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The Palestine Chronicle is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization
whose mission is to educate the general public by providing a forum that
strives to highlight issues of relevance to human rights, national
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FEATURE
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Israeli Refuseniks: Occupation's Dark Underbelly Exposed
Sep 23 2014 / 2:41 pm
Soldiers of Unit 8200.
By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth
A letter signed by 43
veterans of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit declaring their
refusal to continue serving the occupation has sent shockwaves through
Israeli society. But not in the way the soldiers may have hoped.
Unusually, this small
group of reservists has gone beyond justifying their act of refusal in
terms of general opposition to the occupation.
Because of their place
at the heart of the system of control over Palestinians, they have set
out in detail, in the letter and subsequent interviews, what their work
entails and why they find it morally repugnant.
Veterans of the
secretive Unit 8200, Israel's NSA, say it is drummed into new
intelligence recruits that no order is unlawful. They must, for
example, guide air strikes even if civilians will be harmed.
The 43, all barred by
Israeli law from identifying themselves publicly, say they avoided
serving during Israel's latest attack on Gaza, fearing what would be
permitted. But their concerns relate to more than the legality of
military attacks.
In a telling admission,
one reservist said he first questioned his role after watching The
Lives of Others, a film depicting life under the Stasi, East Germany's
much-feared secret police. The Stasi are estimated to have collected
files on five million East Germans before the Berlin Wall fell.
According to the
refuseniks, much Israeli intelligence gathering targets "innocent
people". The information is used "for political persecution",
"recruiting collaborators" and "driving parts of Palestinian society
against itself".
The surveillance powers
of 8200 extend far beyond security measures. They seek out the private
weaknesses of Palestinians - their sex lives, monetary troubles and
illnesses - to force them into conspiring in their own oppression.
"If you required urgent medical care in Israel, the West Bank or abroad, we looked for you," admits one.
An illustration of the
desperate choices facing Palestinians was voiced by a mother of seven
in Gaza last week. She told AP news agency that she and her husband
were recruited as spies in return for medical treatment in Israel for
one of their children. Her husband was killed by Hamas as a
collaborator in 2012.
The goal of intelligence
gathering, the refuseniks point out, is to control every aspect of
Palestinian life, from cradle to grave. Surveillance helps confine
millions of Palestinians to their territorial ghettoes, ensures their
total dependence on Israel, and even forces some to serve as undercover
go-betweens for Israel, buying land to help the settlements expand.
Palestinians who resist risk jail or execution.
The implication of these
revelations is disturbing. The success of Israel's near half-century
of occupation depends on a vast machinery of surveillance and
intimidation, while large numbers of Israelis benefit directly or
indirectly from industrial-scale oppression.
Unlike their
predecessors in Israel's tiny refusal movement, the soldiers of 8200
have been uniquely exposed to the big picture of occupation. They have
seen its dark underbelly - and this gives their protest the potential
to be explosive.
Some in the
international media have framed the soldiers' bravery as a sign of hope
that Israelis may be waking to the toll of the occupation on
Palestinians and the health of Israeli society.
The dissenters of 8200
believed the same: that their confessions might lead to national
soul-searching, investigations into their allegations, and mass
protests like those that greeted news of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon
in the early 1980s. They could not have been more mistaken.
Israel's Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, set the tone, denouncing the letter as "baseless
slander". The army said the soldiers would be "sharply disciplined".
The defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, termed them "criminals".
The head of the
opposition, Isaac Herzog, of the supposedly leftwing Labor party,
characterized their protest as "insubordination", while Smola, a party
established this month to revive the left, called the soldiers' act
"evil".
In the Israeli media the
group were dismissed as deluded eccentrics, "trippy" losers and
"spoiled brats". If there is a constituency of concern among the
public, it has kept stoically quiet.
Revealingly, Herzog was
himself once a senior officer in 8200. He must have been party to the
same ugly secrets but used his political influence to shield the system
rather than blow the whistle.
It seems that when the
barbarity of the occupation is at its most transparent, when it is
hardest for Israelis to avert their gaze, they simply shut their eyes
instead.
The wall-to-wall
condemnation of the refuseniks mirrored Israelis' almost-universal
support for the recent attack on Gaza, even as they learnt of mounting
Palestinian civilian casualties.
Over the past decade,
one intelligence veteran lamented: "We've seen a decline in how much
the soldiers and the Israeli public care that innocent people are
dying." That observation was firmly verified this summer in Gaza.
Thousands of Israelis
who have passed through 8200 did not sign the letter, noted a
commentator. Another pointed out that 43 dissenters were
"insignificant" compared to the 600,000 who serve in the military or
the reserves.
None of this suggests
Israelis are uniquely evil. Rather, it indicates how deeply
dysfunctional their society has become - as one might expect after
years of being collectively complicit in the oppression of another
people.
Netanyahu is only too
aware how to keep the Israeli public compliant. Last week he warned of
an apparently alarming new threat: Hamas had responded to the operation
in Gaza by waging "cyber attacks" on Israel, aided by Iran.
The insinuation was
clear. Unit 8200 is all that stands in the way of the Jewish state's
destruction by the mullahs of Tehran. Those who undermine intelligence
work endanger Israel's survival.
Netanyahu knows it is a
message that will find favor with Israelis. Their military is no
callous and brutal leviathan. And they can continue to sleep easy at
night, still history's victims.
- Jonathan Cook won
the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). He contributed this
article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit his website is
www.jonathan-cook.net. (A version of this article first appeared in the
National, Abu Dhabi.)
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EDITORIAL
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Convenient Genocide: Another Failed War to Re-Arrange the Middle East
US experience in Iraq also taught us that its
effort will only succeed in exacerbating an already difficult
situation. (Zoriah.net)
By Ramzy Baroud
A few months ago, not
many Americans, in fact Europeans as well, knew that a Yazidi sect in
fact existed in northwest Iraq. Even in the Middle East itself, the
Yazidis and their way of life have been an enigma, shrouded by mystery
and mostly grasped through stereotypes and fictitious evidence. Yet in
no time, the fate of the Yazidis became a rally cry for another US-led
Iraq military campaign.
It was not a surprise
that the small Iraqi minority found itself a target for fanatical
Islamic State (IS) militants, who had reportedly carried out
unspeakable crimes against Yazidis, driving them to Dohuk, Irbil and
other northern Iraqi regions. According to UN and other groups, 40,000
Yazidi had been stranded on Mount Sinjar, awaiting imminent "genocide" if the US and other powers didn't take action to save them.
The rest of the story
was spun from that point on. The logic for intervention that preceded
the latest US bombing campaign of IS targets, which started in
mid-June, is similar to what took place in Libya over three years ago.
Early 2011, imminent "genocide" awaiting Libya's eastern city of
Benghazi at the hands of Muammar Gaddafi was the rally cry that
mobilised western powers to a war that wrought wanton killings and
destruction in Libya. Since NATO's intervention in Libya, which killed
and wounded tens of thousands, the country has fallen prey to an
endless and ruthless fight involving numerous militias, armed, and
financially and politically-backed by various regional and international
powers. Libya is now ruled by two governments, two parliaments, and a
thousand militia.
When US Special Forces arrived to the top of Mount Sinjar,
they realized that the Yazidis had either been rescued by Kurdish
militias, or were already living there. They found less than 5,000
Yazidis there, half of them refugees. The mountain is revered in local
legend, as the final resting place of Noah's ark. It was also the final
resting place for the Yazidi genocide story. The finding hardly
received much coverage in the media, which used the original claim to
create fervour in anticipation for Western intervention in Iraq.
We all know how the
first intervention worked out. Not that IS' brutal tactics in eastern,
northern and central Iraq should be tolerated. But a true act of
genocide had already taken place in Iraq for nearly two decades,
starting with the US war in 1990-91, a decade-long embargo and a most
destructive war and occupation starting in 2003. Not once did a major
newspaper editorial in the US bestow the term "genocide" on the killing
and maiming of millions of Iraqis. In fact, the IS campaign is
actually part of a larger Sunni rebellion in Iraq, in response to the
US war and Shite-led government oppression over the course of years.
That context is hardly relevant in the selective reporting on the
current violence in Iraq.
It goes without saying,
US policymakers care little for the Yazidis, for they don't serve US
interests in any way. However, experience has taught that such groups
only become relevant in a specially tailored narrative, in a specific
point in time, to be exploited for political and strategic objectives.
They will cease to exist the moment the objective is met. Consider for
example, the fact that IS has been committing horrific war crimes in
western and northern Syria for years, as did forces loyal to President
Bashar al-Assad and militants belonging to the various opposition
groups there. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and
wounded. Various minority groups there faced and continue to face
genocide. Yet, somehow, the horrifying bloodshed there was not only
tolerated, but in fact encouraged.
For over three years,
little effort was put forward to find or impose a fair political
solution to the Syria civil war. The Syrians were killing each other
and thousands of foreigners, thanks to a purposely porous Turkish borders were allowed to join in, in a perpetual "Guernica" that, with time, grew to become another Middle Eastern status quo.
Weren't the massacres of
Aleppo in fact genocide? The siege of Yarmouk? The wiping out of
entire villages, the beheading and dismembering of people for belonging
to the wrong sect or religion?
Even if they were, it
definitely was not the kind of genocide that would propel action,
specifically western-led action. In recent days, as it was becoming
clear that the US was up to its old interventionist games, countries
were being lined up to fight IS. US Secretary of State John Kerry was shuttling the globe
once more, from US to Europe, to Turkey, to Iraq to Saudi Arabia, and
still going. "We believe we can take on ISIL (previous name for IS) in
the current coalition that we have," he said. But why now?
In his speech on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Obama declared war on IS.
Obama's tangled foreign policy agenda became even more confused in his
13-minute speech from the White House. He promised to "hunt down" IS
fighters "whenever they are" until the US ultimately destroys the group,
as supposedly, it has down with al-Qaeda. IS, of course, is a splinter
al-Qaeda group, which began as an idea, and thanks to the US global
"war on terror", has morphed into an army of many branches. The US
never destroyed al-Qaeda; but it inadvertently allowed the creation of
IS.
"That means I will not
hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is
a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will
find no safe haven," Obama said. Of course, he needed to say that, as
his Republican rivals have accused him of lack of decisiveness
and his presidency of being weak. His democratic party could possibly
lose control over the Senate come the November elections. His fight
against IS is meant to help rebrand the president as resolute and
decisive, and perhaps create some distraction from economic woes at
home.
That same media has also
cleverly devalued and branded conflicts, and acts of genocide in ways
consistent with US foreign policy agendas. While the Yazidis were
purportedly stranded on mount Sinjar, Israel was carrying out a
genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Over 2,150 were killed, mostly
civilians, hundreds of them children, and over 11,000 wounded, the vast
majority of whom were civilians. Not an alleged 40,000 but a confirmed 520,000 thousand
were on the run, and along with the rest of Gaza's 1.8 million, were
entrapped in an open-air prison with no escape. But that was not an act
of genocide either, as far as the US-western governments and media were
concerned. Worse, they actively defended, and, especially in the case
of the US, UK, France and Italy, armed and funded the Israeli
aggression.
Experience has taught us
that not all "acts of genocide" are created equal: Some are
fabricated, and others are exaggerated. Some are useful to start wars,
and others, no matter how atrocious, are not worth mentioning. Some
acts of genocide are branded as wars to liberate, free and democratize.
Other acts of genocide are to be encouraged, defended and financed.
But as far as the US
involvement in the Middle East is concerned, the only real genocide is
the one that serves the interests of the west, by offering an
opportunity for military intervention, followed by political and
strategic meddling to re-arrange the region.
The US experience in
Iraq also taught us that its effort will only succeed in exacerbating
an already difficult situation, yielding yet more disenfranchised
groups, political despair and greater violence.
- Ramzy Baroud is a
PhD scholar in People's History at the University of Exeter. He is the
Managing Editor of Middle East Eye. Baroud is an
internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and
the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father
Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).
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SELECTED ARTICLES
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By Jonathan Cook -
Nazareth A letter signed by 43 veterans of an elite Israeli military
intelligence unit declaring their refusal to continue serving the
occupation has sent shockwaves through Israeli society. But not in the
way the soldiers may have hoped. Unusually, this small group of
reservists has gone beyond justifying their act of [...]
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan
Since the First World War, life of the Palestinians has been routinely
impacted by wars, and unfortunately, they were always the losers
including the wars that they could have been won. They allowed others
to make crucial decisions for them, but most important, they allowed
incompetent and factionalized political elites to [...]
By Jamal Kanj It goes
without saying that Gaza has taught the Israeli military a new lesson:
the days of swift Israeli wars are over. While mostly one-sided, Israel
has never before fought a war that lasted 50 days. The Palestinians
(besieged by brothers and foes) were of no military match to Israel's
most sophisticated [...]
By Ralph Nader The drums
of war are beating once again with the vanguard of U.S. bombers
already over Iraq (and soon Syria) to, in President Obama's words,
"degrade and destroy ISIS." The Republican Party, led by
war-at-any-cost Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain, wants a bigger
military buildup which can only mean U.S. soldiers [...]
Sep 19 2014 | Posted in Articles | Commentary | Read More »
By Nicola Nasser On 12
October, Cairo is due to host a conference, sponsored and chaired by
Egypt and Norway, of international and Arab donors for the
reconstruction of Gaza. This is their ostensible aim. But the reasons
that the donors cited for not fulfilling earlier pledges, made in Paris
in 2007 and Sharm El-Sheikh [...]
By Kathy Kelly In
January of 2004 I visited "Bucca Camp," a U.S.-run POW camp named for a
firefighter lost in the 2001 collapse of New York's World Trade
Center. Located near the isolated port city of Umm Qasr, in southern
Iraq, the network of tent prisons had been constructed by U.S.
Coalition authorities. Friends of five [...]
By Sam Bahour The U.S.
is not a neutral mediator in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; it is an
active participant and is guilty of the crimes being committed by
Israel against Palestinians, most recently, the mass killings and
destruction Israel wrought on the Gaza Strip during the summer. The
reality that the U.S. is an active [...]
Sep 19 2014 | Posted in Articles | Commentary | Read More »
By Ramzy Baroud A few
months ago, not many Americans, in fact Europeans as well, knew that a
Yazidi sect in fact existed in northwest Iraq. Even in the Middle East
itself, the Yazidis and their way of life have been an enigma, shrouded
by mystery and mostly grasped through stereotypes and fictitious
evidence. Yet [...]
Sep 18 2014 | Posted in Articles | Editorials | Read More »
By Ali Kazak Sixty-six
years after the establishment of the "Jewish State" in the Middle East,
the world is witnessing the establishment of an "Islamic State" with
many similarities. Both states were established by extreme ideologies
exploiting religion, both were accomplished by mainly foreign elements
to the region and by terrorism, brutal atrocities, horrifying massacres
[...]
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LATEST NEWS
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Thousands Attend Funeral of Killed Palestinians
Sep 23 2014 / 2:52 pm
Thousands of mourners
attended the funeral for two Palestinian men killed by Israeli forces
overnight during an ambush in the Hebron area.
The funeral for Amer Abu
Aisha and Marwan al-Qawasmeh, suspects in the kidnapping and murder of
three Israeli teens in June, set off from the al-Hussein Bin Ali
mosque in central Hebron.
Abu Aisha's mother took
part in carrying her son's coffin, as her husband and other sons are
currently being held in Israeli detention centers.
The governor of Hebron said Israel "executed" the men and at no point attempted to detain and interrogate them.
The bodies of
al-Qawasmeh and Abu Aisha were given to the Palestinian Red Crescent
and the Palestinian Military Liaison after the families identified the
bodies.
Clashes broke out before the funeral, with 20 Palestinians injured by live fire and rubber-coated bullets.
One man was shot in the head and medics say he is in a critical condition.
Abu Aisha and
al-Qawasmeh were killed overnight following a gunfight after Israeli
forces surrounded a property they were hiding in.
Israel says they were responsible for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in June.
(Ma'an - www.maannews.net)
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SELECTED NEWS
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Senior Hamas official
Mahmoud Zahhar said Tuesday that the Palestinian delegation decided to
go ahead with indirect ceasefire talks in Cairo despite deadly violence
overnight. "After consultations between the delegation and Hamas
officials both in Gaza and abroad, a decision was taken to go ahead
with Cairo talks," Zahhar told Reuters. His remarks followed reports
[...]
Sep 23 2014 | Posted in News | Read More »
Thousands of mourners
attended the funeral for two Palestinian men killed by Israeli forces
overnight during an ambush in the Hebron area. The funeral for Amer Abu
Aisha and Marwan al-Qawasmeh, suspects in the kidnapping and murder of
three Israeli teens in June, set off from the al-Hussein Bin Ali
mosque in central Hebron. Abu [...]
Sep 23 2014 | Posted in News | Read More »
Fatah, Hamas, and
Islamic Jihad officials will meet on Monday in Cairo before indirect
talks a day later with Israel, Egyptian sources told Ma'an. A meeting
will be held at the Egyptian intelligence headquarters to discuss the
reconstruction of Gaza. The sources warned of continuing disagreements
between Fatah and Hamas officials which Israel could potentially [...]
Sep 22 2014 | Posted in News | Read More »
Prisoners who were
rearrested this year after being released in the 2011 Shalit deal
announced they would go on hunger strike Tuesday to pressure the
Palestinian delegation in Cairo to negotiate with Israel for their
release, a rights group said. The Ramallah-based Palestinian Prisoner's
Society said Monday that the strike would be observed by 63 [...]
Sep 22 2014 | Posted in News | Read More »
More than two weeks
after a boat carrying migrants to Europe sunk off the coast of Malta,
none of the bodies of Palestinians who are thought to have drowned at
sea have been recovered by search teams. Eight Palestinians are known
to have survived the Sept. 6 shipwreck that killed around 500 migrants,
and they [...]
Sep 21 2014 | Posted in News | Read More »
Two Palestinians were
killed and three were injured on Friday when an unexploded Israeli bomb
blew up in the al-Shujaiyya neighborhood of eastern Gaza City. A Ma'an
reporter in Gaza said that a huge explosion was heard in the
al-Shujaiyya area and ambulances rushed to the area immediately.
Spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Health [...]
Sep 19 2014 | Posted in News | Read More »
The Middle East Quartet
of peacemakers on Wednesday joined calls for a quick start to the
rebuilding of war-ravaged Gaza before the current truce with Israel
ends in renewed violence. "The precarious situation in Gaza and
southern Israel, the danger that violence could flare up again at any
point, are precisely the reason to move [...]
Sep 18 2014 | Posted in News | Read More »
Cleaning workers at
hospitals in the Gaza Strip declared a 24-hour strike on Wednesday in
protest of not being paid their salaries, a union official said. Sami
al-Amsi, president of the Federation of Palestine trade union, told
Ma'an that the cleaning workers had not been paid their meager monthly
salaries of around $200 for the [...]
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