GAZA: DEATH’S LABORATORY 2016

It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.
—Dr. Erik Fosse, Norwegian cardiologist who
worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war.

What Dr. Fosse was describing was the effects of a U.S. “focused lethality” weapon that minimalizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. While the weapon has been used in Iraq, Gaza was the first test of the bomb in a densely populated environment.

The specific weapon—the GBU-39—is a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and was developed by the U.S. Air Force, Boeing Corporation, and University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2000. The weapon wraps the high explosives HMX or RDX with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel or iron, in a carbon fiber/epoxy container. When the bomb explodes, the container evaporates and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal up to about 60 feet.

Tungsten is inert, so it does not react chemically with the explosive. While a non-inert metal like aluminum would increase the blast, tungsten actually limits the explosion.

Within the weapon’s range, however, it is inordinately lethal. According to Norwegian doctor Mad Gilbert, the blast results in multiple amputations and “very severe fractures. The muscles are sort of split from the bones, hanging loose, and you also have quite severe burns.”

Those who survive the initial blast quickly succumb to septicemia and organ collapse. “Initially, everything seems in order … but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all their organs,” says Dr. Jam Brommundt, a German doctor working in Kham Younis, a city in southern Gaza. “It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles … that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically.” According to Brommundt, the particles cause multiple organ failures.

If, by some miracle, victims do survive, they are almost to certain develop rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), a particularly deadly cancer that deeply embeds itself into tissue and is almost impossible to treat. A 2005 U.S. Department of health study found that tungsten stimulated RMS cancers even in very low doses. Out of 92 rats tested, 92 developed the cancer.

While DIMEs were originally designed to avoid “collateral” damage generated by standard high explosive bombs, the weapon’s lethality and profound long-term toxicity hardly seems like an improvement. And in Gaza, the ordinance was widely used. Al-Shifta alone has seen 100 to 150 such patients.

Was Gaza a test of DIME in urban conditions?

Dr. Gilbert told the Oslo Gardermoen,“There is a strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons.”

The characteristics of the GBU-39 are likely to make it a go-to weapon in the future. The bomb is small and light—less than six feet long and only 285 pounds—that means an aircraft can carry four times as many weapons. It can also be dropped 60 miles from its target. Internal wings allow the bomb to navigate to its target. It can penetrate three feet of reinforced concrete. It can also be mounted on drones, like the Predator and the Reaper, and compared to other weapons systems, is a bargain.”

Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch’s senior military advisor, says “It remains to be seen how Israel has acquired the technology, whether they purchased weapons from the United States under some agreement, or if they in fact licensed or developed their own type of munitions.”

In fact, Congress approved the $77 million sale of 1.000 GBU-39s to Israel in September, 2008, and the weapons were delivered in December. Israel was the first foreign sales of the DIMES.

DIME weapons are not banned under the Geneva Conventions because they have never been officially tested. However, any weapon capable of inflicting such horrendous damage is normally barred from use, particularly in one of the most densely populated regions in the world.

For one thing, no one is sure about how long the tungsten remains in the environment or how it could affect people who return to homes attacked by a DIME. University of Arizona cancer researcher Dr. Mark Witten, who investigates links between tungsten and leukemia, says that in his opinion “there needs to be much more research on the health effects of tungsten before the military increases its usage.”

DIMEs were not the only controversial weapons used in Gaza. The Israeli Self-Defense Forces (IDF) also made generous use of white phosphorus, a chemical that burns with intense heat and inflicts terrible burns on victims. In its vapor form it also damages breathing passages
International law prohibits the weapon’s use near population areas and requires that “all reasonable precautions” be taken to avoid civilians.

Israel initially denied it was using the chemical. “The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus,” said Israel’s Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi on Jan. 13.

But eyewitness accounts in Gaza and Israel soon forced the IDF to admit that they were, indeed, using the substance. On Jan 20, the IDF confessed to using phosphorus artillery shells as smoke screens, as well as 200 U.S.-made M825A1 phosphorus mortar shells on “Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza.”

Three of those shells hit the UN Works and Relief Agency compound Jan. 15, igniting a fire that destroyed hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies. Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City was also hit by a phosphorus shell. The Israelis say there were Hamas fighters near the two targets, a charge that witnesses adamantly deny.

Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International said, “Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza’s densely-populated residential neighborhoods … and its toll on civilians, is a war crime.”

Israel is also accused of using depleted uranium ammunition (DUA), which in a UN sub-commission in 2002 found in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture, the Conventional Weapons Convention, and the Hague Conventions against the use of poison weapons.

DUA is not highly radioactive, but after exploding some of it turns into a gas that can easily be inhaled. The dense shrapnel that survives also tends to bury itself deeply, leaching low-level radioactivity into water tables.

Other human rights groups, including B’Tselem, Gisha, and Physicians for Human Rights, charge that the IDF intentionally targeted medical personal, killing over a dozen, including paramedics and ambulance drivers.

The International Federation for Human Rights called upon the UN Security Council to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes.

While the Israelis dismiss the war crimes charges, the fact that the Israeli cabinet held a special meeting on Jan 25 to discuss the issue suggests they are concerned they could be charged with “disproportionate” use of force. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to at “all times” distinguish between combatants and civilians and to avoid “disproportionate force” in seeking military gains.

Hamas’ use of unguided missiles fired at Israel would also be a war crime under the Conventions.

“The one-sidedness of casualty figures is one measure of disproportion,” says Richard Falk, the UN’s human rights envoy for the occupied territories. A total of 14 Israelis have been killed in the fighting, three of them civilians killed by rockets, 11 of them soldiers, four of the latter by “friendly fire.” Some 50 IDF soldiers were also wounded.

In contrast, 1330 Palestinians have died and 5450 were injured, the overwhelming number of them civilians.

“This kind of fighting constitutes a blatant violation of the laws of warfare, which we ask to be investigated by the Commission of War Crimes,” a coalition of Israeli human rights groups and Amnesty International said in a joint statement. “The responsibility of the state of Israel is beyond doubt.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann would coordinate the defense of any soldier or commander charged with a war crime. In any case, the U.S. would veto any effort by the UN Security Council to refer Israelis to the International Court at The Hague.

But, as the Financial Times points out, “all countries have an obligation to search out those accused of ‘grave’ breaches of the rules of war and to put them on trial or extradite them to a country that will.”

That was the basis under which Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in Britain in 1998.

“We’re in a seismic shift in international law,” Amnesty International legal advisor Christopher Hall told the Financial Times, who says that Israel’s foreign ministry is already examining the risk to Israelis who travel abroad.

“It’s like walking across the street against a red light,” he says. “The risk may be low, but you’re going to think twice before committing a crime or traveling if you have committed one.”

Source

AMNESTY’S SCANDALOUS OBLIQUITY

By Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

Palestinians incinerated to death by Israel’s White Phosphorous bombs

In an apparent effort to sound “balanced” and “unbiased,” the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International (AI) , has urged the international community to halt arms sales to the Israeli apartheid regime and the Palestinian Islamic liberation movement, Hamas.

A report issued by the group on Sunday, 22 February, pointed out that arms supplied to “the two sides” were used in attacks on civilians and civilian objects” which constituted war crimes.

Non the less, a careful examination of the report shows a clear propensity on the part of AI to create a false symmetry between Hamas, a small liberation movement resisting a decades-old Nazi-like foreign military occupation, and Israel, a manifestly criminal state armed to the teeth, which has been committing every conceivable crime under the sun for the purpose of maintaining its colonialist occupation and brutal domination over the Palestinian people.

To be sure, no one claims that Hamas is completely blameless. Targeting innocent civilians is unacceptable.

However, equating the resistance of a long-persecuted people languishing under an evil military occupation, even if wrongs are done, with an immensely superior state terror unjustifiably perpetrated by an occupying power is morally unconscionable, to say the very least.

Indeed, doing so would be analogous to equating European resistance to the attacking Nazi armies during the Second World War, with the Nazi aggression itself.

Well, with all due respect to AI and its efforts to safeguard and defend human rights, there is no legal or moral equation between a rape victim’s right to defend herself against her attacker and the criminal act initiated by the rapist.

I am using this analogy because the enduring Israeli oppression meted out to the Palestinian people is an enduring act of rape.

Yes, firing home-made and other comparatively primitive projectiles on Israeli civilians is a regrettable act. However, the firing of these projectiles, which killed a few Israelis in 10 years of hostilities (virtually one Israeli per year), can’t be compared with the nearly complete annihilation of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and wholesale murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

The excessive, disproportionate and often pornographic use of deadly violence against an essentially imprisoned and unprotected civilian population is more than just a mere miscalculation or faulty reasoning It is rather a deliberate war crime the perpetrators of which are vile war criminals who ought to be prosecuted and punished for their crimes.

More to the point, it is imperative that one gives context if one is truly interested in producing an honest and objective analysis of the recent outrage in Gaza.

Hence, one must be honest enough to remember that Israel had been forcing the 1.5 million Gazans to choose between dying quietly by succumbing to a genocidal hermetic siege that pushed most of the region’s inhabitants to the brink of a silent holocaust, or fighting back, using whatever primitive and extremely limited means at their disposal.

I strongly believe it is absurd and ludicrous, if not outright malicious, to compare Hamas with Israel as far as the use of violence is concerned.

Hamas is a small movement of persecuted Palestinians who have been on the receiving end of Israeli persecution and repression. Hamas poses no real or strategic threat to Israel, a military superpower which also, to a large extent, controls American politics and policies.

In its recent genocidal onslaught on Gaza, Israel used the deadliest weapons of death, including F-16 warplanes, apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, heavy artillery, depleted uranium, chemical agents that eat through the human flesh and eventually cause death, white Phosphorus, dart shells and a variety of other lethal weapons.

On the other hand, Hamas used notoriously primitive weapons, mainly to deter Israel from carrying out a genocide on a wider scale.

During that blitz, Israel knowingly and deliberately targeted civilian neighborhoods, apartment buildings, private homes, mosques, college dorms, university buildings, UN-run schools, grocery stores and businesses. It was a no-holds-barred rampage of murder and terror against an imprisoned and thoroughly starved civilian population.

As a result, as many as 7000 Palestinians were murdered, or maimed and injured, many with life-long deformities. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of other Gazans suffered long-lasting psychological traumas.

On the Israeli side, we are talking about a dozen Israeli fatalities , some of whom killed or injured by “friendly fire.”

So, we are dealing with an extremely lopsided situation where the death ratio is nearly 1 -100. Needless to say, one doesn’t have to be a great military expert to realize that this is not really a war, it is rather a huge massacre.

This is why, AI is called upon to call the spade a spade and refrain from hiding behind technical jargons that not only fail to communicate the facts about what really happened in Gaza but also give a false impression of symmetry in guilt between Israel and Hamas.

More to the point, it is important to remember that Israel didn’t impose the draconian blockade of Gaza as a retaliation for the largely innocuous firing of projectiles onto Israel. The criminal blockade was imposed, first and foremost, as a cruel punishment of Palestinians for electing a political party that Israel didn’t like.

Hence, the imposition of the siege, which is continuing unabated, is per se a war crime or a crime against humanity.

The world betrayed them, the Arab world stood silent, with some Arab regimes even colluding with Israel to perfect the siege in the hope that Gazans would turn against Hamas and bring it down.

And the hypocritical West had the audacity to blame the victims while babbling, as usual, about Israel’s right to defend itself.

This happened while an entire people was being imprisoned, starved, tormented and quietly exterminated, mainly for political reasons pertaining to Israeli territorial aggrandizement.

In short, it was the Nazi-like Israeli savaging of the Palestinians that made Palestinian resistance inevitable. The Palestinians, long tormented by this cruel occupation, have every legal and moral right to resist, using whatever means available to them.

Indeed, instead of blaming the victims for resisting their oppressors, the world, including AI , ought to tell Israel that it can’t just incarcerate 1.5 million civilians within the confines of an open-air prison, surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, tanks, landmines, and other state-of-the-art machines of death, and then expect the victims to display love and understanding toward their tormentors and oppressors.

Israel did transform the Gaza Strip into a real concentration camp, by denying the prisoner population access to fuel, electricity, food, medicine, medical care, and basic consumer products.

Meanwhile, the Israeli death machine never stopped murdering innocent Palestinians, nearly on a daily basis.

It is essential that AI and other human rights groups take these facts into account when dealing with the situation in Gaza.

Failing to do so, by cowering before Israeli pressure, would further corrode AI image as the world’s premier human rights organization.

PALESTINIANS RECONSIDER TWO-STATE STRATEGY

By Khalid Amayreh

RAMALLAH — While the west-backed Palestinian Authority is still clinging to the two-state solution as the only feasible strategy for ending the 40-year Israeli occupation, a growing number of Palestinian intellectuals and lay people are coming to the conclusion that the creation of a viable Palestinian state is no longer possible in light of the ubiquitous proliferation of Jewish settlements. “There is no doubt that the two-state solution is dead. In fact it has been dead for quite a long time,” Laila el-Haddad, a Gaza-based writer, told IslamOnline.net. “The metastasizing of Jewish settlements, along with the overriding deliberate policies of ‘politicide’ have rendered the two-state solution impossible,” she believes. With their horizons constantly narrowed and lingering peace talks with Israel reaching a virtual dead-end, mainly over Israel’s refusal to give up the spoils of the 1967 war, Palestinians are increasingly advocating the one-state solution. “The only feasible, sustainable, and just solution is One state, with equal rights for all,” says el-Haddad. According to public opinion surveys, faith in the two-state solution has been steadily dwindling among Palestinians as they watch unmitigated Jewish settlement expansion swallows up more and more of their land. Since 1967, Israel has built more than 150 Jewish-only settlements on the occupied West Bank, inhabited by as many as half a million settlers. Most of the settlers are classified as “ideological settlers,” who believe that the West Bank is the “Biblical Land of Israel” which must never be given up even in return for a lasting peace with the Palestinians. Hence, many observers have come to believe that no Israeli government will be able, even if willing, to dismantle these large settlements which have become well-established demographic realities in the occupied territories. At the same time, there is a near unanimity among Palestinians and Arabs that without the elimination of at least the bulk of settlements and removal of most settlers, the goal of Palestinian statehood will be utterly unachievable. During the last few months, Ahmed Qurei’, chief negotiator and Fatah leader, warned that the PA would decide to abandon the peace process with Israel if “it becomes clear that the creation of a viable Palestinian state is no longer possible.” “We certainly will resort to the one-state solution. We will not allow Israel to impose apartheid on us for ever.” Tough Choices Hazem al-Qawasmi, an economist and prominent proponent of the one-state solution, argues that there is no viable alternative to it. “We must not be made to pay the price for Jewish settlement expansion. Israel has effectively killed the two-state solution for the purpose of liquidating the Palestinian cause,” he told IOL. “Hence, the Palestinians ought to struggle for a unitary and democratic state which would preserve our national existence and continued survival,” he believes. “The alternative would be national demise, especially in the long run.” Palestinians in general are fully aware that the one-state strategy is fraught with problems and having no guaranteed consequences. The firm Israeli rejection of the idea makes many Palestinians refrain from wholly embracing the quest for the one-state solution. They also think that decades of violence and bloodshed would make the implementation of this vision very unlikely. “The world is under no more of a moral or legal obligation to maintain Zionism in Israel than it was to maintain apartheid in South Africa,” Qawasmi insists. “The Palestinian people’s right to freedom and human rights override whatever rights Israel thinks it has to remain Jewish.” Palestinians opposed to the idea argue that Palestinian weakness vis-à-vis Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinian people and their leadership to handle the one-state idea successfully. Ziad abu Ziad, a former Palestinian negotiator, believes that most Israelis are not ready for peace and that the Israeli political leadership is unable to effect a real transformation in the public mood. “We can’t escape the fact that the expanding settlements leave no room for a prospective Palestinian state,” he told IOL. “I think that we should work on three levels. First, to guarantee the steadfastness of our people. Second, to try on the short term to mobilize international pressure on Israel to force it to stop its settlement activities as a step toward removing Jewish colonies from the occupied territories,” maintains abu Ziad. “Third, in the long term, we should prepare ourselves for a long , durable struggle to recover our rights.”

THIS IS WHAT WAS BANNED AT CARLETON UNIVERSITY IN CANADA

Related Post

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is an annual international series of events held in cities and campuses across the globe. The aim of IAW is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system
and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement.

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is taking place in more than 40 cities across the globe (the number of cities is growing daily). This year, IAW happens in the wake of Israel’s barbaric assault on the people of
Gaza. Lectures, films, and actions will make the point that these latest massacres further confirm the true nature of Israeli Apartheid. IAW 2009 will continue to build and strengthen the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement at a global level.

ZIONIST DOG ATTACKS 100 YEAR OLD PALESTINIAN

One would think it is bad enough that the Israeli army constantly targets and kills innocent children…..but why stop at that? 100 year old people at rest in their own homes and beds are also equal and defenseless targets.

They can always ‘blame it on the dog’ just as we did when our homework wasn’t finished…..

100 year-old man attacked by Israeli army dog

In the early morning of February 20th at 2am, Israeli Forces invaded the town of Tamoun, located in the Tubas region of the northern occupied West Bank. Around 50 soldiers in seven jeeps surrounded two houses in the town, firing sound bombs and live ammunition before breaking into the residences.

Salem Fadel Bani Odeh (100)

During the course of the invasion, an army attack dog mauled the face of Salem Fadel Bani Odeh, aged 100 while he lay helpless in his bed. Two men, Na’el Odeh Bani Odeh, aged 23, Muhamad Mustafa Bani Odeh, aged 25, were also arrested by Israeli Occupation Forces. The windows of a nearby parked car were all shot out by army gunfire.

Salem Fadel Bani Odeh awoke to the explosions of sound bombs and live bullets. The door to his home was smashed down by soldiers, who entered the house and ordered everyone outside. But Salem, who is partially paralyzed and bedridden, could not move. As the soldiers searched the house, an army dog leaped up onto his bed and began biting his face and chest. Though nearly ten soldiers were inside the same room, they did nothing to stop the attack, and the dog continued to knaw on Salem’s face. Finally, after more than half an hour, the soldiers stopped the dog and called for an ambulance. Salem was taken to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, where he remains in moderate condition with parts of one ear bitten off and bites on his face, chest and right shoulder.

According to Ha’aretz, the Israeli army has admitted that the incident occurred.

Source

HAMAS’ POPULARITY SOARING FOLLOWING ISRAEL’S GAZA BLITZ

By Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah

The latest public opinion survey in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has shown a dramatic rise in Hamas’ popularity among Palestinians, with a significant decline in Fatah’s public standing.

Moreover, the poll showed that a majority of Palestinians believed that the advent of the Obama administration in the U.S. wouldn’t make a big difference with regard to American efforts to resolve the Palestinian issue.

According to the poll, Turkey, Venezuela and Iran as well as Hezbullah are the most popular regional forces among Palestinians.

The results of the latest poll, conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) from 29-31 January, showed that nearly 48 % of respondents believed that Hamas came out of the Israeli blitz against Gaza victorious. Nearly 10 per cent opined that Israel won the war, while over a third of respondents, 37.4% said that neither side achieved victory.

The poll, surveying a random sample of 1,198 respondents, found a dramatic rise in the popularity of Hamas, especially in the West Bank.

In contrast, the popularity of the Fatah movement suffered a significant decline, especially in the West Bank.

When asked if general Palestinian elections were held today, 28.6% of respondents said they would vote for Hamas. Fatah’s standing declined from 34% last April to 27.9 in this poll.

According to the latest poll, trust in Hamas rose from 16.6% last November to 27.7 % in this poll. In contrast, the percentage of those who said they trusted Fatah fell down from 31.3% to 26%.

According to a press release by the JMCC, the rise in Hamas’ popularity occurred mainly in the West Bank, which is controlled by the Western Backed Palestinian Authority.

Similarly, the percentage of those who said they trusted Ismael Haniya, the Prime Minister of the Gaza-based Palestinian government, increased from 12.8% last October to 21.1 in this poll. Trust in PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas went down from 15.5% last October to 13.4 in this poll.

The poll showed that the percentage of those opining that the performance of the American-backed government of Salam Fayad is better than that of the Gaza-based government declined significantly from 36% last April to 26.9% in this poll.

However, those who believed that the performance of the Fayad government is worse than that of the Haniya’s government rose substantially from 29.1 to 40% per cent.

The latest poll also found that support for military resistance against the Israeli occupation rose from 49.5% last April to 53.5% in this poll.

Moreover, the poll showed a rise in the percentage of Palestinians opposed to peace talks with Israel.

Turkey, Venezuela and several other political and other entities have also become more popular among Palestinians, according to the latest poll.

Turkey received the highest point of 89.6 %, followed by Venezuela (80.6 %) .

The International Committee of the Red Cross received a satisfaction mark of (79. followed by UNRWA (78.6 %).

Qatar received a satisfaction mark of 68.3%, Hezbullah 66.9 %, the Muslim Brotherhood movement 57.6 % and Iran 55.9%.

The US received the satisfaction of only 2.8 of respondents, Britain, 10.4%, Germany 14.4 % France was the western country that received the satisfaction of the highest percentage of respondents, at 21.5 per cent.

Egypt and Jordan received 35.1% and 41.7 % respectively.

Finally, when asked which entity you would prefer to assume the task of reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, respondents gave the following answers: A majority of 30.6% said they prefer an international mechanism under UN supervision to assume this task. The second choice was for a Palestinian national unity government to oversee the reconstruction. More than 23% said they preferred the government of Hamas to do the job, while a minority of 13.7 % said they prefer the Palestinian Authority to assume the task.

The decline in Fatah’s popularity can be attributed to the widespread public dissatisfaction with the Ramallah regime’s lukewarm stance during the war.

Many Palestinians had the impression that at least some of the PA and PLO leaders adopted a “conspiratorial stance” during the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Some PA officials had reportedly made remarks voicing the hope that Israeli would destroy the Hamas government in Gaza.

Some PLO leaders, such as Yasser Abed Rabbo, reportedly criticized Israel for ending the war too soon without “finishing off Hamas.”

Another important reason for Fatah’s dwindling popularity seems to have to do with the widespread suppression by PA security forces of public descent during the war.

PA security agencies prevented and in many instances violently suppressed pro-Hamas protests during the war.

Dozens of Palestinians, mainly Hamas sympathizers, have also been arrested by the PA security apparatus in the West Bank.

The latest opinion poll is not going to be a good news for PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas has been calling for early presidential and legislative elections in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip in the hope of ending Hamas’ government in the Gaza Strip.

ISRAELI FASCIST’S HISTORY EXPOSED

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

BTW….. the image to the left was the reason Benjamin Heine was banned from Daily Kos, and me as well for defending him…..

Now HaAretz itself exposes this evil man as a fascist of long standing….
Truth slowly trickles out.

Elections 2009 / Haaretz exclusive: Avigdor Lieberman was member of outlawed radical Kach movement

_{By Lily Galili}

Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman was once a member of the
outlawed far-right party Kach, the movement’s former secretary general revealed on Tuesday.

Yossi Dayan said he issued Lieberman, a prime ministerial candidate whose current electoral campaign against Israeli Arabs has provoked outrage, with a party membership card when he was still a new immigrant to Israel. Kach was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for inciting to racism.

“I don’t recall to what extent he was active in the movement, but if he denies [this], I am ready to testify in any forum that Lieberman was indeed a member for a short amount of time,” said Dayan.

Ultra-nationalist activist Avigdor Eskin, meanwhile, remembers meeting Lieberman at Kahane’s office on Ussishkin Street in Jerusalem. “I remember this very well, because I arrived there one day after I immigrated to Israel in 1979,” he said.

Eskin came to public attention for having boasted of holding a pulsa dinura ceremony prior to 1995 assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The ceremony, believed to be of kabbalistic origin, is aimed at conferring a death curse on the subject.

“Kahane saw him as a good guy. I also thought back then that he was not a Kach man ideologically, unless the only measure of this is the question of whether you like Arabs. According to what I remember, he handed out the movements’ publications among its small student group in the Hebrew University,” Eskin said.

He added that he met Lieberman in Kahane’s office a number of times, but to the best of his knowledge the Yisrael Beiteinu chairman was only involved in Kach for a number of months.

Yisrael Beiteinu relayed in response to the Haaretz report that, “We are not dealing with this orchestrated provocation. The success of Yisrael Beiteinu has created among its opponents a great quantity of lies and fabrications, which the political and media establishment knew beforehand.”

The revelation came one day after Israel’s most recognizable television anchor, Haim Yavin, branded Lieberman as “Kahane’s successor,” a reference to the murdered extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who headed Kach movement.

Former Kach members, for their part, actually reject the Kahane comparison. “He is a poor imitation of Kahane,” one said. Dayan, who was close to Kahane for over a decade, is disgusted by it.

“Not everyone who speaks against Arabs is a Kahane,” he said. “[Lieberman] can take a few elements, but to be Kahane is a whole doctrine. Nevertheless, I’m happy that he’s saying what he’s saying, because without a radical solution to the problem of Arabs in Israel it can’t be good here.”

ISRAELI WAR CRIMES BEING ‘LOOKED INTO’

Israel is great at…..

Image ‘Copyleft’ by Carlos Latuff

THE NOT SO NORMAL LIFE IN GAZA TODAY

Image by David Baldinger


AMIRA HASS / Life in the Gaza Strip is not ‘back to normal’
GAZA - “Only aerial photographs of the Gaza Strip will make it possible to show and to comprehend the extent of the destruction,” a number of Western civilians said this week. They added: “But there isn’t a chance that Israel will allow anyone to come with a light plane and do aerial photography.”
The talk of aerial photography reveals the frustration felt by everyone who has managed to come here. The frustration derives from the conclusion that the real dimensions of the Israeli attack on Gaza are not being fully comprehended in the West and in Israel. They go beyond the physical destruction, beyond the numbers of the dead and the wounded, beyond the deadly encounter between a bomb dropped from an F-16 and the hollow concrete and gravel house in the Yibneh refugee camp in Rafah. Three siblings aged 4 to 12 were killed there. Parents and two sisters were injured. The mother - who was nursing her infant daughter and heard and saw the bomb rushing towards them - is in a state of shock. She stares out at the world from her hospital bed in Egypt, and does not speak. The physical injuries can be treated.

Volunteer doctors, architects who specialize in the rehabilitation of disaster zones, jurists whose aspirations reach into international courts for the investigation of war crimes, Red Cross teams, international human rights organization investigators with battle experience behind them, directors of government and independent development agencies, which transfer funds from development budgets to budgets for rehabilitation and rescue: All of them - not only journalists - are flooding the Strip, taking notes, taking pictures, exchanging information, documenting and carefully cataloguing what are emerging as patterns, phenomena that repeat themselves: shelling and bombing of buildings and enterprises that have no connection to the Hamas infrastructure - politically or militarily, the prevention of the evacuation of wounded, unfamiliar kinds of injuries, vandalism in homes that became Israel Defense Forces positions, destruction of agricultural areas and, above all, families - almost in their entirety - that were killed in their homes or as they tried to flee from the approaching tanks. This is the hardest work of documentation.

People have their own ways of trying to characterize their personal disaster: People whose homes or small businesses have been destroyed in the shelling and bombardments, though no one in their family was killed, say: “My damage is nothing,” as though embarrassed. This could be heard from a pharmacist and pharmaceuticals importer, whose warehouse of medications, the only on in the southern Gaza Strip, was bombarded. And nearly the same words were spoken by three brothers - a doctor, an engineer and a lecturer on biochemistry at Al Azhar University, whose family home in the eastern part of Jabalya was shelled with many different kinds of ammunition by the IDF. The house is included in the statistic of 17,000 homes that were partially destroyed, but it appears that it will be easier to raze it than to repair it.


“Tell Moshe and Kadosh from Moshav Mivtahim that the salaries they paid me for many years have been lost under the tanks of the Israel Defense Forces,” said a farmer from the area of Fukhari, east of Khan Yunis - and insisted on saying this in Hebrew. His house is a number in the statistic of about 4,000 homes that the IDF destroyed completely. In this agricultural area - “which in fact is called Kfar Shalom (Peace Village),” said some of its inhabitants, 92 houses were destroyed entirely and raked away along with their fields and groves and the livestock in them. We came there looking for an IDF position from which soldiers fired on Ibrahim Shurrab and his two sons: Kassab and Muhammad. The story of their killing has already been told in these pages. On January 16, during the daily cessation of fire, they were returning from their field to their home in Khan Yunis. One military position in a tank, at the end of the street, allowed them to keep driving. But from the second position they were shot at, from a distance of about 30 to 50 meters, as the father related. The position was in a house the inhabitants of which had fled several days earlier, together with all the people of the neighborhood. From the shooting, Kassab died on the spot. Muhammad, who was wounded in his leg, bled to death. The IDF allowed an ambulance to reach the site only about 23 hours later.

On Monday, on one of the walls of the house that became the IDF position from which soldiers shot the two brothers who died at their father’s side, we found two inscriptions in Hebrew: “The Jewish people lives” and “Kahane was right,” referring to right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Everyone we meet has a tremendous need to tell his story. In minute detail. Again and again. Adnan told how he was saved from death seven times; Kauthar related how she fled with her children as the bullets and shells shrieked overhead and Taleb, in a tired voice, told how after 12 days in which he had lost all contact, the body of his sister and the body of her son, riddled with bullets, were found in their home in Beit Lahiya. This is the sort of thing that is impossible to quantify: The unending horror, for three weeks, the worry, the impotence, the thoughts that never leave about the relative who has bled to death, a meter or a kilometer away. In Gaza today, as students are returning to school and cars are again driving along the roads, the commonplace “life is slowly going back to normal” is more hollow and false than ever.

However, a count of the dead and the wounded is possible. And it has been and is being done. There is a difference of 85 dead between the figures that have been published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health and those that have been arrived at by the two leading human rights centers in the Gaza Strip - Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. This gap, however, is not a result of an intentional inflation of the number of dead and wounded, but rather the result of a number of errors that occurred because of the heavy load: For example, in the aerial bombardment on Saturday, December 27, of the civilian police buildings in Gaza City, seven students of the nearby UNRWA vocational school were killed. All of them - inhabitants of Rafah. It is possible that they were listed twice - once as people from Rafah who were killed and once as people killed in Gaza City. There were people who were taken to Shifa Hospital who when they died were transferred to hospitals in the places where they had lived. It has happened that by mistake a number of names were listed twice. Sometimes there is an error in the name, which is later corrected. Sometimes neither a corpse nor remains have been located. In this way, the body of H., an Iz al-Din al-Qassam member, was lost. Only his shoes, which were found, confirmed that he had been killed. Four members of the Haddad family, parents and two children, got into a car and fled the army that was approaching the Tel al Hawwa neighborhood. A shell incinerated the car. The neighbors were able to identify the four scorched corpses only by the license number of the car, and they reported this to an investigator from the Palestinian Center. Nor is anyone able to intentionally lessen the number of Palestinian fighters who were killed. Every family is proud to say that its son fought and was killed in battle, so that sometimes the error could be the other way around: that someone is called a fighter because a certain organization adopted him, but in fact he was killed in his home and did not even know how to fire a rifle. Investigators who are very familiar with the field have their own ways of knowing who was an armed fighter and who was not. When on January 14 there was a report of four corpses in Shokka, east of Rafah, the field worker from the Palestinian Center knew the name of one of the dead and knew that he was from Iz al-Din al-Qassam. He concluded that two of the others, who were his age, were also in the military organization. However, the fourth man was 42 years old when he was killed, which is not so congruent with the profile of a “fighter,” and inquiries to his family confirmed that indeed he had no connection to the armed group.

In the two human rights organizations the confirmation of the names of those killed, their identity, their age and their sex is carried out in a number of ways: In real time, each of the organizations had field workers present at the hospitals. They saw the bodies and spoke with family members. Other investigators did everything in their power - in conditions of mortal danger and running between the bombardments - to get to the place where people were killed and wounded. If not there - then to the home of the family or the wake house. If this was not possible during the course of events - it is being done now. Each investigator has a detailed questionnaire that he goes over with all the affected families and in which all the details are recorded. The work of getting everything down in writing will take at least a month and a half or two months. Then in all likelihood the slight gaps in the figures of the two human rights centers will be corrected.

The data, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, as of January 22, are as follows: 1,285 dead, of whom 1,062 were non-combatants (895 civilians and 167 civilian police). Of these, 281 were children (21.8 percent) and 111 were women. There are 4,336 wounded, among them 1,133 children. The 6-year-old girl who we saw in the Zeytun neighborhood, who holds her hands up in the air in fear every time the photographer brings his camera near her, is not included in the list of the casualties.