Communist
28th February 2010, 02:01
.
Dispatches From The Edge
Israeli Crackdown; Landmines
& Clusters, Oh My! (http://www.portside.org/?q=showpost&i=7369)
By Conn Hallinan
A heavy-handed crack down on Israeli dissidents is
drawing sharp criticism by human rights organizations
and at least a mild judicial slap on the wrist for the
government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The authorities are
targeting such groups as B'Tselem, New Israel Fund
(NIF), the Association for Civil Rights in Israel
(ACRI), as well as foreign activists in the occupied
West Bank.
"There is an attempt to silence and crack down on
dissent," B'Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli told the
Tobias Buck of the Financial Times. "Since [the Gaza
war], the political climate in Israel has become
extremely polarized. And this polarization has reached
a level where anyone who is critical is presented as a
traitor."
The Netanyanu government has endorsed a bill that, if
passed, will apply onerous registration conditions on
NGOs and subject violators to up to a year in prison.
"These are classic McCarthy techniques, portraying our
organizations as enemies of the state and suggesting we
are aiding Hamas and terror groups," ACRI head Hagai
Elad told the Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook.
On Jan. 15, police broke up a peaceful ARCI
demonstration in East Jerusalem, arresting 16 people.
The rally was protesting the eviction of Palestinians
from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and their
replacement with settlers. Demonstrators were held for
36 hours until a judge from the Jerusalem Magistrates
Court released them without charge. The judge also
refused a police request to ban the demonstrators from
the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Armored personnel carriers and a squad of heavily armed
soldiers surrounded the West Bank Ramallah apartment of
Czech national Eva Novakova, forced her to dress at
gunpoint, and deported her to Prague for overstaying
her visa. Soldiers also seized an Australian and a
Spanish member of the International Solidarity Movement
in Ramallah, but the Israeli Supreme Court ordered
their release.
Jared Malsin, a Jewish-American English language editor
at the Palestinian news agency was arrested at Ben
Gurion airport and detained by Israeli authorities for
deportation. The arrest and deportation order were
blasted by the International Federation of Journalists
as an "intolerable violation of press freedom."
Israeli human rights lawyer Omar Schatz says the
arrests are, "all about fixing the mirror, not fixing
the reflection Israelis see in the mirror."
The crackdown has even fallen on a group of women
fighting ultra-orthodox Jews for the right to pray at
the Jerusalem's Western Wall. In November, Nofrat
Frenkel of Women of the Wall (WW) was arrested for
carrying a Torah and wearing a tallit at the site.
A week before the Sheikh Jarrah arrests, Anat Hoffman,
director of the Israel Religious Action Center, was
detained, fingerprinted, and questioned about the
organization's support for WW protests.
Naomi Chazan, the Israeli president of the U.S.-based
organization NIF, has been subjected to a campaign of
vilification, including posters depicting her with
horns. A government press agency distributed an article
to the foreign press accusing her of "Serving the
agenda of Iran and Hamas." She also lost her job as a
columnist at the Jerusalem Post.
The attempt to smother any challenge to the Netanyahu
government is a reaction to the worldwide criticism
Israel is harvesting in the aftermath of the Gaza War.
Tel Aviv's continued refusal to allow any
reconstruction of the more than 3500 homes destroyed in
the Israeli invasion drew a letter signed by 53 U.S.
Congress members calling for an end to the "de facto
collective punishment of the Palestinian residents of
the Gaza Strip."
U.S. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wa) suggested taking forceful
action to end the Gaza blockade. "We ought to bring
roll-on, roll-off ships and roll them right to the
beach and bring the relief supplies in, in our version
of the Berlin airlift."
But there are internal tensions behind the crackdown as
well. The long occupation of the West Bank has begun to
fray the Israeli military. According to the head of the
Israeli military's Personnel Directorate, Maj. Gen. Avi
Zamir, increasing numbers of Israelis are refusing to
serve in the Occupied Territories. Three years of
military service is compulsory for men, 21 months for
women.
"Taking into consideration Israeli Arab youth, we're
facing a situation in which 70 percent of youths will
not enlist in the military," the general told UPI.
The "Courage to Refuse" movement has long supported
soldiers who won't serve in the Occupied Territories,
and now there is an organization-Shministim- that
advises young people on how to become a conscientious
objector and supports "refuseniks" as well. Police have
also detained several activists for New Profile, a
group dedicated to demilitarizing Israeli society.
A new law makes it a crime for Palestinians to observe
"Nakba," or "Catastrophe," Day commemorating the loss
of their land when Israel was created in 1948.
According to human rights groups, the polarization is a
serious threat to freedom of speech. A recent poll
found that 57 percent of Israelis think "national
security" is more important than human rights. The
country, says Tel Aviv University politics professor
and author Amal Jamal, is headed toward what he calls a
"totalitarian democracy."
These courageous organizations need help. Contact them
at; www.newprofile.org
(http://www.newprofile.org/)
www.nif.org (http://www.nif.org/)
www.acri.or (http://www.acri.or/);
www.palsolidarity.org (http://www.palsolidarity.org/)
www.couragetorefuse.org (http://www.couragetorefuse.org/)
www.womenofthewall.blogspot.com (http://www.womenofthewall.blogspot.com/)
www.shministim.org (http://www.shministim.org/)
________________________________
Step lightly is the only conclusion one can draw from
the Obama administration's refusal to sign the
international treaty banning landmines. U.S. State
Department spokesman Ian Kelly said that the
administration had decided not to join the 10-year old
treaty endorsed by 156 countries. Altogether, 39
countries have not signed on, inclusing Russia, China
and India.
Kelly's comment drew outrage from treaty supporters,
including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who called the
refusal to sign a "default of U.S. leadership," and
contradictory to the White House's "professed emphasis
on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian
affairs."
The U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines called Kelly's
statement "shocking," and anti-landmine groups were
sharply critical of the review process, which was
conducted behind closed doors without input from NGOs,
legislators, or NATO allies who have signed the treaty.
The 1999 treaty bans the stockpiling, production, or
transferring of anti-personal mines that caused over
5,000 casualties last year, one third of them children.
More than 70 countries are infested with them.
In the face of the uproar over the Obama
administration's refusal to join the ban, the State
Department quickly backed off and said the policy
review "is still on-going."
The White House has also resisted endorsing the treaty
to ban cluster weapons.
A total of 103 governments worldwide have signed the
agreement, but ratification is still working its way
through various legislatures and parliaments. Some 30
nations have ratified it, however, elevating the treaty
to the level of international law.
The U.S., Russia, and China are the major producers of
cluster weapons, and they are stockpiled in at least 77
countries. A number of countries, including Japan and
Australia, have destroyed their stocks.
Cluster weapons have a high failure rate-30 percent is
not unusual-and the unexploded bomblets lie in wait for
unwary civilians. Some 90 million cluster weapons were
dropped on tiny Laos during the war in Southeast Asia,
and the weapons continue to kill and maim between 100
and 200 people a year.
Many of the 50 million clusters dropped on Kuwait
during the first Gulf War failed to explode and, in the
two years following the war, killed 1,400 Kuwaiti
civilians. Cluster weapons continue to kill and wound
hundreds of civilians in Kosovo and Iraq.
The aftermath of war was underlined by a recent study
conducted by the Vietnamese military and the Vietnam
Veterans of America Foundation that looked at six
provinces near the old demilitarized zone in the
country's north. It found that it would take 300 years
and $10 billion to clear unexploded bombs and mines
from the region.
Since the war ended in 1975, unexploded ordinance has
killed 10,529 people and injured 12,231 in the six
provinces.
The Iraqi Ministry of the Environment has found that 42
sites across the country are heavily contaminated with
radiation and dioxin. The dioxin is from the widespread
bombing of oil pipelines and refineries during the U.S.
invasion, and the radioactivity is residue from
radioactive depleted uranium ammunition (DUA). Over 500
tons of DUA were used during the first and second Gulf
wars.
According to environment minister Narmin Othman, the
bombing of pipelines in the Basra area has heavily
contaminated the soil with dioxin. "The soil ended up
in people's lungs and has been on food that people have
eaten," he told the Guardian.
DUA is the latest innovation in armor piercing
ammunition, and it is widely used in 120mm tank shells,
and 30mm cannon shells fired by aircraft. While not
highly radioactive, it "has the potential to generate
significant medial consequences" if ingested, according
to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute.
DUA tends to vaporize on contact, contaminating food
and water supplies with radioactive dust.
While the U.S. claims DUA is not dangerous, birth
defects and early life cancers have risen sharply in
places like Falluja where the weapon was widely used.
"We are seeing a very significant increase in central
nervous system anomalies," Falluja general hospital's
director Dr. Ayman Qais told the Guardian. "Before 2003
[the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of
deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities
has increased dramatically."
Admissions for deformities have risen from two every
two weeks a year ago, to two a day now. Besides
deformities of the head, spinal cord, and lower limbs,
multiple tumors have been showing up as well. The
Guardian found that in a three-week period, there were
37 abnormal babies born in the Falluja general hospital
alone.
Dispatches From The Edge
Israeli Crackdown; Landmines
& Clusters, Oh My! (http://www.portside.org/?q=showpost&i=7369)
By Conn Hallinan
A heavy-handed crack down on Israeli dissidents is
drawing sharp criticism by human rights organizations
and at least a mild judicial slap on the wrist for the
government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The authorities are
targeting such groups as B'Tselem, New Israel Fund
(NIF), the Association for Civil Rights in Israel
(ACRI), as well as foreign activists in the occupied
West Bank.
"There is an attempt to silence and crack down on
dissent," B'Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli told the
Tobias Buck of the Financial Times. "Since [the Gaza
war], the political climate in Israel has become
extremely polarized. And this polarization has reached
a level where anyone who is critical is presented as a
traitor."
The Netanyanu government has endorsed a bill that, if
passed, will apply onerous registration conditions on
NGOs and subject violators to up to a year in prison.
"These are classic McCarthy techniques, portraying our
organizations as enemies of the state and suggesting we
are aiding Hamas and terror groups," ACRI head Hagai
Elad told the Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook.
On Jan. 15, police broke up a peaceful ARCI
demonstration in East Jerusalem, arresting 16 people.
The rally was protesting the eviction of Palestinians
from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and their
replacement with settlers. Demonstrators were held for
36 hours until a judge from the Jerusalem Magistrates
Court released them without charge. The judge also
refused a police request to ban the demonstrators from
the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Armored personnel carriers and a squad of heavily armed
soldiers surrounded the West Bank Ramallah apartment of
Czech national Eva Novakova, forced her to dress at
gunpoint, and deported her to Prague for overstaying
her visa. Soldiers also seized an Australian and a
Spanish member of the International Solidarity Movement
in Ramallah, but the Israeli Supreme Court ordered
their release.
Jared Malsin, a Jewish-American English language editor
at the Palestinian news agency was arrested at Ben
Gurion airport and detained by Israeli authorities for
deportation. The arrest and deportation order were
blasted by the International Federation of Journalists
as an "intolerable violation of press freedom."
Israeli human rights lawyer Omar Schatz says the
arrests are, "all about fixing the mirror, not fixing
the reflection Israelis see in the mirror."
The crackdown has even fallen on a group of women
fighting ultra-orthodox Jews for the right to pray at
the Jerusalem's Western Wall. In November, Nofrat
Frenkel of Women of the Wall (WW) was arrested for
carrying a Torah and wearing a tallit at the site.
A week before the Sheikh Jarrah arrests, Anat Hoffman,
director of the Israel Religious Action Center, was
detained, fingerprinted, and questioned about the
organization's support for WW protests.
Naomi Chazan, the Israeli president of the U.S.-based
organization NIF, has been subjected to a campaign of
vilification, including posters depicting her with
horns. A government press agency distributed an article
to the foreign press accusing her of "Serving the
agenda of Iran and Hamas." She also lost her job as a
columnist at the Jerusalem Post.
The attempt to smother any challenge to the Netanyahu
government is a reaction to the worldwide criticism
Israel is harvesting in the aftermath of the Gaza War.
Tel Aviv's continued refusal to allow any
reconstruction of the more than 3500 homes destroyed in
the Israeli invasion drew a letter signed by 53 U.S.
Congress members calling for an end to the "de facto
collective punishment of the Palestinian residents of
the Gaza Strip."
U.S. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wa) suggested taking forceful
action to end the Gaza blockade. "We ought to bring
roll-on, roll-off ships and roll them right to the
beach and bring the relief supplies in, in our version
of the Berlin airlift."
But there are internal tensions behind the crackdown as
well. The long occupation of the West Bank has begun to
fray the Israeli military. According to the head of the
Israeli military's Personnel Directorate, Maj. Gen. Avi
Zamir, increasing numbers of Israelis are refusing to
serve in the Occupied Territories. Three years of
military service is compulsory for men, 21 months for
women.
"Taking into consideration Israeli Arab youth, we're
facing a situation in which 70 percent of youths will
not enlist in the military," the general told UPI.
The "Courage to Refuse" movement has long supported
soldiers who won't serve in the Occupied Territories,
and now there is an organization-Shministim- that
advises young people on how to become a conscientious
objector and supports "refuseniks" as well. Police have
also detained several activists for New Profile, a
group dedicated to demilitarizing Israeli society.
A new law makes it a crime for Palestinians to observe
"Nakba," or "Catastrophe," Day commemorating the loss
of their land when Israel was created in 1948.
According to human rights groups, the polarization is a
serious threat to freedom of speech. A recent poll
found that 57 percent of Israelis think "national
security" is more important than human rights. The
country, says Tel Aviv University politics professor
and author Amal Jamal, is headed toward what he calls a
"totalitarian democracy."
These courageous organizations need help. Contact them
at; www.newprofile.org
(http://www.newprofile.org/)
www.nif.org (http://www.nif.org/)
www.acri.or (http://www.acri.or/);
www.palsolidarity.org (http://www.palsolidarity.org/)
www.couragetorefuse.org (http://www.couragetorefuse.org/)
www.womenofthewall.blogspot.com (http://www.womenofthewall.blogspot.com/)
www.shministim.org (http://www.shministim.org/)
________________________________
Step lightly is the only conclusion one can draw from
the Obama administration's refusal to sign the
international treaty banning landmines. U.S. State
Department spokesman Ian Kelly said that the
administration had decided not to join the 10-year old
treaty endorsed by 156 countries. Altogether, 39
countries have not signed on, inclusing Russia, China
and India.
Kelly's comment drew outrage from treaty supporters,
including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who called the
refusal to sign a "default of U.S. leadership," and
contradictory to the White House's "professed emphasis
on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian
affairs."
The U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines called Kelly's
statement "shocking," and anti-landmine groups were
sharply critical of the review process, which was
conducted behind closed doors without input from NGOs,
legislators, or NATO allies who have signed the treaty.
The 1999 treaty bans the stockpiling, production, or
transferring of anti-personal mines that caused over
5,000 casualties last year, one third of them children.
More than 70 countries are infested with them.
In the face of the uproar over the Obama
administration's refusal to join the ban, the State
Department quickly backed off and said the policy
review "is still on-going."
The White House has also resisted endorsing the treaty
to ban cluster weapons.
A total of 103 governments worldwide have signed the
agreement, but ratification is still working its way
through various legislatures and parliaments. Some 30
nations have ratified it, however, elevating the treaty
to the level of international law.
The U.S., Russia, and China are the major producers of
cluster weapons, and they are stockpiled in at least 77
countries. A number of countries, including Japan and
Australia, have destroyed their stocks.
Cluster weapons have a high failure rate-30 percent is
not unusual-and the unexploded bomblets lie in wait for
unwary civilians. Some 90 million cluster weapons were
dropped on tiny Laos during the war in Southeast Asia,
and the weapons continue to kill and maim between 100
and 200 people a year.
Many of the 50 million clusters dropped on Kuwait
during the first Gulf War failed to explode and, in the
two years following the war, killed 1,400 Kuwaiti
civilians. Cluster weapons continue to kill and wound
hundreds of civilians in Kosovo and Iraq.
The aftermath of war was underlined by a recent study
conducted by the Vietnamese military and the Vietnam
Veterans of America Foundation that looked at six
provinces near the old demilitarized zone in the
country's north. It found that it would take 300 years
and $10 billion to clear unexploded bombs and mines
from the region.
Since the war ended in 1975, unexploded ordinance has
killed 10,529 people and injured 12,231 in the six
provinces.
The Iraqi Ministry of the Environment has found that 42
sites across the country are heavily contaminated with
radiation and dioxin. The dioxin is from the widespread
bombing of oil pipelines and refineries during the U.S.
invasion, and the radioactivity is residue from
radioactive depleted uranium ammunition (DUA). Over 500
tons of DUA were used during the first and second Gulf
wars.
According to environment minister Narmin Othman, the
bombing of pipelines in the Basra area has heavily
contaminated the soil with dioxin. "The soil ended up
in people's lungs and has been on food that people have
eaten," he told the Guardian.
DUA is the latest innovation in armor piercing
ammunition, and it is widely used in 120mm tank shells,
and 30mm cannon shells fired by aircraft. While not
highly radioactive, it "has the potential to generate
significant medial consequences" if ingested, according
to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute.
DUA tends to vaporize on contact, contaminating food
and water supplies with radioactive dust.
While the U.S. claims DUA is not dangerous, birth
defects and early life cancers have risen sharply in
places like Falluja where the weapon was widely used.
"We are seeing a very significant increase in central
nervous system anomalies," Falluja general hospital's
director Dr. Ayman Qais told the Guardian. "Before 2003
[the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of
deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities
has increased dramatically."
Admissions for deformities have risen from two every
two weeks a year ago, to two a day now. Besides
deformities of the head, spinal cord, and lower limbs,
multiple tumors have been showing up as well. The
Guardian found that in a three-week period, there were
37 abnormal babies born in the Falluja general hospital
alone.