The female conscientious objector who just made Israeli history

July 12, 2016, + 972 Magazine 972mag.com (Israel)

By Noam Sheizaf*

Following her sixth trial, Tair Kaminer has become the longest-serving female conscientious objector in Israel’s history. This is her story.

Young Israeli women Tair Kaminer and Tania Golan pose for a final photo outside the Tel Hashomer induction base where they announced their refusal to serve in the Israeli army, January 31, 2016. Kaminer was sentenced to prison.

DF military prison number 6 lies in one of the most picturesque spots in Israel, at the bottom of the Carmel Mountain, between green fields and banana plantations. The prisoners can see the mountains from the yard, but there is no view of the Mediterranean, less than a mile away.

The prison includes a separate unit for officers and, since 2011, a female unit as well. Prison life is boring and discipline is harsh. Most prisoners’

Israeli Commandos Penetrate Syria, Lebanon; Plant Spy Devices And Murder Civilians

8 july 2016, Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם http://www.richardsilverstein.com (USA)

By Richard Silverstein*

.נוהל “מקרה מוזר”: רצח במסווה של “תאונה”, של אזרחים בלבנון ובסוריה שבמקרה נתקלו בצוותי סיירת מטכ”ל או מגלן בדרכם לשתול מתקני ריגול

This article was originally published by Mint Press News.

For years, Lebanese media and the country’s army have reported lurid details about Israeli spy rings inside the country which assist in reconnaissance and espionage targeting Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah.

Former IDF special forces officer 

and novelist, Natan Odenheimer

The Israeli Defense Forces intelligence apparatus uses sophisticated listening devices planted in southern Lebanon — just one of the many surveillance tools at Israel’s disposal — to eavesdrop on the Lebanese militant group’s communications and track troop movements, among other things.

Rumors have trickled back from the front to Israeli reporters that the forays into Lebanon by the IDF’s elite commando units, Sayeret Matkal and Maglan, weren’t always clean operations. In fact, Israeli forces have encountered Lebanese civilians while planting their equipment more than

Scholars of the Levant Conference Calls for Confronting Zionist Practices to Judaize Jerusalem, Expresses Support to Syria

11 April 2012, Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) الوكالة العربية السورية للأنباء

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – The Scholars of the Levant Conference to Support al-Quds on Tuseday called upon the Arab and Islamic figures to confront the serious Zionist practices to judaize Jerusalem and destroy al-Aqsa Mosque, calling upon Arab and Islamic media to expose these practices.

Concluding the activities of the conference, the participants stressed that the Arab and international silence towards what is taking place in Jerusalem is a participation in this crime.

The participants underscored rejection of terrorism and the need for differentiation between it and the legitimate resistance, calling for exposing the Zionist crimes against the Palestinian people.

They called upon the scholars in the Arab and Islamic nations to revive the culture of resistance among their people in order to defend rights and the holy sacred places, in addition to devoting religious discourse to support resistance in Palestine, South of Lebanon and the occupied Syrian Golan.

The final statement stressed the importance of unity and rejection of sedition, warning against the instigative calls of some satellite channels that stoke sectarian sedition to fragment the united nation and calling upon these channels to be realistic and credible serving joint issues in the interest of all sides.

The participants stressed the right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation, adding that supporting the resistance in Palestine is a legitimate and humanitarian duty.
They called on the people of the Arab and Islamic nations to be united regardless of their racial and sectarian affiliations to face attempts of spreading sedition and fragmenting the nation.

The participants expressed support to Syria's national line and efforts to preserve its territorial unity against all conspiracies which aim at undermining its security and stability.

They condemned instigative fatwas by some Muslim scholars in the Arab countries which violate the principles of Islam, adding that it was better for those scholars stress stopping the bloodshed and getting out of the crisis.

The participants denounced the terrorist sabotage acts in Syria which violates human ethics and all religions, adding that these acts will enhance the people's determination to overcome the crisis.

They rejected extremism and systemized terrorism in Syria such as operation carried out by al-Qaeda members and Takfiri groups serving interests that are hostile to Islam and Muslims.

The participants also hailed the courageous and resistant stances of Syria's people and government under the leadership of President al-Assad in support of the Palestinian cause to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Earlier, under the patronage of President Bashar al-Assad, activities of the Scholars of Levant conference to Support al-Quds (Jerusalem) started at al-Assad Library in Damascus.

The Conference is held by the Ministry of Awqaf (Religious Endowment) with the participation of scholars from Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

The first session of the conference started with announcing the formation of the Scholars of Levant Union and electing Dr. Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Bouti as its president.

Abbas al-Mosawi from Lebanon and Sheikh Tayssir al-Tamimi from Palestine who didn’t attend because of the practices of the Israeli occupation were elected as deputies.
The union included 60 members from Syria, 20 members from Lebanon, ten Palestinian scholars and five Jordanian scholars.

The first session is entitled 'al-Quds and al-Aqsa Mosque', it will discuss issues related to al-Quds, the role of the Islamic nation's scholars in supporting al-Quds, Syria's resistant role in defending al-Quds and the occupied Arab territories, judaization of al-Quds and the Israeli violations of al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy sites.

The second session, under the title 'The Role of Levant Scholars in this Stage', discusses the conspiracy against Syria and the dangers of extremism and provocative fatwas (Rulings made by Muftis) on the Islamic nation in addition to the role of scholars in facing the conspiracy against Syria.

Al-Bouti: Liberating al-Quds is a Holy Duty
Dr. Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Bouti on Tuesday said that liberating al-Quds (Jerusalem) is a sacred duty, adding that occupation can never transfer lands' property regardless of its duration.

In a speech during the Scholar of the Levant Conference to support al-Quds, al-Bouti added that "Every Muslim, Arab or Foreigner, and Every Arab person, Muslim or Christian, should sacrifice his life for al-Quds".

Al-Bouti highlighted that the Islamic State liberated al-Quds from the Romans, who occupied al-Quds for several centuries, and restored it to its rightful people of Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Minister of Awqaf (Religious Endowments) Mohammad Abdul-Sattar al-Sayyed said that Jerusalem had been a target along the ages for invaders and that was the main reason for unifying the Arabs when Salah al Din al Ayyubi librated it from foreigners.

" Let us make Jerusalem the direct reason for re-unifying the Arabs as we all agree on librating it," pointing out to the sublime rank of al-Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem where the Israeli occupation is practicing ethnic cleansing against its people from Muslems and Christens.

He said that the Arabs are eager to pray in al-Aqsa Mosque and Church of the Resurrection, warning that the Israeli and the Zionist-backed media outlets are not saving any efforts to distract the Arabs from their central issue and are working in sowing sedition among them.

For his part, His Beatitude Patriarch Gregorios III Laham, Patriarch of Antioch, All the East, Alexandria and Jerusalem for the Melkite Greek Catholic said that the resurrection of Messiah is the celebration of Jerusalem and the title of the Conference is to champion Jerusalem.

He said that every human consider themselves from Jerusalem because it’s the city of all religions and it means in Christianity ' redemption and salvation', stressing that it is key for peace in the region.

Laham called the world, the Christians in particular, to campaign for supporting Jerusalem and its unique natur as a convergence for all religions.

For his part, Grand Mufti of the Republic, Dr. Ahmad Badr Eddin Hassoun, asserted that the blood of the Syrian youths who were assassinated by armed terrorist groups was supposed to be spilled in al-Quds, but the terrorists spilled it in Syria.
The Mufti condemned the Arab states' collation against Syria, adding that those states are providing money and weapons to destroy Syria.

He stressed that the Arab League is now working to weaken the unity of the Arab world which is the basis for resolving the Palestinian Cause and defending the holy places in Jerusalem.

The participants stressed Syria's role in supporting the Palestinian Cause which was reflected in the Syrian people's standing by the Palestinians and Syria's firm stance and rejection of giving up the rights of the Palestinians in restoring their lands.

The participants called upon the people of the Islamic countries and the free people to defend justice and call on the international organizations to shoulder their responsibilities in protecting the rights of the Palestinians and the sacred sites in Palestine from the Zionist crimes to desecrate the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque.

They also stressed that the scholars of the Levant should unify efforts to reunite the Arab Nation and mobilize its resources to support Jerusalem.

The participants added that the Zionism has created fictitious enemies for Arabs with the aim of drawing their attention from their real enemy which is Israel and those who support it.

English Bulletin

STOP THE WAR AGAINST IRAN – BEFORE IT BEGINS

11 November 2011, Communist Party of Israel המפלגה הקומוניסטית הישראלית http://maki.org.il

Written by Uri Weltmann

Intervention in the 18th General Assembly of World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) by the Young Communist League of Israel (YCLI)

Dear Comrades,

The Young Communist League of Israel thanks the JCP for hosting this assembly. Today's assembly convenes at a time of great political unrest in the Middle East region. There are increasing signs that the Israeli government is preparing a new war of aggression, this time – against the people of Iran.

Last week, Israel conducted a test launch for a new long-range missile. The week before that – the Israeli air force conducted maneuvers with NATO armies, near Italy. The British Head of Military recently visited Israel, and the Israeli Minister of Defense visited Britain, with the question of an attack against Iran on the agenda.

At a time where Imperialism and Zionism begin to beat the drums of war, the Young Communist League of Israel, based on our internationalist commitment to defend peace, calls out -

Stop the war against Iran, before it begins!
No to new wars of aggression against the peoples of the Middle East!

But the Israeli government prepares new provocations not only against the Iranian people, but also against the Arab peoples, most notably – the Palestinian people.
Just recently, we've observed the happy occasion of Palestine's admittance as a full member of UNESCO. The Israeli government responded to this, with a decision to construct 2000 new houses in its West Bank settlements.

Thus, it is revealed that all the talk of the Israeli rightwing government, about "advancing peace", is but an empty talk. The Israeli government claims to support a peace, but in fact – creates facts on the ground, which only deepen the occupation and deepen the oppression of the Palestinian people.

In September, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke in the UN General Assembly, and presented a realistic and just peace program. The Israeli government's response was to reject it, with the backing of US Imperialism. Israel also rejects the Arab Peace Initiative, promoted by the Arab League.

Therefore, we need not have illusions in the Israeli government's talk, nor have illusions in some intervention from the Imperialist powers. The United States government, the European Union, serve not the interests of the people. They will not intervene in defense of the rights of the Palestinians, and we've witnessed this in the UN General Assembly in September.

They are part of tripartite alliance of Imperialism, Zionism and Arab reactionaries, which works against peace, against social progress, against the rights of the peoples.

The ending of the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, remains to be a job of the peoples of the region themselves.

And peace can be achieved. Not imperialist peace, based on the continued oppression of the peoples, but a peace based on respecting the national sovereignty of all peoples of the region:

A peace which is based on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, on all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital;

A peace which is based on the dismantling of all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the dismantling of the Separation Wall;

A peace which is based on the release of all Palestinian political prisoners, held in Israeli jails;

A peace which is based on achieving a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees, according to UN resolution 194, which recognizes the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees, which is an inalienable right.

Comrades,

We must remember that Israel occupies not only Palestinian lands.

We oppose the Israeli criminal occupation of Lebanese Shebaa farms, and support the patriotic and steadfast resistance of its people, especially the kind we've witnessed five years ago, when Israel invaded Lebanon.

We support the struggle of the Syrian people to restore the national integrity of its homeland, and end the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.

We stand completely behind the Arab Spring, the popular revolutionary upheavals and demonstrations for democracy and social justice, we've witnessed in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere.

However, we unequivocally reject all Imperialist interference in the Arab countries, under the guise of "helping the Arab Spring". NATO bombings of Libya did not serve the interests of the Libyan people, but harmed it; In Syria, the interference of the United States and France did not serve the interests of the Syrian people, but harmed it.

Comrades,

The Israeli government follows aggressive policies not only in its foreign policy, but also in its domestic policy.

Harsh neo-liberal measures, privatization of public services, cut-backs in social spending – have all harmed the living conditions of the popular strata within Israel. The recent global capitalist crisis made things worse, as the government tried to have the working people pay the price of the crisis.

While the cost of living is on the rise, the wages remained stagnant. Young people, working in precarious jobs, found themselves unable to make ends meet, as food becomes more expensive, as public transportation becomes more expensive, as housing becomes more expensive.

Four months ago, these social tensions gave birth to a massive popular social protest movement, led by young people. This movement was able to mobilize Israelis in demonstrations in an unprecedented way.

The movement, in which comrades from the Young Communist League of Israel have leadership roles, demanded a new social thinking, one that puts social justice on the fore, rather than the profits of a few ultra-rich.

At the height of the mobilization, on September 3rd, half a million of Israelis demonstrated at once – 300,000 thousands in Tel Aviv and 200,000 elsewhere throughout the country - which amounts to about 6% of the country's population.

These developments fill us with optimism and make us more resolute to continue struggling for the rights of the youth.

The Young Communist League, basing itself on Marxism-Leninism, will continue struggling for revolutionary social transformations, for achieving Socialism, which is the only way to solve the social problems created by Capitalism.

The Young Communist League, the sole political youth movement in Israel which has both Jewish and Arab members, will continue struggling against racism, against discrimination, against nationalism and Zionism.

The Young Communist League of Israel is committed to fortify the World Federation of Democratic Youth as a consistent Anti-Imperialist youth organization. The role that WFDY fulfills in this respect is very unique, and most be preserved.

There are many philanthropic and humanitarian international bodies. We don't need another one.

There are many youth forums that have a liberal perspective. We don't need another one.

But there is only one world Anti-Imperialist youth organization, there is only one world youth organization that has a Socialist perspective, and that is WFDY.

This is a legacy we, in the YCL of Israel, are determined to defend.

Comrades,

The Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, once wrote على هذه الارض ما يستحق الحياة "This land has in it what justifies life". Inspired by these words, and drawing from the overwhelming energy of the recent social protest movement, we in the YCL of Israel will continue to struggle for a better life on this land, for all.

Long Live International Solidarity!
Long Live WFDY!

Delivered by Uri Weltmann, member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League of Israel (YCLI), Lisbon, Portugal, November 8th, 2011

“YOU ARE FED UP?”

12 november 2011, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)

Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי

“YOU CAN lie to all of the people some of the time, and to some of the people all of the time, but you cannot lie to all of the people all of the time.”

This slightly altered quotation from Abraham Lincoln has yet to be absorbed by Binyamin Netanyahu. He thinks it doesn't apply to him. Actually, that is the core of his entire political career.

This week, he was given a very instructive lesson. After being treated to dozens of cordial encounters between Netanyahu and Nicholas Sarkozy, Israeli TV viewers got a glimpse of reality. It came in the form of an exchange of views between the presidents of the US and of France.

Sarkozy: “I cannot stand him (Netanyahu). He is a liar!”

Obama: "YOU are fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day!"

That came after it was leaked that Angela Merkel, the German prime minister, told her cabinet that “every word that leaves Netanyahu’s mouth is a lie.”
Which makes it more or less unanimous.

BEFORE PROCEEDING, I must say something about the media angle of this affair.

The dialogue was broadcast live to a group of senior French media people, because somebody forgot to turn the microphone off. A piece of luck of the kind that journalists dream about.

Yet not one of the journalists in the hall published a word about it. They kept it to themselves and only told it to their colleagues, who told it to their friends, one of whom told it to a blogger, who published it.

Why? Because the senior journalists who were present are friends and confidants of the people in power. That’s how they get their scoops. The price is suppressing any news that might hurt or embarrass their sponsors. This means in practice that they become lackeys of the people in power – betraying their elementary democratic duty as servants of the public.

I know this from experience. As an editor of a news magazine, I saw it as my duty (and pleasure) to break these conspiracies of silence. Actually, many of our best scoops were given to us by colleagues from other publications who could not use them themselves for the same reason.

Luckily, with the internet now everywhere, it has become almost impossible to suppress news. Blessed be the online Gods.

A FEW weeks after Yitzhak Rabin was elected Prime Minister (for the second time) in 1992, I met Yasser Arafat in Tunis.

He was, of course, curious about the personality of the newly elected Israeli leader. Knowing that I was meeting him from time to time, he asked what I thought of him.

“He is an honest man,” I replied, and then added: “as much as a politician can be.”
Arafat burst out laughing, and so did everybody in the room, including Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed Rabbo.

Ever since Sir Henry Wotton said, some four centuries ago, that “an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” it is generally assumed that diplomats and politicians may be lying, and not only abroad. Some do so only when necessary, some do it often, some, like Netanyahu, do it as a rule.

In spite of the general assumption of mendacity, it is not good for a leader to be branded as a habitual liar. When leaders meet personally, in private and face to face, they are supposed to tell each other the truth, even if not necessarily the whole truth. Some personal trust is of great advantage. If a leader loses it, he loses a precious asset.

Winston Churchill said of one of his predecessors, Stanley Baldwin, that (quoting from memory) “the Right Honorable Gentleman sometimes stumbles upon the truth, but he always hurries on as if nothing has happened.” One of our ministers said about Ariel Sharon that he sometimes tells the truth by mistake. People asked how you could tell when Richard Nixon was lying: “Easy: his lips are moving”.

Rabin was basically an honest man. He hated lying and avoided it as much as he could. Basically he remained a military man and never became a real politician.
LAST WEDNESDAY was the 16th anniversary of his assassination, according to the Hebrew calendar.

The event was marked in Israeli schools by speeches and special lessons. What these citizens of tomorrow learned was that it is very bad to murder a prime minister. And that, more or less, was that.

Not a word about why he was killed. Certainly nothing about the community the assassin belonged to, or what campaign of hatred and incitement led to the murder.

The Ministry of Education is now firmly in the hands of a Likud minister, and one of the most extreme. But the trend is not confined to the education system.

In Israel it is practically impossible to obtain a picture of Rabin shaking the hand of Arafat. Rabin and King Hussein? As many post cards as you might wish. But Rabin’s peace with Jordan was an unimportant matter, like the US peace with Canada. The Oslo agreement, however, was a historic watershed.

Only people branded as “extreme leftists” – one of the worst insults these days – dare to raise the obvious questions about the assassination: Who? Why?

There is tacit agreement that the only person responsible was the actual assassin: Yigal Amir, the son of Yemenite Jews, a former settler and a student of a religious university.

Would he have acted without the blessing of one or more rabbis? Most certainly not.

Amir was led to do what he did by months of intense incitement. An unprecedented campaign of hatred dominated the public sphere. Posters showed Rabin in the uniform of an SS officer. Religious groups publicly condemned him to death in medieval ceremonies. Demonstrators in front of his private home shouted: “With blood and fire / we shall remove Rabin!”

In the most (in)famous demonstration, in the center of Jerusalem, a coffin marked “Rabin” was paraded around, while Netanyahu looked on from a balcony, in the company of other rightist leaders.

And most tellingly: not a single important right-wing or religious voice was raised against this murderous campaign.

By general tacit agreement, nothing of all this was mentioned this week. Why? Because it would not be nice. It would “split the nation”. Honorable citizens do not do this kind of thing.

Rabin himself cannot be acquitted of all blame. After the incredibly courageous act of recognizing the PLO (and thereby the Palestinian people) and shaking hands with Arafat, he did not rush forward to create an irreversible historic fact of peace, but hesitated, dithered, held back and allowed the forces of war and racism to regroup and counter-attack.

When the Kiryat Arba settler Baruch Goldstein carried out his massacre in the “Cave of Machpela”, Rabin had a golden opportunity to clear out the nest of fascist settlers in Hebron. He shrank back from taking on the settlers. The settlers did not shrink back from killing him.

WHAT HAPPENED next? This week a very revealing document was leaked.

It appears that on the day of the assassination, Netanyahu spoke with the American ambassador (and Zionist Jew) Martin Indyk. Netanyahu, remembering his part in the incitement, was obviously in panic. He confided to the ambassador that if elections were to take place immediately, the entire Israeli right-wing would be wiped out.

But Shimon Peres, the new Prime Minister, did not call immediate elections, though several people (including myself) publicly urged him to do so. Netanyahu’s assessment was quite correct – the country was outraged, the right-wing was generally blamed for the assassination, and if elections had taken place, the Right would have been marginalized for many many years. The entire history of Israel would have taken a different turn.

Why did Peres refuse to do so? Because he hated Rabin. He did not want to be elected as the “executor of Rabin’s testament”, but on his own merits.

Unfortunately, the public did not have the same high opinion of these “merits”.

During the next few months, Peres committed every conceivable (and inconceivable) mistake: he approved the killing of a major Hamas militant which led to a flood of deadly suicide bombings all over the country. He attacked Lebanon, which led to the Kafr Kana massacre, and had to withdraw ignominiously. And then he called premature elections after all. In his election campaign, Rabin was not even mentioned. Thus Peres managed to be (narrowly) defeated by Netanyahu.

I once wrote that Peres suffered his most grievous insult just a few minutes before the assassination. Amir was waiting at the foot of the stairs from the tribune, his pistol ready. Peres came down the steps, and the assassin let him pass, like a fisherman contemptuously throwing a small specimen back into the sea. He was waiting for Rabin.

The rest is history.

THE POWER OF THE SPECTACLE

25 August 2011, Al Ahram Online http://english.ahram.org.eg (Egypt)

Mona Anis

The action of the man who risked his life last week to remove the Israeli flag must be understood against the backdrop of 30 years of indignation

The civil resistance protests that sparked the January revolution and continue to define it have had spectacular moments. Those, it would seem, belong more to the realm of the imaginative or the visionary than to that of the real. One such moment took place last week, in the early hours of Sunday morning, when a young man, Ahmed El-Shahat, scaled the Cairo residential tower housing the Israeli embassy and climbed all the way up to the flagpole on the roof, pulling down the Israeli flag and replacing it with an Egyptian one.

The sheer sensationalism of the act instantly recalled what the cultural theorist Mikhael Bakhtin once said about modern theatrical forms: that they retain some aspects of the medieval communal performance in the public square. Its significance, the emotional energy it unleashed among the spectators – whether they saw it live or on TV and computer screens later – can only be fully understood in the historical context of popular resentment of the flawed Israeli-Egyptian peace treatysigned in 1979.

On 26 February 1980, the day diplomatic relations between the two countries commenced, and as the first Israeli ambassador to Cairo presented his credentials to the then Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a young man from the Delta province of Qalioubiya, Saad Idris Halawa, staged an armed protest at the local council in his village of Aghour. Demanding the expulsion of the ambassador, he was shot dead and subsequently proclaimed insane.

Ever since then, the sight of the Israeli flag at any official function open to the public in Egypt has always triggered popular anger and a demand for it to be removed. In 1980, when Israel was allowed to participate in the Cairo Book Fair for the first time, the flag hoisted over the Israeli pavilion was pulled down by an angry Lebanese publisher – to the cheering of all present. A few years later in 1985, when Israel sought participation again, angry demonstrators besieged the pavilion, removed the flag and scuffled with police.

But if such spontaneous acts of rejection managed to prevent Israel from participating in most public events in Egypt, the Israeli embassy (occupying the top two floors of a residential tower on the banks of the Nile in Giza) has been an altogether different matter. The place is too heavily guarded to allow for any intervention, and numerous attempts to picket it, many by students of Cairo University whose campus is within walking distance, had always been suppressed with the utmost brutality. I recall one such failed attempt in the summer of 1982, following the Israeli invasion of Beirut and the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps –events which led former president Hosni Mubarak to recall the Egyptian ambassador from Tel Aviv, but not to allow a demonstration outside the embassy in Cairo.

For the next 30 years, and until May this year, every time Israel waged a war of aggression against the Palestinians or the Lebanese, demonstrators would try to approach the Israeli embassy – and fail. On 14 May this year, while Israel was celebrating its national day, activists emboldened by the revolutionary fervour that had overtaken the country since 25 January, decided to march from Tahrir Square to Giza. They were allowed to reach the location of the embassy, but as soon as they began chanting slogans and demanding the removal of the flag, the army patrolling the area and guarding the embassy dispersed and chased them down side streets using live ammunition. One demonstrator, Atef Yehia, is still lying unconscious in hospital, the result of a bullet in the head. Others were beaten up and humiliated by the military for daring to ask that the flag be removed. Some were even hauled in front of military tribunals.

The action of Ahmed El-Shahat, who risked his life last week to remove the flag, must be understood against this backdrop. On Saturday, El-Shahat had joined the thousands of demonstrators outside the Israeli embassy protesting the killing of five Egyptian security personnel by the Israelis. A construction worker adept at climbing scaffolding, he had seen the demonstrators trying in vain to target the flag with fireworks in order to burn it. He harboured the idea of obtaining the hated object but told nobody.

“I jumped onto the tank outside the building, and began to climb. I was more worried about being arrested by the army before I reached my goal than of falling off and dying,” he told a press conference on Sunday. To his pleasant surprise, he told reporters, while in the middle of his endeavour, he encountered a police officer looking out of the eighth floor who greeted him with the victory sign.

The rest is history that many people, the present writer included, have watched many times over on YouTube: the thousands of protestors holding their breath as El-Shahat scaled the building, the mad cheers as he reached for the flag, and the hero's reception he got as he came down, people insisting that he should have the honour of burning the Israeli flag himself after he had brought down.

One young man, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, an activist who has been on the frontline of most of the dangerous street battles that took place during the revolution, wrote about the occasion on which activists were dispersed with live ammunition outside the embassy, on 14 May: “In front of the Zionist embassy, young people, mostly under 20 years of age, bared their chests for bullets,” Abd El-Fatah wrote. “Did they believe they were going to liberate the land by such an act? No, they were merely taking part in a spectacle, demanding to see the symbolic gesture of pulling down the flag. Like Bouazizi [the Tunisian street vendor whose action sparked off the country's revolution],they knew what we did not know– that the revolution is a battle of ideas. They were there to demonstrate an idea: all power to the people, not to any external or even internal force.”

Discussing the role of the poor and disenfranchised in the Egyptian revolution, in the same insightful and moving article published in Shorouk newspaper last June, Abd El-Fatah wrote, “These people, whom we don’t call intellectuals, may not know the meaning of such words as discourse, narrative or spectacle, but they are nevertheless affected by such tropes. They know that Tahrir Square was a spectacle, and that the Revolution was won in the poor alleyways and the workplaces. They know that the spectacular is an essential part of the battle of ideas, and that the dream would fall once the Square fell. For the Square is the myth auguring the reality we have all wanted for so long.”

Ahmed El-Shahat, who had come from his distant village especially to demonstrate in front of the embassy, is, in his decision to stage this spectacular act for all the world to see, one more proof of the power of the spectacle.

http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/19678.aspx

EVIDENCE UNDERMINES GOV’T’S CLAIM THAT TERRORISTS WERE GAZANS

22 August 2011, + 972 http://972mag.com (Israel)

Yossi Gurvitz*

The Minister of Defense and the Prime Minister claim the terrorist attack last week came from Gaza. They have yet to provide any proof – and the evidence looks dubious

(PM Netanyahu blaming PRC for Eilat attack at press conference/Photo: Activestills)

An unknown group carried out a combined attack from Sinai into Israel, hitting a number of targets. Six Israeli civilians were murdered and two soldiers were killed; so were seven of the terrorists and a number of Egyptian security personnel. While the attacks were carried out, Minister of Defense Ehud Barak quickly told the public the people responsible were the Popular Resistance Committee of the Gaza Strip; within hours the IAF attacked a house in the Strip and killed several of its leaders. Later that day, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the people responsible for the attacks were killed. This attack by the IAF is what spurred the recent round of escalation – and it’s worth noting the IAF has been raising the flames in the regions for about a month, with the Israeli media quietly ignoring it.

However, Israel has never supplied any proof that the attack has indeed originated in the Gaza Strip. The PRC have denied involvement in the attack. An Israeli propaganda apparatus, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, also claimed (Hebrew) the PRC was behind the attacks, but had to tautologically write “no terror organizations has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack and the Popular Resistance Committee has denied any involvement. However, the Israeli prime minister and other Israeli officials have pointed to the Popular Resistance Committee as the organization who carried out the attack. So, according to the ITIC, the fact that Netanyahu said something is proof enough, even if the other side completely denies it.

During the weekend, the news website Real News interviewed a senior IDF Spokesman officer, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovitz, who’s in charge of the IDF Spokesman with the international media. Leibowitz denied that the IDF connects the PRC to the attacks, said she was not responsible for that the prime minister said, but claimed that the attackers did come from Gaza, citing as proof the fact they were using Kalashnikov assault rifies (Sic! 2:28 and onwards in the video). I dunno how to put it to Col. Leibovitz, but Kalashnikovs are the most common light assault rifle in the world – a gift that keeps on giving from the defunct Soviet Union – and are rather easy to get all over the Middle East.

In a phone conversation with Leibovitz yesterday, she said “senior officials have already expressed themselves on the issue”, and declined to provide more information on the attackers, aside from insisting on them being Gazans. I asked her if she could provide me with the identity of the attackers killed by the IDF, which was until recently standard procedure, carried out within hours of an attack. She said this is unfortunately impossible, and repeatedly insisted they were Gazans. B’Tselem researchers in the Strip, contacted via B’Tselem today, were unaware of the identity of the attackers. Again, usually they are quickly identified and a mourners’ hut is rapidly constructed. They were killed on Thursday; if they resided in the Strip, their families would have heard of their deaths by now.

Yesterday evening the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm reported that Egyptian security forces have identified three of the dead attackers. Egypt has a strong interest to claim the attackers were Gazans, since this would lessen its responsibility for the attacks; nevertheless, they say at least two of the attackers were known terrorists in the Sinai Peninsula. As far as I could find out, the rest of the bodies are in the hands of the IDF – which, again, does not reveal their identity.

And probably with good reason. After all, it seems Barak and Netanyahu pulled off a major disinformation campaign here, which the IDF (in the form of Colonel Leibovitz) has to cooperate with, somewhat unwillingly. They took us to a false war against the Gaza Strip. You can’t really blame Leibovitz: She’s a uniformed officer. She can’t contradict “senior officials [who] have already expressed themselves on the issue”.

Assuming no other reliable evidence shows up, which at the moment is doubtful, we must ask ourselves: Why did Barak and Netanyahu pull off what seems to be a major deception of the Israeli public, which puts to shame any such deception since the Abu Nidal group tried to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Britain in 1982, Shlomo Argov. Sharon, Begin and Eitan needed a pretext to begin their war of deception in Lebanon – the bright idea of, under the guise of fighting the PLO, enthrone the friendly Maronites. When Eitan was informed that the assassins were Abu Nidal’s men, he replied with “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal – we need to screw the PLO.” That’s how it began.

None of the people responsible for that deception, which ended a 11-months old ceasefire and sparked 18 years of war in Lebanon, ever paid a price for it. Ehud Barak, then a young aluf¬ – major general – learned the lesson well. His part in planning the war was suggesting to Sharon that the IDF will attack the Syrians as well, admitting that such a move required the hoodwinking of the public. Sharon, while impressed, rejected the suggestion.

Now it looks – again, barring new evidence – that Barak and Natanyahu are selling us another lie, one which directs fire towards the Gaza Strip. Why? This is the question they must answer. They are, after all, still working for us, not the other way around – and this is precisely the sort of a spin which calls for a board of inquiry and for the separation of Ehud Barak’s body from his seat.

-------------------------

I am Yossi Gurvitz*, a 40-year old journalist, blogger and photographer.

I write for several Israeli publications, including the influential financial daily Calcalist and the Nana portal. In the past, I’ve been deputy editor of Nana News, and with Itamar Shaaltiel edited its 2006 Knesset elections section.

I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, graduated from a Yeshiva (Nehalim), but saw the light and turned atheist at about the age of 17. After the mandatory three years in the military, much more strictly enforced in 1988 than now, I studied history and classics, earning a BA degree, and studying three additional years towards an MA, but abandoned the project in favor of earning my living as a journalist. [It seemed a good idea at the time.]

ISRAEL'S SOCIAL PROTESTS ARE ANYTHING BUT DEAD

The smothering trap that successive Israeli governments have put us in for the past 40 years no longer allows us to breathe.

21 August 2011, Haaretz הארץ (Israel)

By Merav Michaeli

The day after Thursday's terror attacks, the media rushed to declare the end of the protest movement due to the security-political agenda that would now take over. As if nothing had happened, as though Israelis had not taken to the streets en masse in order to bring about change. To the media and, of course, to the government, it is as though nothing had changed, as though they would once again set the agenda. They - the government and the media - would remind us of what is really urgent and important.

That is the greatest threat we face. Not the security situation, but the usual thing - more of the same. That regular, completely automatic Israeli drill, mantra-like, as if hypnotized. Emergency meetings of the inner cabinet and the forum of eight senior ministers, the IDF attacks, the IDF kills, demands for an apology, demands for an investigation, funerals, injured, eyewitnesses. Whichever prime minister says for the who-knows-how-many time, "When Israeli civilians are hurt, we respond swiftly and strongly." Some defense minister or other says: "We will strike them decisively and with full force." Some head of the opposition or other says, "This demands action from Israel, we will support the government's actions." More and more of the same thing, repeating itself over and over again, trapping us on an endless merry-go-round, with no way out.

This dead end is one of the main reasons for the great and unprecedented protest movement that is taking place. Even if the word "occupation" is not uttered, even if no one speaks of a Palestinian state, the smothering trap that successive Israeli governments have put us in for the past 40 years no longer allows us to breathe. There is a sense of hopelessness and pointlessness stemming from the knowledge that everything is the same, and only the citizens' situation declines from day to day. There's nothing to look forward to, no prospect for something else in sight.

It is always astonishing to realize that, save the brief episode of the Rabin administration, no government took any step to change Israel's fundamental situation, in terms of security and policy in the region. No government proposed a solution or responded to an offered proposal. In keeping with that, no prime minister gave us hope, none offered a vision of a better life in Israel.

Everyone warned of myriad threats to the state's existence, but no one can think of a different reality. No one drew a vision of peace with the neighboring states; of good neighborly relations and partnerships that lead to fantastic economic growth, an enriching cultural mix and even military cooperation. Yes, yes. Just imagine Israel living in peace with Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, with all of them forming a NATO-like alliance, a Middle Eastern Treaty Organization, and together fighting the radical Islamic organizations that threaten us all.

Sounds delusional, utopian, impossible? The truth is that it's not that far off from acceptance of the Arab peace initiative, which includes the normalization by all Arab states of relations with Israel, the creation of a friendly Palestinian state and a peace treaty with Syria. For years, all of these were within reach, and some still are. Add to them the desire to live in peace and with cooperation, and the imaginary picture could be very realistic.

In order to realize such a vision, our politicians must see it. Prof. Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions," explains that the brain creates an expectation that is then fulfilled by reality, regardless of the actual reality. For years we have been captives to an expectation of threat and war, which we respond to militantly. Over the years, this vicious cycle has grown increasingly shorter from incident to incident, becoming increasingly destructive to Israeli society and to the state.

The great social protest broke that pattern. The public does not want it any more. It has begun to sketch a new picture of the world. The protest demands a new agenda, one which refuses the axiom that militarism and aggressiveness should be at the top. This agenda also includes a new way of thinking in the world of regional policy. A welfare state is one that does not force its citizens to live under the threat of war and annihilation; a welfare state is one that strives for genuine peace and achieves it. And the demand for such a state is not going away.

ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY LINKED TO ITS GROWING SOCIAL INEQUALITY

13 August 2011, World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org (Australia)

By Jean Shaoul

Unprecedented social protests sweeping across Israel against soaring housing costs, social inequality, and declining living standards have focused on Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s embrace of “free market” reforms—and the resulting stranglehold of Israel’s dozen or so billionaires over the economy.

Little has as yet been said about one of the key factors behind this assault on Israeli workers’ living standards: the enormous economic strain coming from Israel’s brutal suppression of Middle Eastern workers in neighbouring countries, as part of Israel’s broader alliance with US imperialism. In recent years, the Zionist regime has spent billions of dollars on occupying and suppressing the Palestinian people, invading Lebanon, and building up a large military machine. Its crimes have been financed at the expense of the working class.

Moreover, these policies have been carried out largely in violation of the will of the Israeli population. In particular, repeated polls have shown that the majority of Israelis want a peaceful resolution of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A report by the Adva Centre’s Shlomo Swirski, The cost of occupation: the burden of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 2010 report, exposes the social cost to Israel of occupying Palestinian land—excluding East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed directly.

Swirski says that both sides are paying a heavy price, although “Palestinians are paying the heaviest price”. But his report shows how the occupation’s costs have been placed squarely on the backs of the Israeli working class, via a sustained assault on its wages, working conditions, social, education and health care.

Military expenditure in the Palestinian territories took off primarily after the first Palestinian uprising or Intifada in 1987—before which Israeli bosses had profited by using Palestinian cheap labour to drive down Israelis’ wages. After the Intifada, however, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) stationed two special units permanently in the Occupied Territories. Moreover, the expansion of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories after the 1993 Oslo Accords came at the expense of investment in peripheral towns in Israel itself and required more military spending to protect them.

The suppression of the second Intifada starting in September 2000 led to extra security costs and an economic downturn to which the government reacted by slashing all civilian spending. The cuts amounted to NIS 65 ($18) billion between 2001 and 2004, which the report described as “an unprecedented retrenchment”. From 2001 and 2005, child allowances were cut by 45 percent, unemployment benefits by 47 percent and income maintenance by 25 percent—cuts that the Ministry of Finance admitted were made to pay for the defence budget.

The 2001 levels of spending were not restored after Israel’s bloody suppression of the uprising. Social spending per capita has fallen every year following 2001, while defence expenditure has risen.

Israel receives $3 billion a year in aid from the US, much of it for military expenditure, but this in no way covers Israel’s total military budget, believed to be at least $13 billion or approximately 7-8 percent of GDP, one of the highest in the world.

Swirski adds that the prolonged conflict also prevented the integration of Palestinian Israelis into Israeli society, and their social and economic advancement. This marginalisation of 20 percent of the population has further undermined Israel’s economic development.

The occupation’s precise cost is unknown, however, because the military budget is never published. All that is published is the “additional special expenditures” for the occupation. These additional appropriations alone came to NIS 45 ($12.6) billion in 2009 prices between 1989 and 2010. The report notes that this is “larger than the total budgetary outlay on elementary, secondary and tertiary education in Israel”.

The 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza cost NIS 9 ($2.5) billion; the Brodet Commission estimated the cost of building the Separation Wall between Israel and the West Bank at NIS 13 ($3.7) billion, a sum equivalent to the health care budget.

The 2006 Lebanon war to eradicate the pro-Palestinian infrastructure in Southern Lebanon cost NIS 8.2 ($2.3) billion; Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008-09 cost a further NIS 4.5 ($1.3) billion, plus an additional NIS 1 billion ($280 million) to fortify the area adjacent to Gaza.

The impact of such military spending has been nothing short of catastrophic for all layers of Israeli society—save the very rich. The Israeli government does not represent the interests of its citizens, or even of all its Jewish citizens, but those of a section of Israel’s financial elite, a corrupt and venal clique that operates as international gangsters on behalf of its masters in Washington.

Adva’s 2009-10 Annual Social Report shows that inequality is high and growing, not only between rich and poor but between different sections of the working class: Jewish Israelis of European origin, of Middle East and North African origin, Palestinian Israelis, migrant workers, the impoverished orthodox Jews, and the 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In 2010, Israel’s Gini coefficient was 39 percent, making it one of the most socially unequal of the world’s wealthy countries.

The gross average income of 80 percent of workers fell in 2009, with the income of the poorest 40 percent declining most. The middle income group has shrunk from 33 percent of all households in 1988 to 27 percent in 2009, with the share of total income falling from 28 percent to 21 percent.

While 52 percent of Israelis are poor or very poor, the annual per capita income of Palestinian Israelis is about one third that of Jewish Israelis. They face discrimination in terms of employment and education, social welfare and housing investment budgets. Half of all the 850,000 poor children are Palestinian Israelis.

All levels of education, another key focus of the protest movement, are almost universally acknowledged to be dreadful. Teachers’ pay is low relative to other developed countries, while classroom sizes are above average. Students, including Israel’s top students, perform badly by international standards. Some 54 percent of 17 year olds failed to graduate from high school in 2009, reflecting even more starkly the income disparities between social groups.

Access to healthcare is no better, as reflected in average household expenditure on supplemental healthcare insurance, which has continued to grow as public provision has declined. While the poor spend a higher proportion of their income on healthcare, their more limited insurance buys them significantly fewer benefits.

The elderly have been particularly badly affected as the state pension is far below even a minimum standard of living, and the income of the majority is so low that they are unable to save for their retirement. According to Adva’s report, the bottom 20 percent saved almost nothing towards their retirement.

These conditions underscore that a successful struggle against social inequality in Israel poses the urgent necessity of a united struggle by the Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab working masses against the bourgeois Zionist state and the criminal policies of world imperialism.

WHAT TO MAKE OF THE ISRAELI MOVEMENT FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

12 August 2011, Jerome Slater http://www.jeromeslater.com (USA)

It is very hard for an outsider to know what to make of the current wave of populist protest in Israel which, though advocating “social justice” in Israel has nothing to say about the occupation and repression of the Palestinians.

Over 300,000 people have come out into the streets in support of the goals of the movement, which were initially motivated by the unavailability or unaffordability of adequate housing but which have broadened to include the crippling overall cost of living, the growing inequality of wealth within Israeli society, and what the Israeli journalist Dimi Reider has described as “the parenting costs, the free-fall in the quality of public education, the overworked, unsustainable healthcare system, the complete and utter detachment of most politicians, on most levels, from most of the nation.”

Remarkably, polls show that up to 90% of the Israeli general public support the demands for economic reform, including many working-class hardline nationalists and Likud activists. In its broadest form, as the Israeli activist Jeff Halper writes, “the demonstrations currently roiling Israel constitute a grassroots challenge to Israel’s neo-liberal regime. Beginning as an uprising of the middle classes….it has spread to the working class, the poor and the Arab communities as well.”

Last Monday the leaders of the protest movement, as well as student leaders and representatives of various social organizations, issued a joint statement setting forth the movement’s goals in more detail. “For a number of decades, the various governments of Israel have opted for an economic policy of privatization that leaves the free market without reins…making our daily existence a war for survival to subsist with dignity,” the document begins. It goes on to demand that social inequalities be minimized; that the cost of living be lowered; that full employment be achieved; that action be taken to meet “the essential needs of the weaker population in the country, with an emphasis on the handicapped, the elderly and the sick;” and that the state invest in public education, health, transportation, and public infrastructures.

A most admirable set of demands. Indeed, they could be transplanted to this country with very few modifications—which is not at all surprising, since the triumph of the right in Israel and its Likudist “neo-liberal” economics is closely modeled on the greed-is-good and the devil-take-the-hindmost raw plutocracy of the Republican party hereabouts.

The problem is that the leaders of the protest movement have made a conscious decision not to include the demand that the occupation and repression of the Palestinians be brought to an end; indeed, even the demand that the various forms of discrimination against the Arab citizens of Israel be ended has the potential to badly split the movement. As the Haaretz columnist Akiva Eldar has recently caustically observed: “social justice, and justice in general, ends for a considerable number of the demonstrators at the outskirts of Umm al-Fahm [the largest Israeli Arab city]. Never mind the gates of Nablus.”

As might be expected, the decision to focus only on social justice for Israelis rather than on justice for the Palestinians has caused some division within the Israeli left, as illustrated by the contrasting positions taken by two of Israel’s most astute, outspoken, and morally admirable young analysts and journalists, Dimi Reider and Joseph Dana. Reider has made a powerful case:

“It should be admitted…that the Israeli left has utterly and abjectly failed to [persuade] Israelis in the project of ending the occupation. There was never a choice between a social struggle focused on the occupation and a social struggle temporarily putting the conflict aside, because the first attempt would have flopped. There was nothing to be gained by trying the same thing again for the Nth time.”

Dana concedes that “The sad reality is that if Israelis discuss Palestinian rights and specifically the rights of Palestinians under Israeli occupation they very quickly lose public support.…Had protesters connected their struggle for social justice to the occupation, many fewer Israelis would have joined the protests.” Even so, he is very uneasy about the strategy chosen by the protest leaders: “The protesters’ working definition of ‘social justice’ is unclear and full of contradictions. The rights of Israelis are inextricably tied with the rights of Palestinians, both inside the 1967 borders and in the Occupied Territories. The protesters, like most of Israeli society, are operating under the assumption that they are disconnected from the Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation. But the fact is that one regime rules the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and any discussion of the allocation of resources, not to mention social justice, must take into account the rights of everyone who lives under the regime.”

The moral as well as practical dilemma for the Israeli left is acute. Many of Israel’s bravest and most admirable opponents of the occupation—people like Halper, Bernie Avishai, Gideon Levy, Yitzhak Laor, and others—are enthusiastic about the protest movement. Others, like Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, and Uri Avnery, while of course strongly supporting the social justice goals, are uneasy about the decision to exclude the occupation or skeptical about the likely outcome. For example, Hass writes: “In the coming months, as the movement grows, it will split. Some will continue to think and demand ‘justice’ within the borders of one nation, always at the expense of the other nation that lives in this land. Others, however, will understand that this will never be a country of justice and welfare if it is not a state of all its citizens.”

In light of divisions within the Israeli left and the persuasive arguments on both sides of the debate, an outsider is in no position to reach a confident assessment about the issue. Yet, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable about the current strategy of the protest leaders. First, there is an important difference between the social justice protests and the last mass protests in Israel, which were over Israel’s complicity in the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Lebanon. The latter was unambiguously driven by moral considerations; the former, while certainly containing a moral component, is also driven simply by economic self-interest, especially since it has become a populist movement linking the Israeli right with the left. For that reason, there is little reason to be hopeful that the movement signals a moral transformation of Israeli society.

Social injustice in Israel is inextricably linked to the occupation. In the first instance, as a number of the protest leaders and their supporters have pointed out, the enormous public resources devoted to the settlements and the armed forces necessary to protect them are resources that are not available for the rest of society. Even more fundamentally, the occupation and repression of the Palestinians is so morally poisonous that it is impossible to imagine that a truly just society can be created –even if only for the Jews themselves—until it has ended.

PROTESTS OVER SOCIAL CONDITIONS CONTINUE IN ISRAEL

10 August 2011, World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org (Australia)

By Jean Shaoul

Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, faces his biggest political crisis since taking power more than two years ago, as protests continue following last Saturday’s demonstrations. More than a quarter of a million people took to the streets Saturday to protest the soaring cost of living, and thousands protesting high housing costs are continuing to camp out in tent cities in Israel’s major cities.

The protest organizers, mainly young people, have called for a million-person march in 50 cities across the country on September 3.

In Tel Aviv, the economic heart of the country, hundreds of pensioners rallied outside the city government on Monday, demanding the government lower medicine costs, cancel value-added taxes on basic necessities, and prevent a cut in their pensions. Gideon Ben Yisrael, the head of the pensioners’ union, told Ha’aretz that the pensioners identified with the nation-wide social struggle against housing costs and the cost of living, but were also demanding solutions to their problems.

Dozens of non-profit and social organizations are to hold an emergency conference to formulate their recommendations to the Dialogue Committee set up by Netanyahu last weekend, under the leadership of Israeli economist Manuel Trajtenberg.

Netanyahu’s coalition government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history, is incapable of addressing the social grievances of the Israeli people. He has refused to meet with the protesters personally, instead delegating the task of “listening” to the Dialogue Committee.

This is an entirely cosmetic exercise aimed at diffusing the protest movement, while expending no more resources overall on the population’s social needs. Netanyahu and Trajtenberg have already agreed that the committee’s recommendations must stay within the government’s budget. Any changes would only reorder “internal priorities” and would have to be approved by the social cabinet headed by Yuval Steinitz, the Finance Minister, who has adamantly refused to increase the taxes of the billionaire oligarchs and business elite.

In contrast, according to the latest National Insurance Institute report, 23 percent of Israel’s population lives below the official poverty line and 29 percent are in danger of falling below it—that is, the majority, 52 percent, are in fact desperately poor.

In a new development, Israelis living in the US and Germany organised protests via Facebook in solidarity with the tent cities and rallies in Israel. According to the organisers, up to 200 people joined a rally in Los Angeles. They claimed that the soaring cost of living had led hundreds of thousands of Israelis to relocate to the US.

Other rallies were held in Washington DC and New York. In New York, Omri Ariav, an Israeli law student who organised the rally while on a visit to family in New York, explained, “In the past year I did more than 30 days of active reserve duty [in the army]. I can barely keep a car and a rented apartment with a roommate.”

In Germany, 30 Israelis living in Berlin set up an encampment outside the Israeli embassy in the German capital on Monday, in a show of solidarity with housing protesters in Israel. They too said that the high cost of living and rising housing prices had led them to leave Israel.

After more than three weeks of protests, there are signs that the Israeli authorities are trying to break up the movement.

On Sunday, demonstrators from the tent city in Independence Park in Jerusalem called for public housing in front of Amidar, the state owned public housing company. The demonstrators living in Independence Park are all single parents. Many are now homeless, after being evicted from their apartments for failing to keep up with their rent. The police moved in forcefully to break up the demonstration and arrested 10 of them.

One of the protesters, Maya Zigov, told Ha’aretz that it was not the first time that she and her children, the youngest is only 2 years old, had lived in a tent. “Five years ago, I was evicted from an Amidar apartment, and I was in a tent for three months,” she said. “I spent that entire time during the winter in the rain. In the end I got to an apartment and the owner wanted NIS 2,200 in rent. Now they want NIS 3,200, but I can’t pay that when my salary is barely NIS 3,000.”

There are about 10,000 citizens and a further 50,000 new immigrants and their families waiting for public housing—a wait that could last more than six years in the big cities. While there are subsidies for those forced to rent in the private sector while waiting for public housing, these subsidies (NIS 1,250 per month) are totally inadequate.

The same day, Ron Huldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv, made a veiled threat against the protest movement. He told reporters at a press conference that the tent city set up on Rothschild Boulevard to protest high housing prices had a “limited lifespan” and would eventually come to an end. Huldai did not rule out the possibility that the municipal authorities would eventually evacuate the protesters.

Huldai added: “This is not for generations to come—do you know any cities where all its streets are full of tents? This is a protest, and all protests eventually end.”
The next day, the Tel Aviv authorities removed a caravan parked by the National Union of Israeli Students near the Rothschild Boulevard tent city, just hours after obtaining a demolition order for the structure.

On Tuesday, officials in northern Tel Aviv tried to remove tents in two different tent camp sites. They removed three of the 30 tents at the Ben-Gurion site, but left when challenged to provide an eviction notice. Municipal officials accompanied an outside contractor to remove the tents in the Nordau Boulevard camp site, where there are more than 50 tents. They did not have an eviction order, either, and left when they saw a TV camera.

When the attempted evictions received widespread publicity, the Tel Aviv municipality sought to calm tensions by claiming that it had no intention of evicting the tent cities.

The growing political storm has prompted the Knesset (parliament) to break from its summer recess and hold a special session to discuss the situation this week or next. Moreover, Reuven Rivlin, the Knesset Speaker, said that he thought it was unlikely that the current Knesset would see out its four-year term. Elections are due in November 2013.

The Netanyahu government for its part is whipping up tensions against the Palestinian people and its Arab neighbours, as a diversion from the growing social unrest.

On Sunday, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister and leader of the ultra-right Israel Beiteinu party—a key prop of Netanyahu’s government coalition—demanded that Israel cut off all contact with the Palestinian Authority. He accused it of preparing unprecedented “bloodshed,” in a bid to gain international recognition for independent statehood at the UN General Assembly in September.

Lieberman made his provocative claims without providing a shred of evidence, contradicting a parliamentary report released last week that said Israeli intelligence officials did not expect Palestinian violence to break out. While officials have recommended calling up military reservists in case of clashes, the Palestinian Authority has ordered its security forces to prevent any demonstrations from escalating into violent confrontations with Israel.

Israel has also deployed drones over the gas fields off its northern coast in the eastern Mediterranean to which both Israel and Lebanon lay claim. Israel has submitted a map of its proposed maritime borders with Lebanon, which gives Israel 854 square kilometres (330 square miles) more territory than the one Lebanon submitted last year, to the United Nations for adjudication. The two fields in the disputed area, Tamar and Leviathan, are believed to hold at least 8.4 trillion cubic feet of gas (238 billion cubic metres) and 16 trillion cubic feet (450 billion cubic metres), respectively.

Hezbollah said that “The Israeli enemy cannot drill a single metre in these waters to search for gas and oil if the zone is disputed... No company can carry out prospecting work in waters whose sovereignty is contested”. According to the Jerusalem Post, “The decision to deploy drones was made in order to maintain a 24-hour presence over the site” as a warning to Hezbollah.

America's next war theater: Syria and Lebanon?

Washington's War against the Resistance Bloc

10 June 2011, Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Washington and its allies, Israel and the Al-Sauds, are taking advantage of the upheavals in the Arab World. They are now working to dismantle the Resistance Bloc and weaken any drive for democracy in the Arab World. The geo-political chessboard is now being prepared for a broader confrontation that will target Tehran and include Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinians.

Tying Hezbollah’s Hands through External and Internal Pressure
In Lebanon, there is a deadlock in regards to the formation of a Lebanese government. Michel Sleiman, who holds the presidency and the new Lebanese prime minister have been delaying the formation of the cabinet in a political row with Michel Aoun, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement.

It may be possible that the formation of a new Lebanese cabinet is being delayed deliberately to keep Lebanon neutralized on the foreign policy front.

The U.N. Security Council and several U.N. bodies are all being used by the U.S. and the E.U. to put pressure on Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is taking his orders fom Washington. He has contributed to providiing legitimacy to U.S. NATO led wars. Moscow has openly accused Ban Ki Moon of treachery for his 2008 secret dealings with NATO.

It is in this context that the U.N. is being used as a forum for insidious attempts to internationalize the issue of weapons held by the Lebanese Resistance, with a view to disarming it. Despite the fact that U.N. Resolution 1559 is no longer relevant, the Special Representative for the Implementation of Resolution 1559, Terje Roed-Larsen, still remains active and issues reports against Hezbollah.

The envoys of the U.N. to Lebanon resemble colonial figures making uninvited edicts in Beirut and working as agents of Washington, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which has an entire division in the U.S. State Department, is also a loaded political weapon that Washington is planniong on using against Lebanon and Syria.

An international tribunal was formed pertaining to the circumnstances of the the assassination of Rafic Al-Hariri. Hariri at the time of his murder had no official state position, but an international tribunal has been created for his case alone. On the other hand the international community has taken no interest in forming any type of tribunals to investigate the assassination of thousands of people killed in Lebanon. What does this say about the STL and the justice being sought?

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has also been complicit in Israeli violations against Lebanon. Even the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRAW) has been infiltrated with officials that are supportive of Israeli crimes against Palestinians and Lebanese. This was demonstrated by Christopher Gunness, the spokesperson of UNRAW, in a May 15, 2011 interview with the Israeli military. While Israel's IDF was firing on unarmed civilian protesters during Nakba Day 2011, Gunness reaffirmed that UNRAW was working in the interest of Israel's national security, while also accusing the Palestinians of committing terrorist acts against Israel. Even the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip was whitewashed by the UNRAW spokesperson.

The absence of a new cabinet in Lebanon has also allowed Saad Hariri and the March 14 Alliance to continue having an ominous hand in managing Lebanon’s affairs. This also buys time for the STL, which can move forward without being challenged by a Lebanese government in Beirut that would be hostile to the ISF. In this regard, a new government in Beirut would most certainly question to legitmacy of the STL.

Moreover, the Internal Security Forces (ISF) of Lebanon is also being used by the Saad Hariri government against Hezbollah and the political opponents of Hariri family. The ISF may even have a hand in working against Damascus and helping promote violence in Syria. The ISF takes its orders directly from the Hariri family. The latter also controls the Lebanese government.

Because of the free hand given to Saad Hariri and his cronies (largely due to the absence of a functioning cabinet in Beirut), Ziad Baroud, the acting interior minister of Lebanon, has refused to sign any more papers from his ministry. Baroud has taken this position, because he believes that the ISF is acting covertly and without his approval or supervision. In this regard, the ISF has refused to follow the orders of Ziad Baroud to allow Charbel Al-Nahhas, the acting telecommunications minister of Lebanon, to enter ISF headquarters for a routine check. The ISF was clearly trying to hide its operations and was acting to prevent Al-Nahhas and his team from going to certain floors at ISF headquarters.

It is also no secret that Lebanon is a nest of intelligence agents and operatives from the U.S., the E.U., Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Their objective is to confront and dismantle Hezbollah and its coalition.

In 2006, during the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon the embassies of E.U. members were also collecting data against Hezbollah. The Al-Sauds have helped facilitate the links between Israel and the network of spies in Lebanon. This is demonstrated by the clear link between Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hussein, the Shiite cleric working caught working for Israel, and the Al-Sauds.

In tune with all this, Hezbollah is constantly accused of being an instrument of Iran. Recently, Hezbollah was blamed alongside Iran for stirring protests in the Persian Gulf, specifically in Bahrain and the Shiite-dominated areas of Saudi Arabia. In this regard Lebanese citizens, regardless of their faith in many cases, have also been singled out by the Khaliji regimes and expelled from the Persian Gulf. This is part of a sectarian card to create regional divisions and hate. Within Lebanon it has been used by the Saad Hariri faction to target Hezbollah and its allies. Hariri has ironically accused Iran of interfering in Bahrain at the very moment the Saudi military invaded the island-state to keep the Al-Khalifas in power.

The petro-sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf are now systematically preventing Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, and Pakistani citizens from entering their borders. Kuwait has justified this by saying that there could be trouble within Kuwait due to political instability in these countries.

Destabilizing Syria
Damascus has been under pressure to capitulate to the edicts of Washington and the European Union. This has been part of a longstanding project. Regime change or voluntary subordination by the Syrian regime are the goals. This includes subordinating Syrian foreign policy and de-linking Syrian from its strategic alliance with Iran and its membership within the Resistance Bloc.

Syria is run by an authoritarian oligarchy which has used brute force in dealing with its citizens. The riots in Syria, however, are complex. They cannot be viewed as a straighforward quest for liberty and democracy. There has been an attempt by the U.S. and the E.U. to use the riots in Syria to pressure and intimidate the Syrian leadership. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and the March 14 Alliance have all played a role in supporting an armed insurrection.

The Al-Sauds have also helped drown out any authentic calls for democratic reform and marginalized the democratic elements in the Syrian opposition during the protests and riots. In this regard the Al-Sauds have supported both sectarian factions as well as terrorist elements, which quesiton the foundations of religious tolerance in Syria. These elements are mostly Salafist extremists, like Fatah Al-Islam and the new extremist political movements being organized in Egypt. They have also been rallying against the Alawites, the Druze, and Syrian Christians.

The violence in Syria has been supported from the outside with a view of taking advantage of the internal tensions and the anger in Syria. Aside from the violent reaction of the Syrian Army, media lies have been used and bogus footage has been aired. Money and weapons have also been funnelled to elements of the Syrian opposition by the U.S., the E.U., the March 14 Alliance, Jordan, and the Khalijis. Funding has also been provided to ominous and unpopular foreign-based Syrian opposition figures, while weapons caches were smuggled from Jordan and Lebanon into Syria.

The events in Syria are also tied to Iran, the longstanding strategic ally of Damascus. It is not by chance that Senator Lieberman was demanding publicly that the Obama Administration and NATO attack Syria and Iran like Libya. It is also not coincidental that Iran was included in the sanctions against Syria. The hands of the Syrian military and government have now been tied internally as a new and broader offensive is being prepared that will target both Syria and Iran.

Syria and the Levantine Gas Fields in the Eastern Mediterranean
Syria is the central piece of two important energy corridors. The first links Turkey and the Caspian to Israel and the Red Sea and the second links Iraq to the Mediterranean. The surrender of Syria would mean that Washington and its allies would control these energy routes. It would also mean that the large natural gas fields off the Lebanese and Syrian coastline in the Eastern Mediterranean would be out of reach for China and would instead go to the E.U., Israel, and the U.S.

The Eastern Mediterranean gas fields have been the subject of negotiations between the E.U., Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. Aside from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, the existence of the Levantine natural gas fields is also the reason why the Kremlin has created a military foothold in Syria for the Russian Federation. This has been done by upgrading Soviet-era naval facilities in Syria. Moreover, it has been Iran that has agreed to explore and help develop these natural gas fields off the Levantine coast for Beirut and Damascus.

Hamas-Fatah Rapprochement
There is a strong correlation between war in Southwest Asia and increased talk at the official level about Palestinian statehood. Hopes of Palestinian statehood have always been used twice to discharge pressure in the Arab World built from rising tensions from war preparations against Iraq. The first time was by George H.W. Bush Sr. and the second time by George W. Bush Jr., who was praised for being the first U.S. president to seriously talk about a Palestinian state.

Even as he flip-flops on his position, Obama is also now talking about a Palestinian state. Moreover, rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah has taken place as the count-down towards international recognition of Palestinian statehood begins. The Israelis have also released frozen funds to the Palestinians, which they refused to do before due to Hamas.

The rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas has also served to tie the hands of Hamas. Hamas will have to be careful not to effectively become a junior partner in governing Palestine under Israeli occupation. Hamas must effectively now modify its stance in its partnership in a unity government with Fatah. In all likelihood Tel Aviv and Washington will seek to impose Fatah as the senior partner of the Palestinian Authority. In a manner of speaking, Hamas is being domesticated indirectly by Israel and Washington.

Instability in Pakistan
The announcement that Osama bin Laden has been killed by U.S. forces has contributed to a process of covert political destabilization within Pakistan. There has been a calculated effort to present Osama bin Laden as a popular and venerated figure for Muslims. This is with a view of supporting the so-called “Clash of Civilizations.”

At the same time the U.S. government is starting a media campaign against Pakistan. Islamabad has been portrayed as harbouring Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network. In reality any Pakistani involvement with terrorists has been ordered and directed by Washington. There is a much more complicated story to all this, but what is happening in reality is that Pakistan as a nation is being targeted for dismantlement.

The dismantlement and destabilization of Pakistan would serve three objectives.

1. Promoting a scenario of a war with Iran: Pakistan would not be under threat of a takeover by revolutionaries that would side with Iran and its allies.

2. The targetting of Chinese interests in Pakistan, including the energy corridor from Iran to China (the Chinese port in Gwadar), which transits through Pakistan.

3. Regional destabilization in a key area of Eurasia where Southwest Asia, Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent meet. This area extends from Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan, India, and Western China. At the same time Washington also wants to neutralize the Pakistani nuclear program.

The U.S. has also announced that it has the right to violate the national boundaries of countries which harbour terrorists as well as send troops to these countries as part of the “war on terrorism.” Hillary Clinton has justified Washington stance by saying that U.S. forces would be assassinating terrorists. This is merely an opening door for creating a pretext for military intervention in countries such as Iran or Syria.