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Who Profits from the Israeli Occupation?
Related to country: Israel
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Who Profits from the Israeli Occupation?
Announcing a new on-line database: www.whoprofits.org

Now, more then ever, Israeli activists need a powerful global movement to help us build a just peace in Israel/ Palestine. Looking for effective tools for ending the occupation, we have launched a new website listing companies directly involved in the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. The grassroots initiative, of the Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace, includes a database and an information center, and reflects an on-going two-year effort, rigorous research, documentation and site visits.

This unprecedented on-line resource already lists about 200 companies, and hundreds more will be added during 2009, offering an extensive and intricate mapping of the corporate aspects and interests in the continued occupation. The website offers a new useful categorization of all corporate interests in the occupation, and exposes specific examples of direct involvement of many international and Israeli companies for the first time. In tracing ownership links it shows in detail how some of Israel's largest corporations are tied in with the occupation.

The database allows for advanced searches, such as: Which U.S. corporations support the West Bank military checkpoints? Which of the companies are listed in the London stock-exchange? What settlements' production is formally registered inside Israel? Note, however, that the on-line data is always partial, always growing, and please send us any relevant information, further requests for information or suggestions.

As Israeli activists, we feel obligated to try and educate ourselves and others about the economic incentives and corporate involvement in the occupation, but this is not enough. You can support our efforts by continuing this investigation in your own country, by informing others of our website, or by sending us a much needed donation.

February 3, 2009 | 5:21 AM Comments  0 comments


Not war by other means
Related to country: Palestine
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

Last update - 02:11 02/02/2009
Not war by other means
By Akiva Eldar
After the idea of the "enlightened occupation" was brought down atop thousands of people, both Israelis and Palestinians, the Jewish mind has concocted something new: "bringing down Hamas." For 20 years, until the first intifada, politicians pledged that if we give them enough carrots, the Palestinians will come to love their masters. After it became clear that even the biggest carrot, the "generous proposals" we advanced at the negotiating table, would not appease our neighbors, Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak pulled out the stick.
When it comes to the policies in the territories in general and in the Gaza Strip in particular, the sole difference between Livni and Barak and the right is that the right proposes using a bigger club. Much to their surprise, not only does Hamas refuse to be dismantled, its standing in Arab public opinion and the territories was strengthened by Operation Cast Lead. And that is just the beginning.
Despite the long years of conflict, endless wars and military operations, we have not learned that our standard of "victory" or "resolution" is completely different from that of our adversary. Despite the losses and destruction, the Second Lebanon War was "seared" into the Arab consciousness as Moshe Ya'alon's failure and as a heroic victory over the strongest army in the Middle East. Precisely because of the many children killed in Gaza, Cast Lead has been assured a place of honor in the ethos of the struggle of the Palestinian David, armed with primitive Qassams, and the Israeli Goliath, with his F-16s. After all, no reasonable person expected Hamas or Hezbollah to beat the Israel Defense Forces on the battlefield. By the same token, in the international, regional and Palestinian arenas, the jailer of 1.5 million Gazans has no chance of deciding the battle by military means.
When they hear the proud declarations of Israel's leaders, to the effect that "deterrence" has been restored, Hamas' leaders certainly laugh themselves to death, and not just because of the rockets that continue to fall on the people of Ashkelon. The threat of a few more bombs on Gaza deters them like the death penalty deters a suicide bomber on the way to carry out an attack. If every casualty in Sderot is one more vote for the right, then every dead child in Gaza is one more vote for Hamas. And, according to those who contend (to a large extent correctly) that Hamas is Iran's agent, another vote for Hamas constitutes another gift to Iran. The siege on Gaza, which struck a fatal blow to the people's livelihoods there, fortifies Hamas' standing. An occupier who prevents the sick from getting to the hospital and students from going to university should not be surprised that these people do not consider the occupier to be Hamas' enemy, but rather the enemy
of the Palestinian people.
A pledge to topple Hamas by military means is like a pledge to make "economic peace" with the Palestinians. It seems anything but needless to point out that we are dealing with a political conflict, not a military or economic one. Hamas is not a "terror organization," but a movement that won an election held with the international community's blessing, and with Israel's permission. When the adversary is a political party, no matter how violent, it is impossible to turn on its head the rule of famous military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, changing it to "politics is a continuation of war by other means." Or, as Livni put it in her recent Haaretz interview, "Operation Cast Lead should be treated as a military operation with military goals."
Whether Livni likes it or not, Cast Lead had political goals, and they ran counter to the strategic goal she is supposedly striving for - a Jewish and democratic state. The road there could have been short, if it were possible to wipe Hamas out. Unfortunately, racist parties are an integral part of our region's political landscape. If Yisrael Beiteinu was part of a unity government, Hamas can be, too. Only a long-term cease-fire, accompanied by a real diplomatic context, can pull the rug of popular support out from under Hamas and restore it to its natural proportions.

February 3, 2009 | 3:30 AM Comments  0 comments


Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
Related to country: Israel
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on January 28, 2009, Printed on January 29, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/122810/
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?
And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land -- holy in all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions -- based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There's probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a "Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.
Inventing a People?
Zand's central argument is that the Romans didn't expel whole nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today's Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their homeland during the 20th century.
As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the book in Ha'aretz:
There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened -- hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua.
But this begs the question: if the ancient people of Judea weren't expelled en masse, then how did it come to pass that Jewish people are scattered across the world? According to Zand, who offers detailed histories of several groups within what is conventionally known as the Jewish Diaspora, some were Jews who emigrated of their own volition, and many more were later converts to Judaism. Contrary to popular belief, Zand argues that Judaism was an evangelical religion that actively sought out new adherents during its formative period.
This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel's national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than "a people" descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a "Jewish state."
And that brings us to Zand's second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel."
Zand Gets Slammed; Do His Arguments Stand Up?
The ramifications of Zand's argument are far-reaching; "the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants," he told Ha'aretz. Zand argues that Israel should be a state in which all of the inhabitants of what was once "British Palestine" share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, rather than maintaining it as a "Jewish and democratic" state, as it's now identified.
Predictably, Zand was pilloried according to the time-tested formula. Ami Isseroff, writing on ZioNation, the Zionism-Israel blog, invoked the customary Holocaust imagery, accusing Zand of offering a "final solution to the Jewish problem," one in which "No auto da fe is required, no charging Cossacks are needed, no gas chambers, no smelly crematoria." Another feverish ideologue called Zand's work "another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel."
That kind of overheated rhetoric is a standard straw man in the endless roil of discourse over Israel and the Palestinians, and is easily dismissed. But more serious criticism also greeted Zand's work. In a widely read critical review of Zand's work, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, slammed the author's second assertion -- that Zionist academics had suppressed the true history of Judaism's spread through emigration and conversion in favor of a history that would give legitimacy to the quest for a Jewish state.
Bartal raised important questions about Zand's methodology and pointed out what appears to be some sloppy details in the book. But, interestingly, in defending Israel's academic community, Bartal supported Zand's more consequential thesis, writing, "Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions." Bartal added: "no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically 'pure.' " He noted that "[i]mportant groups in the [Zionist] movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely."
"As far as I can discern," Bartal wrote, "the book contains not even one idea that has not been presented" in previous historical studies. Segev added that "Zand did not invent [his] thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others."
One can reasonably argue that this ancient myth of a Jewish nation exiled until its 20th century return is of little consequence; whether the Jewish people share a common genetic ancestry or are a far-flung collection of people who share the same faith, a common national identity has in fact developed over the centuries. But Zand's central contention stands, and has some significant implications for the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Changing the Conversation?
The primary reason it's so difficult to discuss the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the remarkably effective job supporters of Israel's control of the Occupied Territories -- including Gaza, still under de facto occupation -- have done equating support for Palestinian self-determination with a desire to see the destruction of Israel. It effectively conflates any advocacy of Palestinian rights with the specter of Jewish extermination.
That's certainly been the case with arguments for a single-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Until recent years, advocating a "single-state" solution -- a binational state where all residents of what are today Israel and the Occupied Territories share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship -- was a relatively mainstream position to take. In fact, it was one of several competing plans considered by the United Nations when it created the state of Israel in the 1940s.
But the idea of a single, binational state has more recently been marginalized -- dismissed as an attempt to destroy Israel literally and physically, rather than as an ethnic and religious-based political entity with a population of second-class Arab citizens and the legacy of responsibility for world's longest-standing refugee population.
A logical conclusion of Zand's work exposing Israel's founding mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense -- raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the "children of Israel" really are -- in another sense, it hints at the commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the idea that they should have a "right of return."
And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are guaranteed equal protection -- equal protection under the laws of a state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/122810/

February 3, 2009 | 3:21 AM Comments  0 comments


The African Union on Monday called on the international community to provide urgent relief for the war-weary Gaza Strip.
Related to country: Libya
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

The African Union on Monday called on the international community to provide urgent relief for the war-weary Gaza Strip.

The 53-member organization called on the United Nations to investigate human rights violations during Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza, as well, calling preliminary evidence of such behavior “massive, indiscriminate and disproportionate,” according to an African news agency.

But the AU applauded the unilateral ceasefire presented in mid-January, calling on both sides to respect them, “in order to create conditions that are most conductive to a lasting solution to the conflict.”

"The AU renews its support for and solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle to regain their fundamental rights, including the right to existence as an independent state with Jerusalem" as its capital, the union said in a statement.

The AU also urged Israel to “put an end to its aggression against the Palestinian people, lift the embargo it imposed on them and open without delay all border crossings to allow for the free movement of goods and persons, most importantly humanitarian aid.”

Meanwhile, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was elected to represent the AU as its leader. He has been outspoken about the plight of Palestinians in recent weeks, as well as for unity among African nations.

February 3, 2009 | 3:18 AM Comments  0 comments


Religious leaders reinforce campaign to save Jerusalem
Related to country: Palestine
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Religious leaders reinforce campaign to save Jerusalem

02.02.09 - 20:04

PNN exclusive / Maisa Abu Ghazaleh – Under the title “Aggression on Gaza…targeting of Jerusalem,” religious leaders held a conference Monday in East Jerusalem.
The dangers surrounding the city cannot be overstated, was the resounding point, along with timing of the attacks on Gaza exploited to further settlement policy.
“The world must take immediate action to save the city and its Islamic and Christian sanctities,” said Sheikh Taysir Al Tamimi. “And the internal division only serves the Israeli government in achieving its objectives that seek to destroy.”
Jerusalem is still considered the capital of an independent Palestinian state and the Israeli administration is defying the United Nations and international law with the continued takeover.
Projects were suggested to save the city including a weekly program focusing on the city to broadcast on Muslim and Arab satellite channels. Support for residents who are facing increased pressure to flee their homes is also crucial, conference goers said.
Conference moderator Sheikh Jamil Hamami said, “Jerusalem is central to our faith and civilization. The assault on the Gaza Strip that is ongoing charges us to increase our unity and we are optimistic that the new US president will be a positive actor.”
Head of the Supreme Islamic Conference, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, said that the Israeli excavations under Al Aqsa Mosque and the Al Haram As Sharif compound “threaten heritage, history and civilization.”
He told the group of several hundred gathered today, “Jerusalem is forgotten by many right now and we must protect it as the focus is on Gaza, but we must say that we appreciate the position of the Turkish Prime Minister at Davos and the courage and tenacity of thousands.”
Sheikh Sabri went on to address the Israeli attacks on the Silwan neighborhood where part of the United Nations school collapsed yesterday due to excavations under Al Aqsa. “Our history, our character, is under direct attack.”
He added a call to the UNESCO to increase its role in defending Islamic holy sites.
At Monday’s conference Patriarch Michel Sabbah also addressed the necessary focus on Gaza while directly addressing the internal Palestinian divide. It “has fostered the Israeli ability to further its schemes,” calling on Palestinian factions to return to unity. “We are issuing a call to action to save Jerusalem as our historic Arab, Muslim, Christian city.”
Sheikh Ra’ed Salah who heads the Islamic Movement inside the Green Line also called for Palestinian unity and said that the Old City of Jerusalem is under direct and is undergoing Judaization at a heightened pace.”
Governor Adnan Al Husseini called on international institutions to lend a direct hand in saving Jerusalem.http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4695&Itemid=29

February 3, 2009 | 3:17 AM Comments  0 comments


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