In Palestine, Olive Trees are so Much More

In Palestine, Olive Trees are so Much More

Joharah Baker

October 8, 2012 When my grandfather was alive, he had two things he cherished most in this world: his family and his olive trees. He tended to those trees as if they were babies, tenderly pruning them, caring for the saplings like newborn infants and offering a respect and reverence to the aged trees for their endless giving, for the years of rich, oily wealth they bestowed upon him and his loved ones. When he passed, his beloved olive trees remained strong and proud, just like my grandfather had been in life. His sons were sure to protect his legacy, caring for the trees which continued to offer their bounty for all the years since. To Palestinians, olive trees are a lifeline, a symbol of their love for the land and a source of pride; they are their Achilles heel too, and Israel’s settlers know it. The olive harvest is upon us. Some Palestinians with olive groves close to Israeli settlements have already begun picking the fruit in the hopes that they may, at least this year, escape the settlers. But of course, this is too much to hope for. The havoc has already begun; settlers from Nahla’el attacked residents of Beit Illu, a village northwest of Ramallah, attacking the olive pickers and burning down dozens of trees. Palestinian sources say around 300 olive trees have been cut down in Beit Illu alone in the past month. This is by far not the only incident. Around the year, settlers cut down, steal and burn Palestinian olive trees in the West Bank. According to the International Solidarity Movement, over half a million olive and fruit trees have been destroyed by Israeli settlers and the army since 2000. Thousands of olive trees are cut down, burned or stolen each year by Jewish settlers who steal the fruit and the trees or burn them down with the long-term goal of usurping the land. What is so disturbing is that the Israeli army almost always arrives on the scene but it does not deter the settlers. Palestinians, who both depend on olive trees for their livelihood and are bound to them spiritually, are crushed when they are destroyed. Not only are the olive trees cut down, burned, bulldozed and sometimes sold or stolen to be replanted in illegal Israeli settlements, but the land on which they were planted is suddenly inaccessible to its owners. The land is either taken over by settlers or it is gradually fenced off and annexed to nearby settlements by way of a military order. Without delving into the legal [or illegal] ramifications of this olive tree theft, or even the larger unjust premise of the Israeli occupation which allows and even urges on such vigilante behavior, it is the sheer cruelty of the act that must not go unnoticed. Palestinians are inherently connected to their land and to their olive trees in particular. We all understand that settlers attack the trees and the owners while they pick the fruit to intimidate the Palestinians in the hopes of driving them off of their own land. And the best way to do that is to hit them where it hurts the most. For a farmer who has tended these precious trees for years and whose fathers and forefathers have done the same, this is the heart of the struggle. This is also why Palestinians fight back so hard when their trees are attacked. It is a main source of income, true, but olive trees are also part of their identity and their legacy. Apart from their children, these trees and the land are what they love. International solidarity groups and Palestinians from all over Palestine have for years, joined farmers during the olive harvest to pick their fruit and protect them from settler attacks. It does not always work, but the sign of solidarity is heartwarming. We do not expect the Israeli government to halt it vigilante settlers because if it were not for this government’s acquiescence with these criminals, the problem would not exist. Besides, the Israeli government has no qualms over maintaining the military occupation of someone else’s land, planting illegal Israeli settlers and extremist settlers to boot to keep the colonialist project alive and well. In addition, these settlers are determined to break the Palestinian spirit by striking at the heart of what they hold dear. In Palestine, the death of their children and the destruction of their olive trees make grown men cry. While I am grateful that my grandfather did not have to experience either before he passed, it pains me to watch others endure this rape of their land. The question is not whether Palestinians can endure more of this same abuse – they have proven that they can – but how long the world will continue to allow it to happen. Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy(MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.

Tom Engelhardt-Overwrought Empire

Overwrought Empire
The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power

by Tom Engelhardt

October 8, 2012 Americans lived in a "victory culture" for much of the twentieth century.  You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real "American Century" -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious.  Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush.  It was victory with a capital V.  The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet.  It had a military beyond compare and no enemy, hardly a "rogue state," on the horizon.  It was almost unnerving, such clear sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for the ages nonetheless.  Within a decade, pundits in Washington were hailing us as "the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome." And here’s the odd thing: in a sense, little has changed since then and yet everything seems different.  Think of it as the American imperial paradox: everywhere there are now "threats" against our well-being which seem to demand action and yet nowhere are there commensurate enemies to go with them.  Everywhere the U.S. military still reigns supreme by almost any measure you might care to apply; and yet -- in case the paradox has escaped you -- nowhere can it achieve its goals, however modest. At one level, the American situation should simply take your breath away.  Never before in modern history had there been an arms race of only one or a great power confrontation of only one.  And at least in military terms, just as the neoconservatives imagined in those early years of the twenty-first century, the United States remains the "sole superpower" or even "hyperpower" of planet Earth. The Planet’s Top Gun And yet the more dominant the U.S. military becomes in its ability to destroy and the more its forces are spread across the globe, the more the defeats and semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and mistakes grow, the more the strains show, the more the suicides rise, the more the nation’s treasure disappears down a black hole -- and in response to all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes. A great power without a significant enemy?  You might have to go back to the Roman Empire at its height or some Chinese dynasty in full flower to find anything like it.  And yet Osama bin Laden is dead.  Al-Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its former self.  The great regional threats of the moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held together by baling wire and the suffering of their populaces.  The only incipient great power rival on the planet, China, has just launched its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian throw away from the 1990s on whose deck the country has no planes capable of landing. The U.S. has 1,000 or more bases around the world; other countries, a handful.  The U.S. spends as much on its military as the next 14 powers (mostly allies) combined.  In fact, it’s investing an estimated $1.45 trillion to produce and operate a single future aircraft, the F-35 -- more than any country, the U.S. included, now spends on its national defense annually. The U.S. military is singular in other ways, too.  It alone has divided the globe -- the complete world -- into six "commands."  With (lest anything be left out) an added command, Stratcom, for the heavens and another, recently established, for the only space not previously occupied, cyberspace, where we’re already unofficially "at war."  No other country on the planet thinks of itself in faintly comparable military terms. When its high command plans for its future "needs," thanks to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, they repair (don’t say "retreat") to a military base south of the capital where they argue out their future and war-game various possible crises while striding across a map of the world larger than a basketball court.  What other military would come up with such a method? The president now has at his command not one, but two private armies.  The first is the CIA, which in recent years has been heavily militarized, is overseen by a former four-star general (who calls the job "living the dream"), and is running its own private assassination campaigns and drone air wars throughout the Greater Middle East.  The second is an expanding elite, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military, members of whom are now deployed to hot spots around the globe. The U.S. Navy, with its 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier task forces, is dominant on the global waves in a way that only the British Navy might once have been; and the U.S. Air Force controls the global skies in much of the world in a totally uncontested fashion. (Despite numerous wars and conflicts, the last American plane possibly downed in aerial combat was in the first Gulf War in 1991.) Across much of the global south, there is no sovereign space Washington’s drones can’t penetrate to kill those judged by the White House to be threats. In sum, the U.S. is now the sole planetary Top Gun in a way that empire-builders once undoubtedly fantasized about, but that none from Genghis Khan on have ever achieved: alone and essentially uncontested on the planet.  In fact, by every measure (except success), the likes of it has never been seen. Blindsided by Predictably Unintended Consequences By all the usual measuring sticks, the U.S. should be supreme in a historically unprecedented way.  And yet it couldn’t be more obvious that it’s not, that despite all the bases, elite forces, private armies, drones, aircraft carriers, wars, conflicts, strikes, interventions, and clandestine operations, despite a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that never seems to stop growing and into which we pour a minimum of $80 billion a year, nothing seems to work out in an imperially satisfying way.  It couldn’t be more obvious that this is not a glorious dream, but some kind of ever-expanding imperial nightmare. This should, of course, have been self-evident since at least early 2004, less than a year after the Bush administration invaded and occupied Iraq, when the roadside bombs started to explode and the suicide bombings to mount, while the comparisons of the United States to Rome and of a prospective Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East to the Pax Romana vanished like a morning mist on a blazing day.  Still, the wars against relatively small, ill-armed sets of insurgents dragged toward their dismally predictable ends.  (It says the world that, after almost 11 years of war, the 2,000th U.S. military death in Afghanistan occurred at the hands of an Afghan "ally" in an "insider attack.")  In those years, Washington continued to be regularly blindsided by the unintended consequences of its military moves. Surprises -- none pleasant -- became the order of the day and victories proved vanishingly rare. One thing seems obvious: a superpower military with unparalleled capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has the more basic ability to impose its will anywhere on the planet.  Quite the opposite, U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most pitiful of forces.  From Pakistan to Honduras, just about anywhere it goes in the old colonial or neocolonial world, in those regions known in the contested Cold War era as the Third World, resistance of one unexpected sort or another arises and failure ensues in some often long-drawn-out and spectacular fashion. Given the lack of enemies -- a few thousand jihadis, a small set of minority insurgencies, a couple of feeble regional powers -- why this is so, what exactly the force is that prevents Washington’s success, remains mysterious.  Certainly, it’s in some way related to the more than half-century of decolonization movements, rebellions, and insurgencies that were a feature of the previous century. It also has something to do with the way economic heft has spread beyond the U.S., Europe, and Japan -- with the rise of the "tigers" in Asia, the explosion of the Chinese and Indian economies, the advances of Brazil and Turkey, and the movement of the planet toward some kind of genuine economic multipolarity.  It may also have something to do with the end of the Cold War, which put an end as well to several centuries of imperial or great power competition and left the sole "victor," it now seems clear, heading toward the exits wreathed in self-congratulation. Explain it as you will, it’s as if the planet itself, or humanity, had somehow been inoculated against the imposition of imperial power, as if it now rejected it whenever and wherever applied.  In the previous century, it took a half-nation, North Korea, backed by Russian supplies and Chinese troops to fight the U.S. to a draw, or a popular insurgent movement backed by a local power, North Vietnam, backed in turn by the Soviet Union and China to defeat American power.  Now, small-scale minority insurgencies, largely using roadside bombs and suicide bombers, are fighting American power to a draw (or worse) with no great power behind them at all. Think of the growing force that resists such military might as the equivalent of the "dark matter" in the universe.  The evidence is in.  We now know (or should know) that it’s there, even if we can’t see it. Washington's Wars on Autopilot After the last decade of military failures, stand-offs, and frustrations, you might think that this would be apparent in Washington.  After all, the U.S. is now visibly an overextended empire, its sway waning from the Greater Middle East to Latin America, the limits of its power increasingly evident.  And yet, here’s the curious thing: two administrations in Washington have drawn none of the obvious conclusions, and no matter how the presidential election turns out, it’s already clear that, in this regard, nothing will change. Even as military power has proven itself a bust again and again, our policymakers have come to rely ever more completely on a military-first response to global problems.  In other words, we are not just a classically overextended empire, but also an overwrought one operating on some kind of militarized autopilot.  Lacking is a learning curve.  By all evidence, it’s not just that there isn’t one, but that there can’t be one. Washington, it seems, now has only one mode of thought and action, no matter who is at the helm or what the problem may be, and it always involves, directly or indirectly, openly or clandestinely, the application of militarized force. Nor does it matter that each further application only destabilizes some region yet more or undermines further what once were known as "American interests." Take Libya, as an example.  It briefly seemed to count as a rare American military success story: a decisive intervention in support of a rebellion against a brutal dictator -- so brutal, in fact, that the CIA previously shipped "terrorist suspects," Islamic rebels fighting against the Gaddafi regime, there for torture.  No U.S. casualties resulted, while American and NATO air strikes were decisive in bringing a set of ill-armed, ill-organized rebels to power. In the world of unintended consequences, however, the fall of Gaddafi sent Tuareg mercenaries from his militias, armed with high-end weaponry, across the border into Mali.  There, when the dust settled, the whole northern part of the country had come unhinged and fallen under the sway of Islamic extremists and al-Qaeda wannabes as other parts of North Africa threatened to destabilize.  At the same time, of course, the first American casualties of the intervention occurred when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died in an attack on the Benghazi consulate and a local "safe house." With matters worsening regionally, the response couldn’t have been more predictable. As Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post recently reported, in ongoing secret meetings, the White House is planning for military operations against al-Qaeda-in-the-Magreb (North Africa), now armed with weaponry pillaged from Gaddafi’s stockpiles.  These plans evidently include the approach used in Yemen (U.S. special forces on the ground and CIA drone strikes), or a Somalia "formula" (drone strikes, special forces operations, CIA operations, and the support of African proxy armies), or even at some point "the possibility of direct U.S. intervention." In addition, Eric Schmitt and David Kilpatrick of the New York Times report that the Obama administration is "preparing retaliation" against those it believes killed the U.S. ambassador, possibly including "drone strikes, special operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, and joint missions with Libyan authorities."  The near certainty that, like the previous intervention, this next set of military actions will only further destabilize the region with yet more unpleasant surprises and unintended consequences hardly seems to matter.  Nor does the fact that, in crude form, the results of such acts are known to us ahead of time have an effect on the unstoppable urge to plan and order them. Such situations are increasingly legion across the Greater Middle East and elsewhere.  Take one other tiny example: Iraq, from which, after almost a decade-long military disaster, the "last" U.S. units essentially fled in the middle of the night as 2011 ended.  Even in those last moments, the Obama administration and the Pentagon were still trying to keep significant numbers of U.S. troops there (and, in fact, did manage to leave behind possibly several hundred as trainers of elite Iraqi units).  Meanwhile, Iraq has been supportive of the embattled Syrian regime and drawn ever closer to Iran, even as its own sectarian strife has ratcheted upward.  Having watched this unsettling fallout from its last round in the country, according to the New York Times, the U.S. is now negotiating an agreement "that could result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with intelligence." Don’t you just want to speak to those negotiators the way you might to a child: No, don’t do that!  The urge to return to the scene of their previous disaster, however, seems unstaunchable.  You could offer various explanations for why our policymakers, military and civilian, continue in such a repetitive -- and even from an imperial point of view -- self-destructive vein in situations where unpleasant surprises are essentially guaranteed and lack of success a given.  Yes, there is the military-industrial complex to be fed.  Yes, we are interested in the control of crucial resources, especially energy, and so on. But it’s probably more reasonable to say that a deeply militarized mindset and the global maneuvers that go with it are by now just part of the way of life of a Washington eternally "at war."  They are the tics of a great power with the equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome.  They happen because they can’t help but happen, because they are engraved in the policy DNA of our national security complex, and can evidently no longer be altered.  In other words, they can’t help themselves. That’s the only logical conclusion in a world where it has become ever less imaginable to do the obvious, which is far less or nothing at all.  (Northern Chad?  When did it become crucial to our well being?) Downsizing the mission?  Inconceivable.  Thinking the unthinkable?  Don’t even give it a thought! What remains is, of course, a self-evident formula for disaster on autopilot. But don’t tell Washington. It won’t matter. Its denizens can’t take it in. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.  Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

Iraq sends crucial fuel oil to Syria

Iraq sends crucial fuel oil to Syria

By Lina Saigol in London and Michael Peel

October 8, 2012 Iraq is quietly shipping vital supplies of fuel oil to Syria in a deal that has triggered concern in Washington and exposes Damascus’s difficulties keeping its economy afloat in the face of a growing civil war and economic sanctions. Nouri al-Maliki’s Baghdad government agreed in June to supply 720,000 tons of fuel oil to Syria in monthly shipments as part of a one-year, renewable supply contract, according to commercial documents seen by the Financial Times. In June and July, Baghdad’s oil ministry delivered two shipments of fuel oil, which is used for power generation, worth US$14m in total, to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Syria paid in cash, the documents show. While the figures to date are relatively small, the deal highlights the ad hoc efforts Mr Assad’s embattled regime is having to make to keep shortages at bay as the war spreads. It also underlines the more active role Iraq is now playing in the region. The revelations come a month after US officials complained publicly that Baghdad was allowing aircraft carrying Iranian arms to fly over its territory en route to Syria. A state department official said the fuel shipment did not violate US and EU sanctions but he indicated surprise at Iraq’s involvement. Iraq abstained from an Arab League vote in 2011 to suspend Syria’s membership and impose sanctions; it has also rejected attempts to bring down the Syrian regime by force, fearing a wider crisis in the region. Iraq’s Shia-dominated government is close to Iran. Tehran is the Syrian regime’s chief Middle Eastern ally. "Perceptions matter, so we encourage countries trading with Syria to be open about their legal and non-sanctionable exchanges," a US state department official said. "If this is going to continue, we think the Iraqis should be up front about it." The deal showed the Syrian regime was desperate for fuel and was depleting what is left of its hard currency cash reserves to import it, the official added. The documents show that the state-backed Syria Trading Oil Company (Sytrol), which handles Syria’s fuel imports, agreed to pay cash into an account with the Trade Bank of Iraq before each delivery, or provide an irrevocable letter of credit. Iraq offered Syria a discount of 50 per cent below the market price, plus a $5 discount per metric ton, according to the contract. Syria paid $505.909 per ton for the fuel, compared with today’s market price of $800 per ton. Mr Alaa Kidher Kadhum, one of the signatories for Baghdad’s state oil marketing organisation, or SOMO, sits on the board of the Trade Bank of Iraq, according to the documents. Mr Kadhum did not respond to questions from the FT nor did any official from the Iraqi oil ministry. Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister, said he did not know of any such deal. Syrian officials also did not comment. The contract, dated June 28 and written in Arabic on Iraqi oil ministry letterhead, specifies the fuel oil would be loaded in trucks at Iraq’s North Refinery Company, via Syria’s western border. The EU and the US have had sanctions against Sytrol since 2011, which bar any EU or US company from importing, purchasing or transporting Syrian oil, including refined products. The US imposed fresh sanctions on Sytrol in July 2012, specifically for having provided gasoline to its strategic ally Iran.

'Political arrests' plague Palestinians

'Political arrests' plague Palestinians

Jillian Kestler-DAmours

People demonstrate in Ramallah against political arrests [Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/Al Jazeera] October 8, 2012 Rights groups complain of abuses by Hamas and PA amid tit-for-tat detention of rival activists in Gaza and West Bank. A'sira, West Bank - Alaa Shuli still has the scars to remind him of his time in prison. Hung from a wire affixed to the ceiling, with his toes barely touching the ground and his hands tied behind his back, Shuli says he was left that way for hours on end. He remembers prison guards repeatedly beating his legs and arms with a wooden stick, hurling taunts at him, insulting his family members, and sometimes preventing him from praying. Most often, the 35-year-old says he was held alone in windowless, two-metre squared cells, with barely any light penetrating the cement walls. "If I go into the details of the torture, it's still very difficult," Shuli said. Stories of mistreatment and torture in prison are widespread in Palestinian families across the occupied territories. But Shuli's case has a crucial difference: He wasn't tortured by Israeli prison guards, but by Palestinian Authority(PA) jailers. "From the Israelis it's expected. But from your own people?" Shuli said from his home in the West Bank town of A'sira, in the northern Nablus district. "It's wrong." Widespread political arrests  Shuli has been in and out of both Israeli and PA-run prisons since 1997. He says he's been arrested four times by the Israelis and 11 times by the PA, and has spent a total of approximately eight years in jail. From 2007 until today, he says the PA has summoned him for interrogation 170 times. "If you're a journalist belonging to Hamas, the eye of the [PA] security forces will be on you more than others " -  Sami Radi Alassi, journalist "What happened in Gaza [with Hamas winning the 2006 election] is reflected in the West Bank, and I belong to Hamas," Shuli says, attributing politics as the reason behind his frequent imprisonments. His latest arrest took place on September 24 and was part of large-scale PA arrest campaign that saw approximately 130 people taken into interrogation from across the West Bank. Almost all the people who were detained - including students, journalists, teachers and human rights workers - were members of Hamas. Some remain in prison, and others were released. The PA has denied that the recent arrests were politically motivated. "All the recent arrests were on a legal basis, and originated with the public prosecution and Palestinian judiciary," PA security forces spokesperson Adnan Dmeiri told Palestinian news agency Ma'an. "The Hamas leadership is attempting to threaten Palestinian civil peace through its alliance with chaos, which is clear from Hamas' statements in Gaza," Dmeiri added. But according to Randa Siniora, the executive director at the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) in Ramallah, the arrests were carried out without respecting the proper legal procedures. "We're seeing arbitrary arrests which are for political affiliations. This has been very consistent since 2007. We have seen a lot of arrests being taken without proper legal proceedings," she said Siniora said that the non-implementation of court rulings is a major problem in the West Bank. For example, the PA security forces often doesn't release a prisoner from jail despite a court ruling ordering them to do so, she explained. "I think it won't be resolved without political reconciliation among the parties [Fatah and Hamas]. We will continue suffering from it and the human rights situation will not improve." Exacerbated internal divisions Following Hamas' victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, tensions grew as the PA refused to acknowledge the Hamas government and the two sides failed to come to a power-sharing agreement. Violence quickly ensued - including a bloody coup attempt in the Gaza Strip. Since 2007, the Palestinian territories have been divided along sectarian lines, with the PA controlling the West Bank and Hamas governing Gaza. The two factions first signed a reconciliation agreement in May 2011 after months of negotiations, but discussions over how to implement the plan quickly disintegrated. In February 2012, Hamas representative Khaled Meshaal signed a new agreement with PA President Mahmoud Abbas to end the division, but this too has stalled. Today, the rift between Ramallah and Gaza persists, and arbitrary arrests and torture on both sides have only made the situation worse. "Both the Hamas government in Gaza and the government in the West Bank violate human rights and they deny having political prisoners," explained Hamdi Shaqqura, deputy director of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). "The background [of these arrests] is a political background. This is not security grounds. We are talking about political grounds." Shaqqura added that a reciprocal process is in place, where a PA arrest of Hamas-affiliated people in the West Bank will lead to a Hamas arrest of Fatah-affiliated people in Gaza, and vice-versa. Sami Radi Alassi says  he was arrested by PA forces for taking pictures of a Hamas rally [Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/Al Jazeera] "It's a kind of action and reaction, both ways. Who pays the price? The Palestinian society at large. Who pays the price? Activists from both sides - the activists of Hamas in the West Bank [and] activists of Fatah in Gaza. Who pays the price? The Palestinian cause in general," Shaqqura said. On October 3, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report detailing the serious abuses Palestinians face in the Hamas-run criminal justice system in Gaza, including arbitrary detention, torture, civilians being tried in military courts, and denying detainees access to lawyers or communication with their families. Hamas has also failed to hold its security service officials accountable for allegations of wrongdoing and abuse, and has allowed a widespread system of impunity to grow in Gaza, HRW found. Islam Shahwan, spokesman for the Hamas interior ministry in Gaza, said the HRW report was "politically motivated" and stated it "relied, in part, on guessing rather than on facts", Reuters reported. Still, Joe Stork, HRW deputy Middle East Director, stated "there is ample evidence that Hamas security services are torturing people in custody with impunity and denying prisoners their rights. The Gaza authorities should stop ignoring the abuse and ensure that the justice system respects Palestinians' rights." Freedom of expression compromised Palestinian journalist Sami Radi Alassi was arrested earlier this year; he believes he was arrested for taking a photograph at a Hamas-affiliated march through Nablus and posted it on Facebook. A former radio and television reporter who now writes for local newspapers and websites, Alassi has been in and out of Israeli and PA prisons since 2004. His arrests, he said, are both because of his journalism work and his affiliation with Hamas. "If you're a journalist belonging to Hamas, the eye of the [PA] security forces will be on you more than others," Alassi said. He said that when he was released in 2010 after three years in Israeli prison, the PA called to tell him that he only had ten days to spend with his family before they would arrest him themselves. "The direct impact is to enhance the self-censorship among the journalists, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza." - Riham Abu Aita, public relations officer "It's not like before," Alassi said, about continuing his work as a journalist in the West Bank after these numerous arrests. "I can't go to all events. I can't speak as freely. I don't feel safe." Despite this, he said he wouldn't abandon the profession. "I can't leave my work as a journalist because of pressure from the PA or anything else. I love my work, especially because it's about being close to people and talking to people." According to Palestinian media freedom group MADA, nine Palestinian journalists were arrested in the occupied Palestinian territories since the beginning of 2012. Over the past four years, MADA reported a total of 113 arrests and 371 violations of media freedoms committed by the Palestinian authorities. "The direct impact is to enhance the self-censorship among the journalists, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza," Riham Abu Aita, MADA public relations officer, said. "When there is no atmosphere or horizon for reconciliation between the parties that is reflected on journalists and on freedom of expression." According to Palestinian human rights group Al Haq, the arrests signal the failure of the PA "to adhere to all principles essential to a society that aspires to democracy". "Chief amongst these is an abiding respect for freedom of association. Arbitrary arrest and detention without charge or trial have no room in such an environment," Al Haq said in a statement.

Interfaith Dialogue No Answer to Israel’s Racism

Interfaith Dialogue No Answer to Israel’s Racism

By Stuart Littlewood

October 8, 2012 So the Albuquerque Episcopalians got jumpy and 'disinvited' the Friends of Sabeel who had booked their cathedral for a conference. Sabeel is an international peace movement which calls itself the Voice of Palestinian Christians. Why would one Christian group snub another? The excuse for turning away the conference was concocted by the Dean of the Cathedral, the Very Rev. J. Mark Goodman. "We said our prayers and deliberated thoughtfully and purposefully," he explained. It seems he and his Episcopalian colleagues didn't like the way the conference would be dealing with "a political issue that has polarized people in ways that we felt were unhelpful. We did not want to introduce a polarized issue into the life of the Cathedral that would have the potential to divide rather than unite. Our decision was not based upon anti-Palestinian positions. In fact, many on the Vestry [i.e. the church directors] are very sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, yet they were concerned about the rhetoric of the literature from Sabeel." He denied they were put under pressure from Zionists. Nevertheless they had invited a local rabbi to come and speak to the Vestry, a rather odd thing to do when, presumably, they were all acquainted with the endless crimes committed by the Jewish State against the Christian communities in the Holy Land. Do they usually turn to rabbis for advice? Goodman also said Vestry members had attended his recent Forum classes, after which they had misgivings about serving as conference hosts. "This summer at General Convention, I served on a committee that dealt in a focused way with resolutions about the conflict between Israel and Palestinians," he went on. "It was my personal prayer that we would craft resolutions that were balanced and offered a way forward with positive engagement with each side, seeking a way forward that would bring security, dignity and peace to a region that has known strife for too long. I believe we succeeded." Note the reliance on "positive engagement". What exactly does that mean – more interfaith dialogue? "We succeeded", he says. But how does he measure success? And why is he not pressing for the enforcement of international and humanitarian law and the implementation of UN resolutions, the only route to justice? The Episcopalian approach implies that some sort of equivalence, or level playing field, already exists between the powerful aggressor and the weak victim, the robber and the robbed, the armed occupier and his unarmed dispossessed prisoner. How did these churchmen, far removed from the rotten reality, become experts on "security, dignity and peace" in the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom? Have they been there, rolled up their sleeves and immersed themselves in the snakepit that the Holy Land has been allowed to become? What makes him and his mates think they’ve found a way forward while Palestine remains under brutal occupation? The mission statement provided by Goodman's church says: "The Cathedral continues to honor its responsibility to be a good steward and shepherd in the community and the world." A huge and worthy commitment indeed. However, the cathedral’s own relatively peaceful community and inconsequential little world have been rudely rocked by scandal following claims that it was headed for bankruptcy and members were deserting. The cathedral accountant blew the whistle and allegations were made about the misuse of collection money, liberal imbibing of expensive wine and Vestry members "trashing the cathedral’s endowment by $2 million through complacency, and of not disciplining the dean". The regional bishop moved quickly to hush it up in an operation that local church workers said was "like a quiet version of the Spanish Inquisition". If only this sort of tomfoolery were all that Christian churches in the Holy Land had to worry about. Unfortunately the Episcopalians seem pretty confused, or downright ignorant, about the depths of evil to which the Israeli occupation has sunk. This is from their official report 'Israel-Palestine: Convention supports positive investment - Bishops agree to postpone indefinitely debate on corporate engagement', "Bishop John Tarrant of South Dakota urged opposition to Resolution C060 [which calls on the church to engage "in corporate social responsibility by more vigorous and public corporate engagement with companies in the church’s investment portfolio that contribute to the infrastructure of the Occupation"]. He spoke about the town of Rawabi, currently under construction north of Ramallah in the West Bank, that will provide opportunities for affordable home ownership, employment and education. Tarrant said that the project, envisioned by a group of Palestinian businessmen, would inject about $80 million into the Israeli economy. "'It gave me the sense that there are Palestinians that understand the importance of mutuality if the two states are going to exist side by side,’ he said. "He reminded the house of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s charge for Episcopalians 'to go as emissaries…to go into the world of God’s dream’. 'I believe there are Palestinians and Israelis now that are going into the world with God’s dream.’" Has Bishop Schori been to the world of God’s dream and seen what’s there? And why would Bishop Tarrant want to inject all those $millions into the Israeli economy when Israel has been strangling the Palestinian economy to death, seizing its land and water and withholding Palestine’s tax revenues? Bishop Charles Bennison of Pennsylvania said the movement to support boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel was unwise. "We need more, not fewer, economic ties to Israel. The more isolated Israel becomes the more dangerous the situation becomes." It turns out that Episcopalians are against boycott and divestment. Instead the bishops have supported a resolution on positive investment in the Palestinian Territories, as if that will do the slightest good while the illegal occupation and blockade continue. Meanwhile they agreed to postpone indefinitely the conversation on corporate engagement. To them, it seems, going as emissaries into God’s dream involves kicking the can down the road like the rest of wretched Christendom (with a few honourable exceptions). Was anybody at the Convention truly concerned with right versus wrong, good versus evil, the rule of international law versus the rule of the gun-butt, the F-16, the helicopter gun-ship, the tank shell, illegal detention and the hard-to-get permit to go anywhere. Their Own Bishop Victim of Israel’s Apartheid Policies The Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem himself is a classic victim of the machinations of the cruel occupation. Suheil Dawani is Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, which is a part of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and The Middle East. This covers Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. He was installed in April 2007, but in March 2011 Israel cancelled his residency permit making it well nigh impossible for him to carry out his duties. As a non-Israeli he needs a temporary residence permit. The Israelis played fast and loose, granting a permit initially then turning him down. Here’s the explanation: "The bishop is a native of the Holy Land and has spent most of his life and ministry there, but cannot obtain either citizenship or legal residence in Israel, since he was born in Nablus, in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, but has not been annexed to Israel. East Jerusalem, on the other hand, where the Anglican Cathedral and Diocesan offices are situated, was also occupied at the same time, but Israel annexed it and considers it part of its national territory (although no other country in the world recognizes this annexation). Therefore, Bishop Dawani is considered by Israel to be a foreigner who can only visit – let alone live in – East Jerusalem with a special permit, which the Israeli authorities can either grant or deny at their sole discretion." Get it? There's a religious war going on in the Holy Land and Dawani was wide open to this sort of dirty trick. After six months of aggravation and international pressure, during which Israel's Interior Ministry accused him of "improper" land dealings on behalf of the church and the Palestinian Authority, the illegal occupiers granted residency permits to the bishop and his family. But here's the catch... those permits will have to be renewed when they expire, whenever that may be or whenever the Israelis choose. So the Israelis have the bishop's balls in a vice. Keep quiet Dawani and all you Anglicans/Episcopalians while we carry on with our ethnic cleansing. Keep quiet while we trash the Palestinian economy, confiscate their lands and water resources, continue the blockade, erase their culture and humiliate their families, drive out the Christians and Muslims and disrupt the religious life of those who stubbornly remain. Keep quiet or we'll revoke your permit again. The Catholics similarly walk on eggshells and are mercilessly bullied in their homeland. Their priests are harassed and obstructed and often prevented from going about their pastoral duties. Many are 'imprisoned’ in their parish – if they leave it to visit relatives or holiday in another part of the Occupied Territories or in neighbouring countries like Jordan and Lebanon, the Israelis may not let them back in. So imagine what it’s like for the Muslims. The simple truth is that the Jewish State is the world leader in rampant lawlessness and interfaith bullying, while the wet and wimpish Anglicans respond with their clapped-out formula of interfaith dialogue and other verbal diarrhoea. For 64 years it has got us and our Palestinian brothers and sisters precisely nowhere. The good folks of Sabeel must now be wondering what they’ve done to deserve same-faith friends like the Albuquerque Episcopalians. - Stuart Littlewood’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, can now be read on the internet by visiting www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk.

How the U.S. Quietly Lost the IED War in Afghanistan

How the U.S. Quietly Lost the IED War in Afghanistan

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Oct 9 2012 (IPS) - Although the surge of "insider attacks" on U.S.-NATO forces has dominated coverage of the war in Afghanistan in 2012, an even more important story has been quietly unfolding: the U.S. loss of the pivotal war of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to the Taliban. Some news outlets have published stories this year suggesting that the U.S. military was making "progress" against the Taliban IED war, but those stories failed to provide the broader context for seasonal trends or had a narrow focus on U.S. fatalities. The bigger reality is that the U.S. troop surge could not reverse the very steep increase in IED attacks and attendant casualties that the Taliban began in 2009 and which continued through 2011. Over the 2009-11 period, the U.S. military suffered a total of 14,627 casualties, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System and iCasualties, a non-governmental organisation tracking Iraq and Afghanistan war casualties from published sources. Of that total, 8,680, or 59 percent, were from IED explosions, based on data provided by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO). And the proportion of all U.S. casualties caused by IEDs continued to increase from 56 percent in 2009 to 63 percent in 2011. The Taliban IED war was the central element of its counter-strategy against the U.S. escalation of the war. It absorbed an enormous amount of the time and energy of U.S. troops, and demonstrated that the counterinsurgency campaign was not effective in reducing the size or power of the insurgency. It also provided constant evidence to the Afghan population that Taliban had a continued presence even where U.S. troops had occupied former Taliban districts. U.S. Pentagon and military leaders sought to gain control over the Taliban’s IED campaign with two contradictory approaches, both of which failed because they did not reflect the social and political realities in Afghanistan. JIEDDO spent more than 18 billion dollars on high-tech solutions aimed at detecting IEDs before they went off, including robots, and blimps with spy cameras. But as the technology helped the U.S.-NATO command discover more IEDs, the Taliban simply produced and planted even larger numbers of bombs to continue to increase the pressure of the IED war. The counter insurgency strategy devised by Gen. David Petraeus and implemented by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, on the other hand, held that the IED networks could be destroyed once the people turned away from the Taliban. They pushed thousands of U.S. troops out of their armoured vehicles into patrols on foot in order to establish relationships with the local population. The main effect of the strategy, however, was a major jump in the number of "catastrophic" injuries to U.S. troops from IEDs. In his Aug. 30, 2009 "initial assessment", McChrystal said the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) "cannot succeed if it is unwilling to share risk at least equally with the people." In an interview with USA Today in July 2009, he argued that "the best way to defeat IEDs will be to defeat the Taliban’s hold on the people." Once the people’s trust had been gained, he suggested, they would inform ISAF of the location of IEDs. McChrystal argued that the Taliban were using "the psychological effects of IEDs and the coalition force’s preoccupation with force protection" to get the U.S.-NATO command to reinforce a "garrison posture and mentality". McChrystal ordered much more emphasis on more dismounted patrols by U.S. forces in fall 2009. The Taliban responded by increasing the number of IEDs targeting dismounted patrols from 71 in September 2009 to 228 by January 2010, according data compiled by JIEDDO. That meant that the population had more knowledge of the location of IEDs, which should have resulted in a major increase in IEDs turned in by the population, according to the Petraeus counterinsurgency theory. But the data on IEDs shows that the opposite happened. In the first eight months of 2009, the average rate of turn-ins had been three percent, but from September 2009 to June 2010, the rate averaged 2.7 percent. After Petraeus replaced McChrystal as ISAF commander in June 2010, he issued a directive calling for more dismounted patrols, especially in Helmand and Kandahar, where U.S. troops were trying to hold territory that the Taliban had controlled in previous years. In the next five months, the turn-in rate fell to less than one percent. Meanwhile, the number of IED attacks on foot patrols causing casualties increased from 21 in October 2009 to an average of 40 in the March-December 2010 period, according to JIEDDO records. U.S. troops wounded by IEDs spiked to an average of 316 per month during that period, 2.5 times more than the average for the previous 10-month period. The Taliban success in targeting troops on foot was the main reason U.S. casualties from IEDs increased from 1,211 wounded and 159 dead in 2009 to 3,366 wounded and 259 dead in 2010. The damage from IEDs was far more serious, however, than even those figures suggest, because the injuries to dismounted patrols included far more "traumatic amputation" of limbs – arms and legs blown off by bombs – and other more severe wounds than had been seen in attacks on armoured vehicles. A June 2011 Army task force report described a new type of battle injury – "Dismount Complex Blast Injury"– defined as a combination of "traumatic amputation of at least one leg, a minimum of severe injury to another extremity, and pelvic, abdominal, or urogenital wounding." The report confirmed that the number of triple limb amputations in 2010 alone had been twice the total in the previous eight years of war. A study of 194 amputations in 2010 and the first three months of 2011 showed that most were suffered by Marine Corps troops, who were concentrated in Helmand province, and that 88 percent were the result of IED attacks on dismounted patrols, according to the report. In January 2011, the director of JIEDDO, Gen. John L. Oates, acknowledged that U.S. troops in Helmand and Kandahar had seen "an alarming increase in the number of troops losing one or two legs to IEDs." Much larger numbers of U.S. troops have suffered moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries from IED blasts – mostly against armoured vehicles. Statistics on the total number of limb amputations and traumatic brain injuries in Afghanistan were excised from the task force report. In 2011, U.S. fatalities from IEDs fell to 204 from 259 in 2010, and overall fatalities fell from 499 to 418. But the number of IED injuries actually increased by 10 percent from 3,339 to 3,530, and the overall total of wounded in action was almost the same as in 2010, according to data from iCasualties. The total for wounded in the first eight months of 2012 are 10 percent less than the same period in 2011, whereas the number of dead is 29 percent below the previous year’s pace. The reduction in wounded appears to reflect in part the transfer of thousands of U.S. troops from Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where a large proportion of the casualties have occurred, to eastern Afghanistan. The number of IED attacks on dismounted patrols in the mid-July 2011 to mid-July 2012 period was 25 percent less than the number in the same period a year earlier, according to JIEDDO. The Pentagon was well aware by early 2011 that it wasn’t going to be able to accomplish what it had planned before and during the troop surge. In a telling comment to the Washington Post in January 2011, JIEDDO head Gen. Oates insisted that the idea that "we’re losing the IED fight in Afghanistan" was "not accurate", because, "The whole idea isn’t to destroy the network. That’s maybe impossible." The aim, he explained, was now to "disrupt them" – a move of the goalposts that avoided having to admit defeat in the IED war. And in an implicit admission that Petraeus’s push for even more dismounted patrols is no longer treated with reverence in the ISAF command, the August 2010 directive has been taken down from its website. *Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Russia, Iraq agree to $4.3-billion military hardware deal

Russia, Iraq agree to $4.3-billion military hardware deal

RussiaToday

October 9, 2012 Russia and Iraq have signed a set of contracts that will see Russian fighter jets, helicopters and other military hardware exported to the transitioning country as part of a tighter military cooperation plan. The contracts are being finalized as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is on a visit to Moscow for talks with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev before later discussions with President Vladimir Putin. Earlier, online Arabic newspaper Elaph quoted al-Maliki as saying his country needs the modern weapons from Russia to combat terrorists in the mountains and desert. Iraq does not need Washington's endorsement of the contracts, he added. "Our foreign policy is based on our interests. We are prepared to cooperate with all. We are on good terms both with the US and Iran. We do not want to be encircled by constant conflict," the prime minister said. Konstantin Makienko, the deputy director of Russia's Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, says a second package of contracts is expected to follow. He added that the deal shows the Iraqi government’s determination to pursue an independent policy in the face of political pressure from the US. Makienko also explained that the Iraqi military is more accustomed to Russian equipment than to anything manufactured elsewhere. Iraq is buying 30 Russian MI-28 attack helicopters, worth $2 billion, along with 42 Pantsir short-to-medium-range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon systems, worth $2.3 billion. The country also reportedly intends to purchase Russian MiG fighter jets as well as armored vehicles. These are the first significant military deals between the two countries since 2008. Between 2008 and 2011, Russian military exports to Iraq amounted to just $246 million. The number one market for Russian military hardware is traditionally India, followed by Venezuela and Vietnam, according to forecasts for the period ending in 2015. Russia’s cooperation with Iraq previously included joint development of oil fields, including West Qurna, one of Iraq’s largest, but that contract was broken off on the eve of the NATO invasion of the country in 2003.

SOS-Israel takes pride in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouin villages

Israel takes pride in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouin villages

Jillian Kestler-D'Amours

Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the Naqab desert has drawn protest (Keren Manor / ActiveStills)  October 9, 2012 Earlier this year, I spent a day in the heart of the occupied West Bank with Israelis — some of them living in illegal settlements — who have made it their mission to destroy Palestinian homes and communities built without permits, all in the name of "equality under the law." The irony was hard to miss. That day in the West Bank, when I asked about "equality under the law" as it applies to the Negev/Naqab region of southern Israel — another area of focus for these right-wing activists — I was told that the Negev could wait for another day. Last week, that day finally came. The individuals I met in the West Bank belong to right-wing Israeli group Regavim, whose explicit mandate is to "promote a Jewish Zionist agenda for the State of Israel." They hosted a public forum last Thursday titled "Which way for the Negev?" Held in conjunction with the Zionist Organization of America and a group called Likud Anglos, English-speaking supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing party, organizers handed out pamphlets announcing that "time was running out" on the Negev. The Negev region of southern Israel covers over half of the total territory of the state. About 200,000 Palestinian Bedouin citizens of Israel currently live in the area, making up some 30 percent of the total population. For years, the government has promoted a policy whereby Jewish-Israelis are encouraged to move to the Negev — through generous benefits packages — while the Bedouin are increasingly restricted, and their villages are denied official recognition. The latest Israeli government project, known as the Prawer Plan, would see at least 30,000 Bedouin forcibly evicted from their homes and communities and transferred to impoverished townships that lack basic services and are hotbeds of crime and unemployment. Comic dishonesty Back at the Regavim event, Seth Franzman, editor of the opinion pages in The Jerusalem Post, was invited to speak. Among other points, including the claim that the Bedouin of the Negev aren’t truly indigenous, Franzman stated that to allow the Bedouin to live in distinct communities that reflect their cultural traditions and norms is reverse racism. This is a perversion of the truth. All the Bedouin are asking for, by fighting to remain in their lands and villages, is a right that is granted unequivocally to Jewish Israelis: to live in communities that suit their needs and desires. In the Negev, Jewish residents have the opportunity to live in a wide variety of communities, including kibbutzim, moshavim (agricultural villages), cities, and individual farms. Individual farms are a phenomenon whereby a single Jewish family is given hundreds and sometimes thousands of dunams of land, which are immediately equipped with water and electricity, in an effort to safeguard the area for Jewish use. By contrast, the Bedouin of the Negev have only two options: unrecognized villages, many of which pre-date the founding of the state itself and yet are denied basic services such as water, roads, schools and health care, or poverty-stricken and woefully inadequate townships. "No one else has land rights in this country but [the Bedouin] have some special right that is above everyone else, mind you above even the other Arabs, who have less rights," Franzman said, as he comically further turned reality on its head. While the views promoted by speakers such as Franzman were not surprising, they did highlight the frightening reality that underscored the Regavim event: confident in the stranglehold they have achieved on lands and resources in the occupied West Bank, right-wing Israelis have begun to look inward and identify new "threats" to Jewish privilege and dominance. Poisoned system As Israeli Minister of Information and Diaspora Affairs (otherwise known as the minister for hasbara — propaganda), Yuli Edelstein, who delivered the evening’s keynote address, succinctly stated: "If we want to really continue the Zionist dream, and if we want to continue what I call settlement activities, where is the next challenge? I’m glad that in so many places, young people see the next challenge in the Negev and the Galilee." Indeed, the non-Jewish populations in these areas pose the new, biggest threat to the Zionist narrative, insomuch as Bedouin and other Palestinian citizens are currently fighting for basic human rights. The fact that a struggle for equal rights causes Israelis to speak about the end of the state, of "time running out" and of other apocalyptic fears, highlights just how poisoned the whole system is. Granting rights to the Negev Bedouin does not mean that Jewish-Israelis living in the Negev will lose some of theirs. It does perhaps mean, however, that Jews will have to cede some of the privileges that they have enjoyed since Israel was created and defined itself as a "Jewish state." While most Israelis — whether on the so-called "Israeli left" or extreme right — don’t even acknowledge that this system of privilege exists, virtually all (some openly, others unconsciously) fear its breakdown. And nowhere is this more obvious than the Negev, where 200,000 citizens are demanding that their basic rights be realized after 60 years of living in inequality, and where the Israeli government is trying its utmost to stop them. "I think that we all have to stay on message here, with the message being creating and innovating and developing the Negev according to the dreams of the founding fathers and [first Israeli Prime Minister, David] Ben Gurion in particular," said Yuli Edelstein at the Regavim event, further highlighting the intransigence that defines his views. "We don’t have anything to hide and we don’t have anything to be ashamed of." Israel, it seems, is a country where politicians take pride in depriving the marginalized of basic rights. Jillian Kestler-D’Amours is a reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. More of her work can be found at jkdamours.com.