jews, Indian and East Asian Jews, and Jews from Spain and some Slavic countries. The Ashkenazim, or Jews from Western Europe, are generally in the upper classes in Israel. They are privileged in terms of education, employment, positions in the armed forces, housing opportunities and they have many other societal advantages.

Prior to reading this book, I was aware of statements like David Ben-Gurion’s “poor human material” , in referring to Jews from Arab countries [see for example War Without End, by Anton La Guardia]. It was evident that if Israel’s founders based their new country on the premise that one ethnicity is superior to others, then it is no stretch to assume that racism will spread to encompass other ethnicities. If Jews are considered superior to non-Jews, it would not be out of character for the privileged class to believe that certain Jews are superior to other kinds of Jews. In fact, it would be a surprise if there was no evidence of the expansion of racism. Racism is hard to contain, always spilling out over the edges and spreading.

Still, the views expressed by some Ashkenazim quoted by Lavie in her book are stunning: the president of Israel in 1951 said that Mizrahim were unfit for education [p. 56], Mizrahi children are openly called “kushi sambo” (sambo nigger) [p. 14]. And, like Palestinians, Mizrahi single mothers are described as “du-ragli” in Hebrew slang. The literal meaning is bipedal but the word implies a sub-human that walks on two legs.

In fact, Europeans were considered so superior to Mizrahi that during the Soviet immigration period Soviet citizens could easily bypass the requirement of having five maternal Jewish generations in order to immigrate to Israel. Many who were not Jewish falsified their documents, as was known to the authorities who let them in anyway. Lavie states, “Perhaps the absorption authorities were less concerned with Jewishness than with increasing Israel’s Whiteness, or ‘eugenic capability’” [p.37].

Mizrahim, who usually arrived in Israel with next to nothing after their former governments confiscated their possessions in the 1950s, were given housing in the homes that Palestinians had been forced out of a few years earlier, or they lived in tent cities on the front lines between Jordan and Israel. Little or no education was given to children as they were considered too primitive to benefit from formal education. Importantly, education of many Mizrahi children did not include foreign languages. Child labor was common, with children being exploited in the homes of Ashkenazim. Children were exposed to medical experimentation [The Ringworm Affair, p. 79], which killed and injured many.

Mizrahi families were often broken apart: many Mizrahi children were forcibly removed from their parents between the 1930s and 1970s, and the babies given to childless Ashkenazi parents. The practice of taking children from parents deemed unsuitable for parenthood continues today for Mizrahi families, especially those led by single women, who have difficulties providing for their children due to the torturous and exploitative bureaucratic system.

Israeli authorities began a policy of dividing and conquering from the moment Mizrahi Jews arrived in Israel. They already had a lot of practice in this strategy: modeling the European colonial powers, Israel divided Palestinians remaining in Israel into Druze, Christians, Bedouins, Muslims, etc., and set one group against each other [see Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Settler State, by Shira Robinson]. This same strategy was used on Jews of Arab and North African countries, which drove a wedge between the Mizrahim and the Palestinians, who shared language and culture and should have been natural allies. In the Ashkenazi Zionist mind, an alliance between Mizrahim and Palestinians was a dangerous prospect for the continuation of the Ashkenazi political and economic domination in Israel. A Mizrahi-Palestinian coalition in government would spell the end of Ashkenazi control.

The welfare system, which was to provide a safety net, instead gives bureaucrats, opportunities to sexually exploit the women who are forced to show up in person at multiple agencies for help (Lavie offers documentation for this phenomenon, for instance Esther Hertzog’s research, “Who benefits from the Welfare State?” [in Hebrew.]). Rules prevent welfare recipients from owning cars, putting money into a bank, and earning even a substandard wage, making normal commerce difficult and obtaining a job nearly impossible. In 2003, the already insufficient safety net was further eroded by laws in the Knesset.

After the welfare safety net was nearly eliminated, Vicky Knafo, a Mizrahi single mother, began a protest march. At the time, the author was also a Mizrahi single mother in Israel, and experienced first-hand the state system of bureaucracy and exploitation meant to disenfranchise an already marginalized group. Although Vicky Knafo’s protest was prominent news in Israel, few foreign news media covered it – it was not deemed important enough. Since few Mizrahi spoke English or other foreign languages, it was impossible to get international coverage of this grassroots movement for social change. At the same time, the Israeli regime was able to play sectors against one another to cause infighting and divisions.

After weeks of Knafo’s camping out and protesting, a Palestinian suicide bomber struck in Jerusalem, and the news media immediately abandoned the Knafo protest to cover the suicide bombing. Mizrahi single mothers had gained nothing.

The swing to the right in Israeli politics has been largely due to the Mizrahi voting bloc, who overwhelmingly supported right-wing parties such as Likud and more recently Avigdor Lieberman’s racist Yisrael Beiteinu. This is a puzzle: how is it possible that a marginalized, oppressed group supports a party which clearly marginalizes and oppresses another group of people? Lavie says that it is a reaction to years of abuse and disenfranchisement by the Israeli left. It was the left that forced the Mizrahim into downward mobility, expressed vile racism against them and carried out some of the worst practices against their families. The right-wing parties have been those that actually give something tangible to the Mizrahim, such as community renewal projects in the Mizrahi ghettos within Israel.

The Israeli left are the parties who abuse the Mizrahi Jews, yet speak about peace with the Palestinians. Mizrahim understand this hypocrisy. The Israeli left want a two-state solution, in which Israel would give up some of the land in the West Bank to a Palestinian state. Yet most of the settlers living in the West Bank, according to Lavie, are Mizrahim. A peace on those terms would result in large-scale Mizrahi homelessness and is therefore unacceptable to Mizrahim.

Also obviously hypocritical to Lavie and other Mizrahi women are the Ashkenazi feminists who are so patronizing to women of color. Lavie says, in addressing these women belonging to NGOs and philanthropic organizations, “Your feminism is not liberation. It is containment.” [p.136] These NGOs and organizations, like Women in Black, who record human rights abuses against Palestinians at West Bank checkpoints, are part of the Israeli left who talk about peace and the two-state solution but tend to ignore the racism in front of them. These Ashkenazi women who talk about peace are seen as heroes among Jews in the West – showing the vitality of Israeli freedom of expression. Yet, Lavie asks, “How would progressive diaspora Jews – important contributors to civil rights and anti-apartheid movements – react to the revelation of Israeli intra-Jewish racism?” [p.138]

What does this all mean for those of us in the Palestinian solidarity community? The majority ethnic group, the Mizrahi, are marginalized and oppressed by the minority Ashkenazi, but are fiercely chauvinistic. They seem willing to accept their own oppression to protect the state from those who are culturally and even ethnically similar to them. This leaves very little room for optimism. If the majority of the Jewish population are those who could play a pivotal role in bringing about justice in that country, yet are satisfied to be racist, how could their opinions be changed? An effective Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targets those with economic and political power, heads of corporations, governmental policy makers, academics – the Ashkenazim. Those in the lower echelons of society – laborers, unemployed people, welfare recipients – the majority who are Mizrahim and Palestinians, might lose a job due to an effective BDS campaign, but the economy does not rise or fall because of them. Few in the West understand the dynamics and demographics of Israeli society, and so do not challenge the Mizrahim to shift their way of thinking. Without this challenge, there is little incentive to change. This is concerning especially in light of such dramatic recent successes of the BDS movement. Is it possible to create change in that society without the Mizrahim?

However, the book’s last sentence, “How long can the regime depend on Mizrahi docile loyalty to the Jewish state?” implies some optimism. A major threat to Ashkenazi domination and perhaps the key to ending Israeli apartheid could be in forging relationships between Mizrahim and Palestinians on the basis of their shared ethnicity, culture, history and oppression. Lavie does not instruct us on how these relationships could be forged, nor does she help us understand our role in this relationship building. But it is essential that we understand the pervasive racism within Israeli culture.