Category: Palestine

Thanks to the News Insider I saw this story about how Israel is ‘stunned’ by the abuse of Palestinians by its police. An example:

… three [police] confessed to ordering the 17-year-olds into their jeeps and driving them off to a nearby forest, where they were beaten with sticks, punched, had milk poured over them and were forced to kiss the policemen’s boots and chew sand and stones.

This is appalling. But to me, it is only a part of something much bigger and hence, more appalling. None of this ‘abuse’ (don’t say the word ‘torture’, it’s impolite) would take place if Israel wasn’t occupying Palestine. It wouldn’t take place if Israelis, Americans, and the rest of the world were not willing to accept the idea that entire peoples have to be subjugated, humiliated, starved, and killed so that other people can enjoy some notion of ‘security’ (when in fact even that ‘security’ is endangered by the occupation itself). It is similar to the way people were appalled by the photos at Abu Ghraib. Of course what happened there is appalling. But something the world seemed to have understood after WWII, that international aggression was the ultimate crime that made every other crime possible, seems to have been lost here. It is not just that American or Israeli soldiers shouldn’t have tortured Iraqis or Palestinians. It is that American or Israeli soldiers shouldn’t be there at all. It feels odd to even have to say this. This is always a problem in trying to relate things that should be obvious — sometimes obvious things are obvious to everyone. Other times they are not, so they have to be said, even at the risk of saying something that might be obvious.

Other West Asia news. Sharon has dumped some people from his cabinet so he can try to push through what I will continue to call the Gaza starvation plan.

Paul de Rooij, writing in Counterpunch, has a good analysis of Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israel. He calculates an average of 2.25 Palestinians killed each day — day in, day out, since 2000. Based on Red Crescent figures. IMEMC did their own body count for May — 137 Palestinians killed.

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.

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.