Palestine

The State Department Doesn’t Know Where Castano Is

Gonzalo Gallegos, spokesman for the US State Dept. for the Western Hemisphere, said about Castano: “We have not been in contact with that individual. We don’t know where he is, and we don’t know where the information came from.”

The information he’s referring to is the information that Castano was smuggled — by Americans — out of Colombia and into Israel, via Panama. An official denial from the State Department and an official denial from the Israeli Ambassador in Colombia are enough to make a person really suspect that Castano is in Israel.

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Carlos Castano not in Israel?

Israel’s ambassador to Colombia, Yair Recanati, said that Castano that the embassy hadn’t heard a word from him about him going to Israel, according to an interview with RCN Television (Colombia’s big television network). This doesn’t exactly mean that he’s not in Israel, although the ‘diplomatic sources’ who told AFP that he was in Israel (from which the Ha’aretz and El Tiempo stories drew) were never named. It seems that those looking for a definitive location for this paramilitary warlord are destined for disappointment… for now…

Carlos Castano in Israel

Colombia’s El Tiempo and Israel’s Haaretz are reporting that Carlos Castano, the head of Colombia’s paramilitaries, the drug trafficker, the mass murderer, has been smuggled into Israel after ‘disappearing’ about a month ago.

This does wonders for Israel’s ‘anti-terror’ posture, since Castano is a mega-terrorist. But then, when you kill thousands (that’s not an exaggeration) of helpless people over a period of many years, that’s called ‘counter-terror’ isn’t it? Maybe Castano, Sharon, Bush, and Uribe can all get together for a televised terrorist group hug.

Actually that Castano ended up in Israel shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. His autobiography, ‘Mi Confesion’, has nothing but praise for Israel and the country is where he says he learned what he knows about how to fight ‘terrorism’: he apparently took courses there on ‘anti-terror techniques’.

It’s the new world water, and every drop counts

A reader sent me this article in the New Scientist. It is about a neglected aspect of the US/Israel war on the Palestinian population: the fact that it is a water war. I don’t have the statistics with me (Vandana Shiva cites a few of them in her book, Water Wars), but Israeli per capita water use is vast compared to Palestinians. Israeli agriculturalists are allowed to dig wells several times deeper than Palestinians. Gaza is always short of drinking water and every time it is besieged the Israelis essentially use the denial of water as a weapon. And, most tellingly, the Apartheid Wall‘s path follows the West Bank aquifer very closely.

The New Scientist article reports on a ‘plan’ for desalination plants to supply the Palestinian territories with water, while the Israelis freely use the Palestinian aquifer for their own water needs, as they are doing now.

This may come as a surprise to readers, but the US and Israeli officials agree that the plan is a good one, while experts, scientists, and Palestinians all agree that it is a bad one — all strictly from a technical point of view, of course. The immorality of a campaign of ethnic cleansing as part of a wholesale water theft (or is the water theft part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing?) doesn’t really come up in the article.

(thanks to the reader who sent me the article. points to any reader who can identify the song and the artist from which the title of this blog entry was taken and email it to me).

A beacon of democracy in the middle east

Israel and the United States, currently competing to see who can bring more democracy to the Middle East, have achieved notable triumphs in the area of press freedom. Israel, for example, shoots and kills journalists (like the UK’s James Miller and over a dozen Arab journalists who die even more invisibly than people like Miller) and international observers (like the UN’s Ian Hook) and activists (like the US’s Rachel Corrie). Israel bombs radio stations — it did so as part of its latest attack on Rafah, for example. You can get a good idea for what Israel thinks of freedom of the press for Palestinians from this quote by an Israeli official, that comes via al-Jazeera: “We are under no obligation to help Palestinian journalists enter Israel. We don’t differentiate between ordinary Palestinians and Palestinians who claim to be journalists.”

Not to be outdone, the United States has a proclivity for bombing al-Jazeera journalists — it bombed the Kabul station while bombing Afghanistan, it conducted a missile attack on Tariq Ayoub, and it shelled the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing numerous journalists.

Well, Israel is keeping up! Readers may remember the case of Mordechai Vanunu, the technician who leaked Israel’s nuclear weapons program and spent 18 years in prison for his act. His arrest itself was abhorrent, his imprisonment despicable, and conditions were placed on him after his release that he couldn’t leave Israel, couldn’t talk to journalists, etc. After Vanunu’s release, he was forced to hide in a church after Israeli newspapers leaked his address. A journalist from the Sunday Times, Peter Hounam of the UK, spent some time with Vanunu at the church. As a result, Hounam was arrested and is now being kept incommunicado by the Israelis.

Homelessness in Rafah

I am reproducing below a very short press release from the United Nations refugee agency. It is self-explanatory.

Latest Israeli Operation Leaves 575 Palestinians Homeless

Gaza – The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has completed its initial assessment of the numbers of homes demolished or damaged beyond repair during the latest Israeli military operation in Rafah.

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Evacuate Gaza, but kill 1000?

Another one that’s tough to verify, this one comes via the News Insider. Apparently Israel’s got a list of 1000 people to kill in Gaza before ‘withdrawal’.

For those who don’t understand ‘withdrawal’, it means Israel seals Gaza off completely, maybe evacuates settlers or maybe doesn’t, continues to slaughter Palestinians in Gaza at will, continues to control all traffic in and out of the area, and therefore that Palestinians continue to starve. It also means that because Israel has ‘withdrawn’, the argument so frequently used by people who don’t find starving children offensive so long as those children are not their own, that Palestinians are starving their own children, can be used. The media will believe it. You can expect headlines that say: ‘Israeli withdrawal prompts starvation in Gaza’, or something. Then maybe Israel can return in a few years.

But I get ahead of myself. So the article (really just a blurb), has this quote:

“An Israeli field officer based in the Gaza Strip was quoted as saying by the British paper the army was changing its tactics. After initially pursuing the leaders of various groups, it was now turning to second and third-ranking figures in the command structure.”

As if Israel wasn’t indiscriminate enough in its killing.

Israel seems to have the same kind of problem with funerals as the US has with weddings. They fired on a funeral procession (for people Israel had killed) in Rafah, shooting one person in the eye.

Still other, related news: Rumsfeld has gone to the root of the problem with the US military — and banned digital cameras.

Thanks to the News Insider for these stories.

Israel continues to kill, with media help

Its impunity ratified, Israel is continuing the slaughter in Gaza, and in particular in Rafah. MSNBC calls this ‘forging ahead’ to look for ‘tunnels’. The bizarre and contorted story calls three of the people Israel killed ‘militants’, citing ‘witnesses’, then tacks on almost as an aside the fact that ‘Medics said the mangled remains of two other men were found in what looked like another missile attack.’ Then it goes on to cite the Army’s justificaiton. Then another murder: ‘Witnesses said soldiers shot dead a 39-year-old man who went onto his roof and shouted a request for water.’ Followed by equal weight for the army: ‘The army said troops “spotted a terrorist and shot him.”‘ That’s 40 people in the past 3 days of slaughter — called ‘fighting’ by MSNBC.

Gaza

I was wrong — this needs to be blogged, despite the fact that it is all over mainstream outlets. It looks like another line has been crossed, with Israel launching a missile attack into a crowd of people in Gaza, essentially a flat out massacre of civilians, without even any kind of pretext (most Israeli massacres of civilians come with a pretext). The absence of a pretext in this attack is a sign of impunity, I suppose related to the fact that the only forces that can restrain the Israeli military are the US (firmly dedicated to committing massacres with impunity and unlikely to play any restraining role) and the Israeli public (which is, actually, hopefully, less interested in these kinds of massacres).

It’s worth mentioning that apologists for Israeli atrocities always make a point of trying to differentiate Israel’s massacres of civilians from the Palestinian suicide bombers. They are not making the quantitative argument that Israel kills more civilians, which is the case, or that Israel starves Palestinians and the reverse is not true, also the case, and so on. Instead, they are saying that the Palestinian bombs are meant to kill civilians, deliberately, by design, whereas Israel kills Palestinians by accident. It was outrageous when they were using it before, but I suppose they’ll probably stop using it now.

Not that you need arguments when you have helicopter gunships and missiles.

Much more gravely, this is a glimpse of what Sharon’s ethnic cleansing plan for the Palestinians is: it has always been to use artillery against densely populated civilian areas and commit atrocities that dwarf the Jenin massacre of 2002. It is a ‘feeler’: if there isn’t a major reaction from the Israeli public or the US, there will be more such massacres, and soon.

Below is the note from the ISM.

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
For Immediate Release

ARMY FIRED MISSILES AT A CIVILIAN DEMONSTRATION IN RAFAH
13 people, mostly youths are reported killed, more than 60 injured

[Rafah, Gaza Strip] Israeli army helicopter gunships and tanks opened fire on a nonviolent civilian demonstration in Rafah early this afternoon. 13 Palestinian are repored killed, including 2 children, and 60 injured.

Approximately 3.000 Palestinian civilians from Rafah, mostly youths, were peacefully demonstrating to protest the recent military operation in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Eyewitnesses reported that 4 missiles were fired from helicopter gunships and tanks fired shells at the crowd of unarmed civilians.

Hospitals are overflowed and cannot handle the situation, chief hospital spokesperson said.

This recent attack raised the previous death toll to 37 people in one of the bloodiest military operation since the beginning of the second Intifada.

For more information, please contact:

Mohammed Ali (English and Arabic): 972-59 841672
Adwan (English and Arabic): 972-59 304628
Dr. Ali Musa (Director of Rafah’s Hospital): +972-8-2132-616
Sa’id Zoroub (Mayor of Rafah): +972-59-408-391 or +972-8-21-37-951 (Office)
Ali Barhoum (Rafah Municipality): +972-59-815-100 or +972-8-21-37- 951
(Office)
Dr. Youssef Musa (Director UNRWA Clinic in Gaza): +972-59-410-490

ISM Media Office: +972-2.277.4602

… and back to Gaza

After our brief excursion into optimism, let us return to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where Israel is launching missiles, artillery, and aggression into neighbourhoods. Using the IMEMC.org newswire, a valuable resource.

There was all the home destruction in Rafah.

The shelling of residental areas.

The shelling of a mosque.

Assassinations of Islamic Jihad and people anywhere near people suspected of belonging to said group.

Standard patterns of wreckage, destruction, and murder that are the daily diet of Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and especially in Rafah, courtesy of the Israeli military and the US government. These are being reported in the mainstream media as ‘retaliations’.