From Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc

International release, July 31.

Day 20 of the Lebanon carnage
And more than a month since the tanks rolled into Gaza

Adam Keller

We got up with the news of Condoleezza Rice at last putting down her foot (or at least, giving this impression on TV) and forcing a temporary halt to the systematic Israeli bombing of Lebanon's towns and villages. The declaration was made from Washington, after Israel's Defence Ministry agreed to announce it but failed to do so.

The halted bombings gave a respite also to the communities of Northern Israel, where those who had not run away had been living in bomb shelters for the past three weeks.

It was, of course, in the aftermath of yesterday's atrocity at Qana, the second mass killing perpetrated in the same unfortunate Lebanese village. What happened yesterday was just too big and too horrible to ignore, as the smaller daily killings of Lebanese civilians were ignored - with the images from Qana reverberating endlessly throughout the world, from every TV screen.

As reported in the morning papers, the generals were "greatly surprised" and highly displeased with the order to stop the bombing raids for at least the next 48 hours. As the day wore on, there were more and more bellicose pronouncements and declarations from ministers and generals: there is and will not be a ceasefire any time soon; the "regrettable" mass killing in Qana was the fault of the victims themselves "who were warned and did not run away"; ours was and remains "The Most Moral Army in World"; the ground offensive into Lebanon will not only be continued but will be greatly intensified; the air force is still authorized to assassinate Hizbullah militants "wherever they are found"; the air offensive will be soon resumed and inhabitants of South Lebanon are warned to run away today or be killed in the new bombings tomorrow; "maximum fire-power" should and would be used "in the most intensive way"... In the evening it culminated with the mock-Churchilesque televised speech of PM Olmert, complete with the promise of "pain, tears and blood".

The streets are still full of patriotic posters, most of them put up by banks and big corporations and bearing the promoter's logo beside the Israeli national flag and the stirring slogans "United We Will Win!", "Israel Is Strong!", "Everybody Embraces Our Soldiers!". But only a few citizens seem to have taken up the call to raise the national flag over their own homes and cars.

Meanwhile, at least many in the mainstream Left who in earlier days remained silent or outrightly supported the "Justified War Against Hizbullah Aggression" have been shocked or moved by the Qana carnage. Meretz leader Yossi Beilin has at long last came to the conclusion that the "continuation of the war is useless and counterproductive" and that it should come to an end. A few hours before he made this statement, a leader of the Meretz Youth declared her resignation, feeling "sick and tired of being involved in a peace movement which supports war". And a whole group of Meretz activists, led by former KM's Naomi Hazan and Yael Dayan, participated in yesterday's protest outside the Defence Ministry gates.

The influential dovish commentator Nahum Bar'nea wrote in today's "Yediot Aharonot": "Except for the lunatic fringe leftists, no one disputes that Israel had to react to the killing and kidnapping perpetrated by Hizbullah in our territory (...). I have confidence in the army's High Command, but having confidence does not stop me from having painful questions. Didn't the government, the army, the political system, the media, all let themselves be carried away by blind enthusiasm which serves only the enemy? I have heard Defence Minister Peretz boasting that he had "released the army from all restrictions" about harming "civilian populations which live at the side of Hizbullah militants". We saw the results of this "release" yesterday, with the bodies of women and children taken out of the house in Qana" (...)

So, there is every reason for the anti-war movement to continue and intensify its own "offensive". Demonstrations take place every day in various cities. Tonight at the basement of the Kibbutz Movement Headquarters - actually, not far from where the Inner Cabinet ministers met to approve a wide-scale extension of the ground invasion into Lebanon - Gush Shalom representatives took part in a coordinating meeting of the main peace groups, which resolved on holding a larger protest in the weekend.

The speeches of PM Olmert are full of bombastic cliches on "our heroic boys in uniform", but the 32-year old Reserve Captain Amir Fester was not convinced: he went to prison yesterday rather than obey the order to enter Lebanon. "He is not of the radical left, but in the last few days has been feeling more and more that the war is not justified" his girlfriend Nitzan Lahav told Yediot Aharonot. "The more the war continued he was increasingly troubled. In the beginning we like everybody supported the war, but we came to the conclusion that within two weeks there will anyway be an agreement with the Lebanese. So why not stop it now and end the killings?"

Meanwhile, in Gaza...

The Israeli army invaded Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, July 17, 2006. Later that week journalist Rory McCarthy wrote a report from Nahariya, Israel, published in The Guardian (UK), entitled, "Israel steps up military attacks in 'forgotten war' with Palestinians." In the article Journalist McCarthy described the attack as follows:

Earlier this week Israel mounted a two-day operation in Beit Hanoun, where heavy fighting left at least six Palestinians, mostly gunmen, dead. Using tanks and bulldozers, troops damaged several houses and farmland as well as three empty UN schools. The mayor estimated the damage at around $7m (?3.8m). Israel also bombed the Palestinian foreign ministry, which partially collapsed. Several homes nearby were also damaged."

Good journalism, I'm sure: concise, with all the pertinent facts. But, as good journalism must needs be, I guess, it is cold and impersonal, speaking of "houses," "farmland," "schools" damaged, as well as the cost of the same.

What is missing, of course, is the human equation.

Below is an account of the same Israeli incursion, July 17 2006, but told from that missing human perspective.

From Marisa Ali

I am a Canadian, from Calgary, Alberta, and have lived in Ramallah, Jerusalem and Gaza for over 15 years. I married my husband, Qassem Ali, in 1999.

Qassem is the CEO of Ramattan News Agency, the Palestinian media outlet that services the international Western and Arab media (including CNN, BBC, NBC, and CBC) with breaking news, footage and live coverage. broadcasting via satellite to living rooms around the world.

For many years, I was employed with the United Nations in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Recently, Israel refused to allow me, and thousands of foreign nationals like me, married to Palestinians or working with them in the West Bank and Gaza, to remain with our homes and families. I have since been living in Cairo with my small son, while my husband shuttles back and forth between Gaza and Cairo to attend to his work. To this day, only a handful of carefully selected diplomats, journalists and employees of international organizations are permitted access to Gaza, leaving this besieged population effectively isolated.

The following is an account of what happened to my family in the village of Beit Hanoun in the north of the Gaza Strip on Monday, July 17th, 2006.

When the phone rang at 7h30, I answered knowing it couldn't be good news. My sister-in-law Azza's voice, normally the epitome of calm and control, was terrified. "The wall is being bulldozed on top of us!" she yelled, "Do something, anything!" From Cairo, there was nothing much we could do, but try to reassure her that the Israeli Army must know that there are people inside the house.

Minutes later, a tank was parked in the middle of our living room and a gaping hole in the wall revealed the uprooted garden and corpses turned up from the neighboring cemetery by Israeli tanks and bulldozers.

The Israeli Army moved quickly upstairs from the main floor of our building, which contained Qassem's office and a reception area, to the third floor, the home of Azza and her four children May (18), Qosai (15), Hazem (14) and Reem (12).

They took the boys, Qosai and Hazem hostage, handcuffed and blindfolded, sitting with their heads down on the floor in a small room, and proceeded to rip up the floor tiles and break every dish, glass and item of furniture in sight. Hazem and Qosai tell us that from under their blindfolds, they saw the soldiers fill bags with the sand taken from under the tiles and put them in the windows.

They then smashed holes in the walls, through which they shot machine gun fire at anyone who happened to be in the street. Meanwhile, Israeli tanks fired from the ripped-up street, punching holes in the home of Qassem's older sister Fairuz and other homes nearby.

Other soldiers then moved up into our own fourth-floor apartment and bunkered-down in our bedroom, where they destroyed everything they could, ripping out the windows, shattering the walls and shooting indiscriminately outside. Pictures fed to us via satellite by the Ramattan crew that filmed the aftermath of that grim day revealed my 2-year old son's toys shattered and strewn about the room mixed with broken window frames, blood and hundreds of spent cartridges.

Azza and her devastated entourage of five women and eleven young children took refuge in a neighbor's shack, after they were thrown out into the crossfire. Amid the ear-shattering explosions from Israeli artillery and Palestinian counter-fire, Azza, the director of a women's rights NGO working with USAID, tried to reassure the terrified women and children of our family that they were going to be all right. She heroically did this while her own two sons, Hazem and Qosai were being used by the Israeli soldiers as human shields against the defensive fire from the resistance in our neighborhood.

One member of my husband's news crew, staying in our Beit Hanoun home, was also taken by the soldiers, as well as three of Qassem's cousins in the neighboring house and his elderly aunt. The soldiers screamed at their hostages that they were members of Hamas, at which point Qassem's Aunt Aicha showed them the liquor cabinet in her son's house, proving that soldiers' accusations were nonsense. No Hamas member would have alcoholic beverages anywhere near his home.

Although the soldiers stopped ranting about Hamas, they still took the men and boys away.

One of the first things the soldiers had done as they entered my husband's home was to take all the mobile phones of the besieged family and crew. A journalist from the Ramattan headquarters, later trying to reach Azza on her phone, instead was answered by an Israeli soldier. The journalist asked about the whereabouts of the men and children who had been taken, and was told by the soldier that they would not be hurt. Although this was weak reassurance indeed, it gave us hope that they were still alive up to that point.

In fact, while the kids eventually did come back physically unhurt, the Israeli soldiers viciously beat the older hostages before releasing most of them. Qassem's oldest cousin Emad, a businessman known for his unflinching courage, was taken away by the Israeli military when they withdrew. We still have no information about his whereabouts or safety.

As the tanks and the machine guns relentlessly rained death and destruction on our neighborhood, the Palestinian resistance was faced with a difficult dilemma: how to defend the neighborhood against an Israeli military machine that had taken root in the house of one of the village leaders? To shoot meant to damage his home and, possibly, unwittingly hurt the boys. But not to shoot meant to accept the presence of a vicious snipers' nest in the midst of the village, shooting and killing the residents of Beit Hanoun.

The resistance shot back, and the families, huddling for protection in the neighboring houses, endured the trauma of a full day of rocket, grenade, and heavy machine gun fire. At one point my 73 year-old mother-in-law and pregnant sister-in-law Heba braved a break in the fire to drag an injured man out of the street and into a nearby clinic. He died before he reached the clinic, one of the more than 100 Palestinians killed in what the Israelis call this murderous operation, "Summer Rain", most of them civilians, 18 of them children. More than 400 Palestinians have been wounded, including 108 children, according to the UN.

That day, the Israeli Army withdrew at about 20h00 under pressure from the dogged resistance, possibly assisted by the frenzied calls to the numerous contacts of my husband and his cousin Ayman. Ayman, stranded in Cairo after the border closed while he was on a business trip in Paris, had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown with his wife Faten and six children stuck with Azza in the thick of the invasion.

We are under no illusions. They will be back, to kill and destroy and commit their war crimes against a captive population. Because, with no one able or willing to stop them, they can.

Mysteries of War

From the BBC (7/29) "Briefing the Security Council on Friday, [UN Humanitarian ChiefJan] Egeland said some 600 people had been killed by Israeli action in Lebanon, of which around a third were children. 'It's been horrific... There is something fundamentally wrong with the war, where there are more dead children than armed men,' Mr Egeland said."

 


Since WWI, war has fundamentally changed from killing and wounding soldiers in combat to destroying civilians. Despite the Geneva Conventions, which define targetting civilians as a war crime, and despite the newer "high precision" bombs that can hone in on infrastructure (and specific human beings considered to be criminals), the innocent continue to die in huge numbers. Why?

War

  

Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beiruit

Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can it take?

BYLINE: Robert Fisk

In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus-headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its after math, these a with drew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.

That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive. Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine' the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the faade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"

And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rub-ble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man' and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics' and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the huddled masses southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

My people died of hunger, and he who

Did not perish from starvation was

Butchered with the sword'

They perished from hunger In a land rich with milk and honey.

They died because the vipers and

Sons of vipers spat out poison into

The space where the Holy Cedars and

The roses and the jasmine breathe

Their fragrance.

And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.

And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.

And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".

Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

Then, on my balcony - a glance to checkthe location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."

On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.

Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart

And kisses - to the sea and clouds,

To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.

From the soul of her people she makes wine,

From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.

So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

'Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate'

U.S. Green Party on the Crisis in Lebanon

If you are horrified by the overwhelming support from Democrats for the Israeli invasion and destruction of Lebanon, you might consider the Greens in the upcoming election:

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org

For Immediate Release:
Thursday, July 20, 2006

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805,starlene@greens.org

Greens to Bush: Press Israel to stop the attacks
on Lebanon

* Slaughter of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians is a punishable war crime; use of U.S. weapons for such purposes violates U.S. laws


WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Green Party leaders called on President Bush to demand that Israel immediately cease its invasion of Lebanon and its rain of destruction on civilian populations and infrastructure in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

Greens urged President Bush to press for an immediate ceasefire. The Green Party has
repeatedly called for negotiation, a halt to violence by both sides, and adherence to
international law as the only means to achieve peace and security for all Israelis,
Palestinians, and people in surrounding countries.

"The current U.S. reaction is a bipartisan disaster, with most Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress expressing unqualified support for Israel," said Rae Vogeler, Wisconsin Green candidate for the U.S. Senate . "While President Bush is busy rattling sabers at Iran and Syria and refusing to demand a ceasefire, hundreds of innocent Lebanese and
Palestinian civilians are dying."

Greens based their demand on the following:

* Israel's attacks violate Fourth Geneva
Convention prohibitions against "collective
punishment," i.e., the retaliatory killing of
civilians, "targeted" assassinations, and
destruction of the infrastructure of an occupied
territory. Israel's use of U.S.-made weapons
violates U.S. laws against deploying such weapons
for use against civilians.

* The attacks cannot be justified as a response
to the capture of an Israeli soldier who was in
Gaza as part of the occupation force. (The
current exchange of violence began with Israeli
shellings that killed eight Palestinian civilians
on a Gaza beach.) Israel itself is holding
thousands of Palestinian civilians, including
over 400 Palestinian children and 120 women, in
inhumane conditions and has reportedly subjected
some detainees to torture.

* Israel and the U.S. have refused to recognize
Hamas as the legitimate democratically elected
government of the Palestinian territories; the
current attacks are clearly meant to destroy
Hamas in the Palestinian territories and
Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to punish Palestinian
civilians for having elected Hamas.

* The current escalation of hostilities is a
result of Israel's illegal occupation (with U.S.
support) of Palestinian lands and daily brutality
and killing visited on Palestinians, land grabs
and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, cutoff of
water and electricity, destruction of homes and
businesses, economic strangulation, and
conversion of the Palestinian territories into
heavily guarded bantustans sealed off with a
'security' wall.

* The Olmert government's current actions,
especially deployment of troops into Lebanon,
risk a greater regional conflict that will
threaten global peace as other nations become
involved in the conflict, and will also hinder
efforts to effect U.S. troop withdrawal from
Iraq. Aside from the U.S. and Israel itself,
most of the world understands the attacks as
illegal Israeli military aggression.

Greens have repeatedly called for Israel to end the occupation and fully recognize the human rights of Palestinians, in accord with international law and U.N. directives, as necessary first steps for peace in the Middle East.

In November, 2005, the Green Party endorsed a resolution calling for divestment and a general boycott of Israel until it complies with international law and realizes human rights for Palestinians, including those living within Israel's borders
.

Greens have also endorsed the Palestinian Right of Return, consistent with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 (nonbinding, passed December 11,
1948), which states that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date."

For Green campaign listings, news, photos, and web sites, visit the Green Party's candidate spotlight page and the Green elections database , which lists all 2006 candidates.

The Green Party will hold its 2006 nationalmeeting, titled "El Futuro es Verde / The Future is Green," in Tucson, Arizona, from July 27 to 30 . For media credentialing, visit
.


MORE INFORMATION

Green Party of the United States
http://www.gp.org
1700 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 404
Washington, DC 20009.
202-319-7191, 866-41GREEN
Fax 202-319-7193

Green Party Peace Action Committee (GPAX)
http://www.gp.org/committees/peace

"El Futuro es Verde / The Future is Green"
National Meeting of the Green Party of the United
States in Tucson, Arizona, July 27-30, 2006
http://www.gp.org/meeting2006/
http://www.pimagreens.org/gpusanm/index.html
Media credentialing page:
http://www.gp.org/forms/media

STATEMENT OF THE ATLANTA FRIENDS MEETING ON THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS

From its earliest inception, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) has placed rejection of war as basic to our understanding of God’s will. We believe that human beings are capable of solving conflicts through reason, an empathetic understanding of the other’s point of view, and the courage to take principled, nonviolent action in the face of injustice.

In this spirit, the Atlanta Friends Meeting urges all parties in the current conflict to declare a ceasefire and work toward a negotiated settlement of their grievances. As Quakers who are also U.S. citizens, we strongly object to the fact that tax-payer funded U.S. military equipment is being used illegally in this conflict. We are very concerned that Israel is using weapons supplied by the United States to target Palestinian & Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in violation of the US Arms Export Control Act and the Geneva Conventions.

The Israeli air force fighter squadrons are composed of Lockheed Martin F-16I Fighting Falcons and Boeing F-15Is, which fire US-manufactured AMRAAM, Sidewinder, and Sparrow missiles. From 2000-2005, the United States licensed to Israel at least $1.062 billion of spare parts, engines, and missiles for its F-15 and F-16 fighter planes.

From 2000-2005, the United States licensed to the Israeli navy more than $572 million worth of patrol boat, ship, and submarine components and spare parts, torpedoes, and sonar equipment.

From 2000-2005, the United States licensed to Israel more than $348 million worth of tanks, components, and spare parts.

(Statistics for US weapons licensed to Israel are compiled from the State Department's annual report to Congress pursuant to Sec. 655 of the Foreign Assistance Act)

By using US-supplied weapons to attack Gaza and Lebanon, Israel is violating the terms of the US Arms Export Control Act and Foreign Assistance Act. The Arms Export Control Act restricts the use of US weapons to legitimate self-defense and internal policing; US weapons cannot be used to attack civilians in offensive operations. The Foreign Assistance Act prohibits US aid of any kind to a country that routinely kills civilians as a result of its military operations.

The Atlanta Friends Meeting urges the President and Congress to act immediately to halt Israel’s military attacks in the Middle East that are being conducted with U.S.-supplied weapons in violation of our laws. We urge the President and Congress to stop all foreign assistance and military equipment exports to Israel until it ceases military attacks outside of its internationally recognized borders.

Adopted in Meeting for Business - July 16, 2006
Sally MacEwen, Clerk of the Meeting

Negotiate? Or just kill each other?

A way out of the Gaza crisis

By Arthur Neslen, Al Jazeera, 4 July 2006

Arthur Neslen is an Israeli journalist working in Tel Aviv. His first book, Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche, was recently published by Pluto Press.

Out of sight of the international press pack, a bid to resolve the Gaza crisis, involving a dialogue between a Jewish religious leader and Hamas representatives, continues and is well advanced.

"I'm talking to Hamas representatives every day," a weary sounding Menachem Froman told me by telephone from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, where he lives and works as a rabbi. "We have had a lot of meetings and I have just spoken to an aide of my prime minister about this."

But Tel Aviv's interest in a negotiated end to the standoff is far from assured.

The day before the tanks rolled into Gaza, Froman had been due to launch an extraordinary peace initiative at a news conference in Jerusalem with Muhamed Abu Tir, the Hamas MP, Khaled Abu Arafa, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, and three Israeli rabbis.

The panel was to have made a collective call for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the beginning of a process to release all Palestinian prisoners and the immediate start of negotiations with Hamas on the framework for a peace deal based on 1967 borders.

They would also have announced that Jewish and Muslim religious leaders could achieve peace where Israel's politicians had failed.

But the response from Israel's security establishment was crushing.

Stymied

Hours before the meeting was due to start, the Shin Bet detained Abu Tir and Abu Arafa and warned them not to attend the meeting. The news conference's organisers were forced to contact the other rabbis - who were already on the road to Jerusalem - and tell them not to come.

Instead of a triumphant statement of mutual respect and dialogue, a subdued and gently defiant three-man panel fended off aggressive questioning from an unruly Israeli press pack.

As Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son was killed by Hamas in 1994, said that the Palestinians had been pushed into the kidnapping by an inhuman occupation, one journalist jumped up and down shouting: "Should someone who murdered your son be freed?"

Frankenthal responded with dignity: "It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say that they are terrorists and we must fight them.

"But in the eyes of the Palestinians, they are liberators. We need to understand that it is the obligation of the Palestinians, as it is the obligation of every other nation, to fight for their liberation. The time has come for reconciliation, and the only way to achieve that is to talk."

Talking, however, requires a partner.

Kidnapped

Two days after the news conference, Abu Tir and Abu Arafa were kidnapped by Israeli forces, along with a third of the Hamas cabinet. Four days later, Israel revoked both men's citizenship and residency rights in Jerusalem. As the Jerusalem Post headline put it: Shin Bet foils Hamas-Jewish meeting.

An even more accurate headline might have been the one Israel National Radio's Arutz Sheva website ran a few days later, pertaining to another story: The peace process is a bigger danger than Hamas.

In this opinion piece, Ted Belman said that "the threat of rockets raining down on Israel from Gaza isn't nearly the threat that the peace process was and is" because peace talks would require Israeli concessions.

"To avoid this fate, the violence in the territories would have to continue at tolerable levels, but that doesn't solve the problem," he said. Belman concluded that the Palestinians needed to be provoked.

Some argue that Israel's re-invasion of Gaza was a similar provocation aimed at bringing down the Hamas government and preventing a unified Palestinian negotiating stance based on the prisoners' document.

Sharon's path

Having ruled out the only possible solutions that could have bought a temporary peace, Olmert and Peretz are now the proud owners of a Sharonist policy which, almost by definition, strengthens Hamas in the occupied territories and far-right forces at home. American and British support for it traps them further within a dynamic that heats the pot of bloodshed, even as they dishonestly promise their people disengagement, convergence and peace.

Could Froman's efforts offer them a way out of the strings with which the Palestinian fighters have so daringly bound them?

The rabbi is currently "neither eating nor sleeping" as he talks with Hamas representatives, building on his meetings with Mahmoud al-Zahar earlier this year. Froman may be an eccentric, but he has a formidable track record.

A co-founder of the messianic Gush Khatif settlers movement, Froman split from the group after Baruch Goldstein's Hebron massacre.

He became a religious adviser to the Knesset and brokered the release from prison of Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He also brokered Yassin's subsequent announcement of a ceasefire, which Israel refused to accept and Yassin subsequently withdrew.

Yasser Arafat considered him a brother.

Indeed, a peace plan the two men were working on was reaching a culmination point in Arafat's final days. It involved Arafat signing off on an independent Palestinian state and permanent religious ceasefire, the latter with the support of key Israeli civic and religious leaders.

It was scuppered by an inconvenient phone call from the then-interior minister, Gideon Ezra, and a deterioration in Arafat's health which, by the following day, had rendered him unable to take visitors.

Ironies abound in the history of Froman's peace efforts. His uncle was killed in the 1930s by Ezzedine al-Qassam, the militant Palestinian cleric whose name was later adopted by Hamas's armed wing. Yet Froman is on record as saying he has more in common with "my brothers and sisters in Hamas" than with secular Israelis.

His motivations stem from a deep commitment to the once-integral universal tradition in Jewish thought, best summarised by Rabbi Hillel's "do unto others" maxim. He believes that while the land of Israel is holy, sovereignty over it is not and so aspires to live as a Palestinian Jew in a Palestinian state. For the past two years, however, he has been living under police protection because of death threats from other settlers.

Should his peace efforts bear fruit, perhaps his national-religious neighbours will be reminded that in the messianic age, according to Isaiah, the wolf is supposed to lie down with the lamb.

You can find this article at:

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D6B63C28-F631-4DA5-A76F-9014523ABCD6.htm

Israeli Human Rights Groups Protest Gaza Disaster

Six Human Rights Groups to Israeli High Court: Renew Fuel Supply to Gaza and Open the Crossings for Food, Equipment and Humanitarian Supplies


Today, July 11, 2006, six human rights groups petitioned the Israeli High Court demanding that the crossings in Gaza be opened to allow for the steady and regular supply of fuel, food, medicine, and equipment, including spare parts needed to operate generators.

The groups – the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Hamoked: Center for Defence of the Individual, B’tselem, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and Gisha - Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement also asked for an urgent hearing in order to prevent serious harm to the health of the civilian population, especially patients in hospital, and to prevent the breakdown of the water and sewage system in Gaza.

During the current military operation in the Gaza Strip the Israeli military has interrupted the supply of fuel to Gaza and kept Gaza`s crossings mostly closed to supply of food and other humanitarian goods. The uninterrupted supply of fuel and equipment is necessary for the functioning of Gaza`s health and sanitation systems, and Gaza requires a steady supply of food and medicine.

Since Gaza`s power station was destroyed on June 28, there is an increased need for fuel to power the generators in Gaza and for spare parts to keep the generators running at such a high capacity. The closure of Karni Crossing has led to shortages in food at a time when, given the difficulty of obtaining electricity to prepare and refrigerate foodstuffs, Gaza requires increased shipments of dairy products, meat, flour, and other goods.

Without a steady supply of fuel and parts, hospitals cannot perform life-saving surgery and treatment plants cannot pump and treat sewage in Gaza. Gaza hospitals have reduced their activities to life-saving procedures. Since the bombing of the power plant, Gaza`s water utility has been dumping 60,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into the sea each day, for lack of power and equipment to run the treatment plants, and there is concern that untreated sewage will pollute the aquifer or spill into the streets.

Because of the electricity shortages, stores in Gaza have stopped selling meat and dairy products. Trucks laden with food and medicine have been stuck at Karni Crossing, which has been closed since July 6, including 230 containers from international aid organizations.

Withholding fuel, food, and equipment from Gaza residents constitutes collective punishment, in violation of international law. The petition argues that Israel is not fulfilling its legal obligations to provide for the needs of the civilian population and to distinguish between military and civilian targets.

According to Faysal Shawa, a businessman and Gaza resident: "We have been thrown back to the way people lived 100 years ago ... We don`t have water, we don`t have milk for our kids."

According to Maher Najer, Deputy Director of Gaza`s Water Company: "We face severe shortages in the electricity, fuel, and spare parts needed to operate Gaza`s water and sewage systems. These shortages threaten to create a public health catastrophe."


© All rights reserved to ACRI
last updated : 11/07/06

Israel Has Crossed A Moral Boundary

Outrage at the new human rights violations by the IDF in Gaza is shared by those who would see Israel's religious state replaced by a more inclusive democracy, as well as those who, like Michael Lerner (below), love and support Israel as a homeland and refuge for Jews. Regardless of one's position, it is clear that the passions aroused by this conflict have made Israel/Palestine one of the most dangerous places in the world. As Juan Cole points out, fifty thousand Turks demonstrated on Sunday, and 3000 went into the streets in Cairo, despite the government crackdown. Cole says, "if it weren't for authoritarian governments in the region, hundreds of thousands of people would be on the streets demonstrating as we speak. Since they can't demonstrate, they turn to Islamist politics and sometimes terrorism. Ironically, a sense of justice denied and outrage over human rights violations can actually turn people toward an acceptance of extreme measures."

Please take action.


Israel has Crossed a Moral Boundary
Rabbi Michael Lerner

In 2003 I was prevented from speaking at a large demonstration protesting the impending war in Iraq because I was deemed too pro-Zionist by one of the sponsoring organizations. My sin then, as now, is that I believe that both sides have acted with insensitivity and have been oblivious to the needs of the other, and both sides need to repent.

I still believe that now, and as late as last week was calling on the tens of thousands of readers of www.tikkun.org to insist to the Palestinians that they would be far more effective if they were to adopt the non-violent strategies of Gandhi, King, and Mandela rather than to imagine themselves capable of militarily defeating Israel. And just as I’ve critiqued the state terrorism against civilians that the IDF brings to the West Bank occupation, so I’ve always critiqued the terrorism of some sectors of the Palestinian population.

But this week it’s impossible as a Jew and as an American to not notice that a new human rights violation by Israel has taken place which manages to surpass many of its previous violations in cruelty and in the outrage it has generated.

Anyone has ever faced the crippling heat of the desert-like conditions of southern Israel or the Gaza strip knows the desperation for water that comes each summer. So when Israel bombed and destroyed the electricity system for 1.2 million Gazans and thereby made all electric pumps inoperable, they inflicted a collective punishment on the entire Gazan population.

The alleged justification was a desire to punish Palestinians for electing a Hamas government, and more immediately to retrieve a soldier who had been “kidnapped” (the quotes because this was not a civilian but a soldier in uniform, so if Israel sees itself as at war with Hamas, then the only possible description is that their soldier was captured by the other side). The Hamas government, however, has publicly urged the “kidnappers” whom it does not control to free the captured soldier.

Moreover, the outrage in Israel about this “kidnap” reflects a huge level of systematic denial going on in the consciousness of Israelis and many who support its policies—because virtually every human rights group including the various Israeli human rights organizations has chronicled tens of thousands of acts of "kidnap" of this sort by the IDF against Palestinian civilians, who are then kept in detention for as long as six months without a trial, often facing brutal torture, and then released without ever having been charged with any crime. Of course, and I thank God for this because I care for the well being of the people of Israel , and as a Jew I am deeply tied to the success and safety of this particular Jewish society, the Palestinians have never been able to punish hundreds of thousands or millions of Israelis collectively for these systematic violations of human rights. To the extent that they do so through acts of terror, I condemn those acts.

This is a defining moment in our relationship with Israel for all Americans of whatever faith. Just as we need to make clear to our own government that its human rights violations in Guantanamo and Iraq are unacceptable, so we need to communicate to the Israeli people that the mass punishment of a million people for the acts of a few is as unacceptable when it comes from a democratic society as when it comes from the willful oppression of entrenched authoritarian dictators. Even if, God forbid, the captured soldier is murdered by the lunatics who captured him, it is only they and their conscious sponsors who should be punished, not random Palestinians, unless you think it equally appropriate to some day punish the entire American public for the three million Vietnamese killed by American action in Vietnam or for the horrendous acts which continue in Guantanamo and Iraq even today.

Unfortunately, we can’t count on our U.S. government to convey this sentiment without qualifying its concerns in ways that essentially communicate that Israel can do whatever it wants and we won’t interfere.

So the onus is upon us as ordinary citizens to act and act decisively. We need to communicate our concerns to legislators and media. We need to organize demonstrations in front of the offices of our elected officials, and also outside Israeli consulates and those Jewish institutions which continue to use their influence to support Israeli policy even at this moment (there are a few which have spoken out in critique, but very very few). And we need to write to those in power in Israel, starting with Prime Minister Olmert, telling them that even those of us who love Israel and will never let it be destroyed find this particular action unconscionable, demand that Israel immediately rebuild the electricity system, and that Israel stop trying to impose its will with military might but instead sit down with the Palestinians and negotiate a lasting peace.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, the largest circulation liberal/progressive Jewish magazine in the world. He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, national chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives , and the author of ten books, most recently a 2006 national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right

On Kidnapping

Look who's been kidnapped!

Hundreds of Palestinian 'suspects' have been kidnapped from their homes and will never stand trial
Arik Diamant

It's the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.

A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.

This might be the end of the kidnapping, but the nightmare has just begun. The soldier's mother collapses, his father prays. His commanding officers promise to do everything they can to get him back, his comrades swear revenge. An entire nation is up-in-arms, writing in pain and worry.

Nobody knows how the soldier is: Is he hurt? Do his captors give him even a minimum of human decency, or are they torturing him to death by trampling his honor? The worst sort of suffering is not knowing. Will he come home? And if so, when? And in what condition? Can anyone remain apathetic in the light of such drama?

Israeli terror

This description, you'll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The "soldier" was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew "someone" who had done "something."

We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as "Scream Hill" (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows.

No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive.

When the Palestinians do this, we call it "terror." When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.

Suspects?

Some people will say: The IDF doesn't "just" kidnap. These people are "suspects." There is no more perverse lie than this. In all the years I served, I reached one simple conclusion: What makes a "suspect"? Who, exactly suspects him, and of what?

Who has the right to sentence a 17-year-old to kidnapping, torture and possible death? A 26-year-old Shin Bet interrogator? A 46-year-old one? Do these people have any higher education, apart from the ability to interrogate? What are his considerations? I all these "suspects" are so guilty, why not bring them to trial?

Anyone who believes that despite the lack of transparency, the IDF and Shin Bet to their best to minimize violations of human rights is naïve, if not brainwashed. One need only read the testimonies of soldiers who have carried out administrative detentions to be convinced of the depth of the immorality of our actions in the territories.

To this very day, there are hundreds of prisoners rotting in Shin Bet prisons and dungeons, people who have never been –and never will be – tried. And Israelis are silently resolved to this phenomenon.

Israeli responsibility

The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn't clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive.

Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses, as Palestinian society has done, we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories.

Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.

Arik Diamant is an IDF reservist and the head of the Courage to Refuse organization
(07.05.06, 12:35)

Collective Punishment

Mona El-Farra, is a 52 year-old woman, who lives in Gaza City. She says of herself, “ I am a physician by training, a human rights and women's rights activist by practice.” She has a blog that she has entitled “From Gaza with love” (see (http://www.fromgaza.blogspot.com/)

Saturday, July 01, 2006
Dear all:

My friend Hoda lives next to the Ministry of Interior building in Gaza that was hit last night with 2 rockets, the attack occured 2am yesterday, please forgive me about the accuracy, l am starting to lose track of days and nights and how many times we were attacked. Hoda told me that the whole building was shaking.

She went out, with her pyjamas, all the residents were out in their night wear, children faces were too pale,some of them were crying hystiricaly, the fume filled the place , the flat next door were largely damaged (it is the next to the building that was targeted),where a family with 6 children live ,there was large fire, the firee brigades used her flat, to put off the fire, the Ministry of interior building was empty during the attack !!!!,the aim was revenge and destroyingof the building ,i live 150 meters from Hoda place, no body is safe no one is immune .what happened with Hoda reminded me with the night when late president Arafat headquarters in Gaza were attacked, 2 years ago, I lived nearby, and too close, that night 37 shells hit that building.

The power is still off ... we had it for 3 hours yesterday, enough to recharge my laptop, and mobile phone and to do some cooking. I am highly concerned about the hospitals, the fuel supply to run the local generators is running down ,the borders are completely sealed since the attack, no fuel was allowed inside Gaza since that date, the medication and medical supplies are running down too, We do not have enough strategic storage, because of the previous ongoing sanctions, our drug stores are exhausted, the water supply is scarce too, we need to rationalise our water use,we are going through big humanitrian disaster.

Sonic booming
When the get fighters ,go fastly through the sound barrier, we expereince this sort of terrifying raids at least 7 times, in different times of the day and night, many international human rights orgs. appealed to Israel to stop this raids, knowing its harmful effect on people, they never used it before withdrawal from Gaza.

How can i let you know what is my personal feelings? During this raids, if I am sleeping my bed shakes tremendously, my dauhgter jumps to my bed, shivering with fear then both of us end up on the floor ,my heart beats go very fast , and i had to pacify my daughter, now she knows we need to pacify each other , she feels my fear, if I am awake i flinch up and scream loudly, i cannot help myself, ok I am a doctor and mature middle aged woman with large experience and an activist too, but with this booming i go hystirical, after all we are all humans and each have its own threshold, hearing the sound of breaking windows is frightening too, many tin roofs in the refugee camps collapsed on the heads of families, as a result of this booming, hospitals received large number of psychologicaly traumatised children.

1.5 million residents in Gaza face COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT, feelings of hate will grow larger, and all these assaults and savage agressions against population will not bring peace or security to Israel, only justice peace will.

Israel is talking about security of its citizens, against militiamen, who are armed with some home made fire sticks rockets. Israel is talking about terrorism, what can i call this sonic booming and power plant attack, but STATE TERRORISM

Yours in love and solidarity

Mona ElFarra

Presbyterians Not Backing Down on Divestment

When faced with a clash between their investment practices and their socially responsible investment policy, the Presbyterians have always called for a step-by-step process that applies ever-increasing pressure on corporations which profit from human rights violations. Divestment is a final step, one that need not be engaged in if a corporation brings its policies in line with international norms and values. Their press release is below:

Presbyterian Israel-Palestine Mission Network

PRESS INFORMATION For more details, please contact:
Kristine Currie 313-303-4458 Email: Kcurrie45@sbcglobal.net

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Presbyterian Divestment - Still on the Table

(BIRMINGHAM) June 21, 2006 - The Presbyterian Church (USA)'s 217th General Assembly retained the process known as "phased, selective divestment". The current resolution urges investments "only in peaceful pursuits" in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem; and affirms the "customary corporate engagement process" of the Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee (MRTI) charged with carrying out General Assembly policy.
Today's decision continues the call to end the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories. It further criticizes the separation barrier which "encroaches into Palestinian territory and fails to follow the legally recognized borders of Israel."
Palestinians are facing a humanitarian catastrophe. United Nations reports reveal that 60% of Palestinians are now living in acute poverty and that over half of all Palestinians are completely dependent on food aid. The rise in poverty is a direct result of Israel's policies of occupation. These include road closures, the construction of the separation barrier, checkpoints, and restrictions on the movement of Palestinian commerce in particular food.
Since the 2004 GA, the PC (USA) MRTI committee has focused upon corporations whose profits are derived from the sale of products and services used in illegal activities violating human rights. The church's socially responsible investment policy follows a process of corporate engagement to assure that its investment portfolio is in accordance with the church's social justice policies. After developing criteria specific to the pertinent human rights issues, the process involves four steps: identify target companies; engage management in dialogue, initiate shareholder action, and, if needed as a last resort: recommend divestment to a subsequent General Assembly.
Currently, the MRTI has identified five corporations whose products and services are used to harm civilians: Caterpillar, Motorola, Citigroup, ITT Industries and United Technologies.

"Accidental" death from a Palestinian Point of View

Begging for a Response
Israel’s ongoing air strikes on Gaza are politically motivated
By Sam Bahour

The Israelis are a stiff necked people. They refuse to accept anything less than full acquiescence by anyone involved in their plans, no matter the cost -- human, political, financial, or otherwise. Israel’s non-stop aggression against Palestinians – averaging two Palestinian deaths a day for several years now – is much more than what is popularly being coined in Israel and abroad as low-intensity warfare. If international and humanitarian laws are to be used as a measure, the ongoing Israeli killing spree is taking on the shape of a sustained campaign of war crimes aimed to remove the Palestinians from Israel’s way.

The recent Israeli shelling of a crowded Gaza beach full of Palestinian civilians spending a weekend by the sea is the latest tragedy in an unrelenting effort undertaken by the newly elected Israeli government to provoke Palestinians, in specific, the Hamas-led Palestinian government. The carnage of this latest Israeli attack (the afternoon attack, not the morning one) left a toll of 10 dead and over 50 wounded. The entire incident, like the hundreds prior, quickly become a footnote in some Israeli military report that will most likely also carry an empty apology for the large numbers of children and women among the dead. President Bush refused to condemn the attack and the United Nations, like a large slice of the Israeli public, will most likely not even take note of it.

In a world that has become numb to Middle Eastern carnage, except if the dead are Israeli, it does not come as a surprise that, at most, the dead are merely counted, hardly ever are they named. The lack of world leadership has moved the international community to completely lose any moral compass whatsoever. The basic fact that one party, the one burying its children on nearly daily basis, is an occupied people, the Palestinians. The other party, the one launching air and sea strikes on civilian populations, and constantly shelling the Gaza Strip is the occupying party, Israel. This core fact of the conflict has become lost in some misguided desire to create symmetry between Palestinians and Israelis. International and humanitarian laws classify an occupied people as “protected persons,” and every signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, including the US, has an obligation to interfere to stop this cruel and inhumane Israeli collective punishment of Palestinians.

Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including...wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, …or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."

International law does not release from responsibility an occupying force because it apologizes for killing those it occupies, especially an occupying force that has instilled a mode of operation of systematically killing and then cynically apologizing.

Israel kills with purpose. Following the rise to government of the hard line Hamas movement to the Palestinian government, Israel is optimizing on the US led campaign to bring a full collapse of the democratically-elected Palestinian government, by killing on a daily basis of what the world’s media has sadly accepted as “targeted assassinations.” There is a clear political agenda in the latest round of Israeli attacks. Israel is begging for Hamas to react in kind by breaking its one sided truce that Hamas has held for over a year, despite Israel’s continued provocations.

Israel knows that as it continues to cage Palestinians in pockets of living hell, it is human nature that sooner or later the Palestinian government or even Palestinian individuals will be forced into reacting by trying to defend its population, never mind that the Palestinians do not have the means to even dent the Israeli military powerhouse. Nevertheless, by the Palestinians striking back, and sadly taking Israeli lives in the process, Israel can then kick into action its well-oiled public relations spin machine to turn the tables on the entire Palestinian cause for independence and self-determination and thus, further continue the delegitimization and the demise of the Palestinians.

Israel’s renowned planning efforts forgot one elementary fact of life. Like with slavery, there was a right and wrong and in the end right prevailed and slavery ended. And, like with South Africa’s Apartheid, there was a right and wrong, and the racist Apartheid system fell flat on its face. The Israelis have forgotten that militarily occupying the Palestinians -- for over forty years now -- is wrong too, and their occupation will come tumbling down in due time. Sadly, as Israeli politicians do cartwheels to sustain their oppression of Palestinians, or maintain their popularity with the dead bodies of Palestinians, both Palestinians and Israelis are paying the price with their lives.

The writer is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian City of El-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and can be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.

June 9, 2006
Ramallah

400 Israeli Women Are Watching

Checkpoint Witnesses
By Amelia Thomas
The Christian Science Monitor
Wednesday 07 June 2006
The Israeli women of Machsom Watch keep a close eye on soldier behavior at the roughly 600 Israeli-controlled checkpoints in the West Bank.
Nablus, West Bank - The midday heat beats down fiercely as a silver car swings off the main Israeli highway toward the West Bank. Pulling over just before an army-patrolled checkpoint, the three women inside pull name tags and signs from their purses. "Machsom Watch" read the logos they attach to their shirts, the windshield, and on a flag fluttering from the back window. These Israeli women are volunteers for an organization whose members venture into the West Bank twice a day, every day, to some of the roughly 600 Israeli checkpoints (machsomim in Hebrew) there.
Machsom Watch, founded in 2001 by three seasoned activists, consists of some 400 ordinary Israeli women who take turns standing at Israeli-controlled checkpoints, watching for human rights violations and harassment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers.
Some simply observe and report; others attempt to talk with soldiers or intervene on the part of Palestinians. Each "patrol" produces a report of their shift's events, which is then put up on their website (www.machsomwatch.org). Most checkpoints the women monitor are inside the West Bank, rather than on border points between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The purpose of such interior checkpoints is solely "to prevent free passage of Palestinian residents between their villages and towns," says group spokeswoman Adi Dagan. This violates international law, she says. The checkpoints' hours of operation and procedures are "arbitrary" and often changed, she says, making access to jobs, schools, and hospitals for many Palestinians at best, time- consuming and at worst, impossible.
The Israeli Defense Force disputes this. "If the Army's sole purpose would be to prevent freedom of movement for normal Palestinians," says IDF spokesman, Capt. Jacob Demal, "it would be a waste of our time. But checkpoints are there to impair the transportation efforts of potential suicide bombers, who use the routes time and time again."
On the issue of checkpoints' hours and regulations changing "arbitrarily," he agrees. But the changes, he says, are based on "general or specific intelligence," in response to the threat level.
Machsom Watch's women are from many professional backgrounds, social classes, and regions of Israel. "Most have never been politically active before," Ms. Dagan says. "They are largely women in their 50s, 60s, or beyond, whose kids are grown up and now for the first time ever they can act on their beliefs."
The three grandmothers taking a Sunday afternoon shift that circles the Nablus region are no exception. Two, Alix Weizmann and Aliya Strauss, are teachers; the third, Susan Lourenco, a university administrator, was born and raised in England by German Jewish parents. Each is acutely aware that her actions are not widely appreciated. "Most average Israelis," says Ms. Lourenco, "don't know what's going on and don't care. But our priority is to make the Israeli public know what's happening in this region and show them that changes have to be made."
"That's not an easy task," adds chirpy Ms. Strauss, now a busy social activist and demonstration-goer in her mid-70s. She sports an "End the Occupation" baseball cap and huge sunglasses.
"I finally decided to make a commitment and join two years ago," says Ms. Weizmann, whose four children all served in the IDF and don't approve of her "unpatriotic" activities. "I think we make a bit of a difference. You have to do the little that you can."
The car winds through the dramatic, rocky country of the Samarian Hills. "Palestinians aren't allowed on this road," notes Lourenco, though the road cuts through Palestinian farmland. The only other vehicles are military tanks and Humvees, jeeps from nongovernmental agencies, or the cars of Jewish settlers - some from illegal settlements that dot the hillsides. About 400 miles of such roads, open only to Jews, snake across the West Bank.
Finally, the women arrive at the first checkpoint on their itinerary, near the Jewish settlement of Shavei Shomron. The neat tarmac road continues up to the settlement; the road that was once the main thoroughfare between the cities of Jenin and Nablus peters out into a narrow, poorly surfaced road.
At the top of this road lies the first checkpoint, an army outpost complete with trailers, watchtower, concrete posts, and curling razor wire. Israeli citizens are not allowed to venture any further. "So we'll just hang around, and see what happens," says Weizmann with a rueful grin.
The women are not relishing their stop here.
"Last week, the soldiers shouted all kinds of vulgar insults at us, too disgusting to relate," recounts Lourenco.
The women encounter other kinds of abuse. "We've been spat at, screamed at, sworn at, our cars scratched by settlers," she continues. None of the women is frightened of a threat from the "enemy" Palestinian side. "They know we're there to help them," says Strauss. "It's our side we're scared of."
As the women stand in the baking heat, a Palestinian minibus pulls up carrying workers from the Palestinian Archaeological Authority, its roof laden with wheelbarrows and shovels. Each morning at 4 a.m., they pass through this checkpoint; every day at 2 p.m., they return home. Almost every time, soldiers on guard delay them. "No authorization to pass today," calls the young soldier from the watchtower.
"But they came through this morning," shouts up Lourenco, on the workers' behalf.
The soldier sighs and picks up his telephone. After a short conversation, the soldier steps down from the tower, examines the workers' permits, then quickly lets them proceed. "It just goes to show," notes Lourenco as they pull away, "that decisions are all down to the individual soldier. That's the biggest problem of all."
Throughout the day, the women move from checkpoint to checkpoint. Their daily "patrol" takes roughly seven hours and includes stops at about five checkpoints, more if soldiers set up temporary "rolling" checkpoints.
Next, the women stop at the Beit Iba checkpoint on the outskirts of Nablus. The area is in chaos, as a new army restriction bans taxis and buses from entering or exiting the city. Two young Palestinian men sit in concrete corrals, a third in a tiny tin-doored inspection booth. The young men explain, in shouts, that they are being held as punishment for trying to circumvent the checkpoint. One has already been held, in stifling heat without even a place to sit, for almost four hours.
"Army rules forbid soldiers to punish civilians like this," says Weizmann, as Lourenco steps forward to talk to the commanding lieutenant, no older than 22. He stands, brandishing his machine gun at queuing civilians. He is not obliged to give out his name and does not turn toward her.
To these soldiers, the treatment is legitimate. "We're punishing them for trying to avoid the checkpoint," the young lieutenant finally offers. "Otherwise, what should we do - just let them go?"
"It's not allowed," says Lourenco firmly.
"Yes, it is," he replies, uncertainty wavering in his voice.
Minutes later, without explanation or apology, the men are briskly and quietly freed. It appears that, on this occasion, the presence of Machsom Watch has hastened their release.
As the women talk with another group of Palestinians having problems at the checkpoint, some soldiers look on.
"They're really annoying," says one, frowning.
"I don't have any opinion of them," says another flatly.
A third soldier attempts a polite smile. "They're not a problem," he says. "We work following the rules. It's only if we do something wrong." He glances over at the three women, "Well, then it might be a problem."
A trickle of Palestinians is slowly making its way through the checkpoint. "It's hard physically," the soldier continues. "Too hot in summer, too cold in winter. But we're protecting Israel from bombers and terrorists. Some people just want to go to work and we can't let them past." He shrugs. "You get used to it."
"I guess the intent [of Machsom Watch] is good, that they're trying to ease the situation for Palestinians," says IDF spokesman Captain Demal, who notes that the Army often cooperates by giving the women the cellphone numbers of the checkpoints' first-in-commands. "At the same time," he says, "they don't see the whole intelligence picture. And there's a big threat to soldiers." Soldiers have been killed at checkpoints. "We've done a steady job of improving checkpoints ... improving them on a human level," he adds.
The Machsom Watch women's biggest problem may lie in the suspicion with which both soldiers and civilian Israelis greet them, and the strain of witnessing unpleasant events on a weekly basis.
On their way home, the mood in the car is heavy, Lourenco is disturbed by what she sees as an increasing stranglehold on Palestinian civilians. She seldom sleeps well the night after her shift, she says, and rises early to write her report.
"After five years, we haven't been very successful," says Dagan. "Not a single checkpoint has been removed, and we haven't been able to change policies on restriction of movement for Palestinians. It's only getting worse," she continues. "But it's a long-term project to try to challenge something so big and deeply rooted."
"Often I feel we do so little," sighs Lourenco as the car pulls back into Tel Aviv's rush-hour traffic. "But I cannot live in Israel and remain silent. We show a peace-loving face to Palestinians who see no other Israelis but soldiers and settlers." And although she says she finds her task increasingly difficult, she knows that her presence at checkpoints makes a difference. "You should see the Palestinian women's eyes light up when we catch their eyes. I couldn't stop now."

Israeli Conscientious Objectors

Over 1000 Israelis have declared themselves conscientious objectors, unwilling to fight in the Occupied Territories (or at all). Israel does not recognize international agreements that uphold the right of people to refuse military service for reasons of conscience. Maayan Padan is one of the remarkable young people who have chosen to go to prison repeatedly for the "offence" of peace.

This message comes from New Profile, an Israeli organization dedicated to the demilitarization (or, as they say, "civil-ization") of Israeli society.

 

CO Maayan Padan has returned to prison for a second term. She was first sentenced to 7 days in prison for her refusal to enlist on 16 May, and then on 21 May she was given 21 more days in prison for staying AWOL between prison terms. Maayan has begun serving her prison term of 28 days in total on 21 May in Military Prison No. 400, and is due to be released on 15 June.

Before returning to prion, Maayan made the following statement:
Today, after my first prison term, I am stronger in my stand, that we should struggle to dismantle military organisations as such and to stop entrenching militarism in society. Children looking up to 'soldier heroes' interpret violent acts in a positive light and shape their characters and worldviews around them. Parents dress their babies as soldiers. Our sould are sacrifised in the name of land, but this sacrifise is a fiction, used as excuse to continue the systematic occupation, oppressing the spirit of the Palestinian people and creating deep grievances eventually leading to the desperate protest of terrorism. It is our duty to pose an alternative and to struggle for its right to exist.
Maayan's prison address is:
Maayan Padan
Military ID 6151802
Military Prison No. 400
Military Postal Code 02447, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-9579348

Recommended Action

First of all, please circulate this message and the information contained in it as widely as possible, not only through e-mail, but also on websites, conventional media, by word of mouth, etc.

Other recommendations for action:

1. Sending Letters of Support

Please send the imprisoned objectors letters of support (preferably postcards or by fax) to the prison addresses above.

2. Letters to Authorities

It is recommended to send letters of protest on behalf of the imprisoned objectors, preferably by fax, to:
Mr. Amir Peretz,
Minister of Defence,
Ministry of Defence,
37 Kaplan St.,
Tel-Aviv 61909,
Israel.
E-mail: sar@mod.gov.il or pniot@mod.gov.il
Fax: ++972-3-6976711

Copies can be sent to the commanders of the military prisons (note the updated fax number for prison No. 6) at:

Commander of Military Prison No. 6,
Military Prison No. 6,
Military postal number 01860, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-4-954-05-80 Commander of Military Prison No. 400,
Military Prison No. 400,
Military postal number 02447, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-9579389

Another useful address for sending copies would be the Military Attorney General:
Avichai Mandelblit,
Chief Military Attorney
Military postal code 9605, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-569-43-70

It would be especially useful to send your appeals to the Commander of the Induction Base in Tel-HaShomer. It is this officer that ultimately decides whether an objector is to be exempted from military service or sent to another round in prison:
Amir Rogowski,
Commander of Induction Base,
Baqum, Tel-HaShomer
Military Postal Code 02718, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-737-60-52

Copies of appeals can also be sent to:
Head of Incompatibles Unit
Induction Base (Baqum)
Tel-HaShomer
Military Postal Code 02718, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-737-67-05.

For those of you who live outside Israel, it would be very effective to send protests to your local Israeli embassy. You can find the address of your local embassy on the web.

Here is a sample letter, which you can use, or better adapt, in sending appeals to authorities on the prisoners' behalf:

Dear Sir/Madam,

It has come to my attention that [name & military ID], a conscientious objector, has been imprisoned [his/her] refusal to perform military service for the [n-th] time in a row, and is held in Military Prison No. [400/4/6].

The imprisonment of conscientious objectors such as [name] is a violation of international law, of basic human rights and of plain morals. The repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors is an especially grave offence, as it means sentencing a person more than once for the same offence, and has been judged by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to constitute a clear case arbitrary detention.

I therefore call for the immediate and unconditional release from prison of [name], without threat of further imprisonment in the future.

Sincerely, 

Just Doing My Job

  

Appeal from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel

Call for Donations to Aid Palestinian Hospitals

The financial crisis affecting the Palestinian Authority (PA) due to the stoppage of international aid and the freezing of the tax revenue by the state of Israel, has had a grave impact on the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and has led to an acute shortage of basic needs, such as medicines and food.

A number of Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have asked us at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel to assist them in acquiring a number of medicines and medical equipment needed for the daily functions of the hospitals. During visits we have conducted to several hospitals we witnessed the harsh reality of a scarcity of life saving medicines and medical equipment to be used in the operating rooms.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, together with several Israeli peace and human rights groups, began a campaign to raise funds in order to aid the Palestinian areas that were hardest hit as a result of the financial crisis, and to provide, as best we can, some of the urgent medical needs of the Palestinian hospitals, with whom we have been in contact for many years.

Additionally, we are handling individual cases of patients from the occupied territories who have not received permits needed to enter Israel for urgent treatment, or patients that the PA is not paying for their treatment, due to the financial crisis. This activity also involves legal costs.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel feels obligated to support our colleagues working in the Palestinian health system, who in this difficult time are doing all they can in order to grant the best medical service to the Palestinian population, and to aid patients and medical teams who are carrying the burden of this difficult crisis.

We turn to you with this urgent appeal asking that you donate to this activity according to your ability. In light of the urgency of the matter, we ask that those who are able to donate contact us as soon as possible, so that we can begin to transfer the aid immediately. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel plans on organizing shipments within the upcoming days.

We kindly request that you pass this message on to others, with the hope that they will answer our request and join us in this aid mission.

For more information regarding the crisis in the occupied territories:

Ibrahim Habib, Fieldwork Director, +972-54-7577696

Shabtai Gold, Public Outreach, +972-54-4860630

More information about the crisis is available on Physicians for Human Rights website: www.phr.org.il

How to donate:

All of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel’s activities are supported by donations from individuals and organizations. Inside Israel, donations to the organization are recognized as tax deductible. From outside Israel, tax deductible donations can be made through the New Israel Fund.

For more information regarding donations please contact: Daniel Hasson, +972-3-687-3718

mail@phr.org.il

www.phr.org.il

A (mostly) nonviolent demonstration

Uri Avnery
20.5.06
Who's guilty? The victim of course

THOSE WHO listened to the radio news last Saturday heard a stunning report: that Muhammad Abu-Ter and Uri Avnery had barricaded themselves together in a private home in a-Ram.

The very fact that these two - the No. 2 man of Hamas and the notorious Israeli leftist - were together was already shocking enough. But the fact that they had invaded the home of an innocent Palestinian family and barricaded themselves there, like criminals fleeing from the police, was even more staggering.

This false news item would, perhaps, deserve no special mention, if it were not typical of the whole media coverage, not only of this specific demonstration, but of all joint demonstrations of Israeli peace activists and Palestinians. More than that, it throws light on the close connection between the Israeli media and the occupation regime. Without this connection, it is doubtful if the occupation could have lasted for the 39 years it has so far.

Therefore it is worthwhile to analyse the events in detail.

FIRST OF all, the background. A-Ram (that's how the name is spoken, though its written form is al-Ram) was a small Palestinian village north of Jerusalem, on the highway to Ramallah. Since the "unification" of Jerusalem in 1967, the village has become much bigger. The reason: while the Palestinian population doubles every 18 years or so, it is well-nigh impossible to obtain a building permit in East Jerusalem. For lack of an alternative, many Arab East Jerusalemites build homes for their enlarged families in the surrounding villages. A-Ram has in fact become a town, but most of its 50 thousand inhabitants have Jerusalem (i.e. Israeli) identity cards, and their life revolves around Jerusalem. Their work, health services and universities are there. Officially, however, the town belongs to the occupied territories.

When it was decided to build the Separation Wall around Jerusalem, the plan was to cut a-Ram off from the city. Worse: the path of the Wall passes right down the middle of the main street - so that it does not separate between Palestinians and Israelis, but mostly between Palestinians and Palestinians.

To get an idea: it is as if a wall had been built in the middle of Broadway, from 42nd Street to Harlem. Or in the middle of the Champs-Elysees, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. Or in Berlin, in the middle of the Kurfuerstendamm, from the Memorial Church to the Messegelaende. The two parts of the city and its neighborhoods would be separated by a nine meter high wall.

When this was only in the planning stage, the inhabitants held a number of non-violent demonstrations. To all of them, Israeli peace activists were invited and came. But in the meantime, the monstrous Wall has become reality. It cuts off the holders of Israeli identity cards from the city where their businesses and places of employment are located. It cuts off the pupils from their schools, which are only 100 meters away on the other side of the wall. Not to mention the students who are separated from their universities; the sick, separated from their hospitals; even the dead, separated from their cemeteries.

Now the wall is nearing completion. It is still under discussion in the Supreme Court, but experience shows that that is pretty hopeless. One can still reach the town through an army checkpoint, but even this hole is about to be plugged: the Wall will close off this place, too. In the meantime, in some places there is still a high fence instead of the concrete structure, pending the conclusion of the court proceedings.

In order to protest this, a large Palestinian-Israeli event was planned. It was to be a march in the main street, along the Wall (on the Palestinian side, of course), from the town center to an improvised tribune, where speeches were to be made.

The details were worked out in three planning sessions. In order to underline the non-violent character of the event, it was decided that the schoolchildren, whose schools have been cut off, would march at the head in their school uniforms, their satchels on their backs, accompanied by their teachers. Also, an alternative route was planned for them in case there would be a danger of a clash with the army.

WHEN WE - about 300 Israeli activists of several peace movements - were approaching a-Ram, we were informed that large forces were waiting to block our passage at the checkpoint. Going around them, we reached the wall on the "Israeli" side. At this point there stands a high fence, instead of the concrete structure. We breached it and many demonstrators succeeded in crossing to the "Palestinian" side, into a-Ram, before the army, which was surprised by this move, succeeded in rushing up reinforcements.

In the meantime, the Palestinian demonstration had already started on its way, exactly as planned - at the head a group of boy-scout drummers with their flags, after them the small children of the first class, behind them the other schoolchildren, from small to big, then the main demonstration with posters and flags, led by a row of leaders of all Palestinian parties. The Israeli activists mingled with the Palestinians in order to demonstrate solidarity, and I was invited to join the front row.

That way I found myself walking between Abu-Ter, the Hamas leader who has become famous in Israel not least because of his brightly shining red beard, and the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem affairs, Abu Arafeh, also a Hamas member. Next to them there were the leaders of Fatah, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front and the People's (ex-Communist) Party. We marched arm in arm, and it seemed that the demonstration would pass off peacefully. And then, suddenly, we saw that the road ahead of us was blocked by a large contingent of soldiers and policemen who were waiting for us - rows of soldiers heavily armed from head to foot, in front of them mounted police on their horses and behind them army Humvees.

The first concern was the safety of the children. Their teachers led them into a side street, and we marched slowly on, on our way to the tribune. There could not have been a less threatening sight than the row of notables, arm in arm, walking in front.

ABOUT WHAT happened then I can testify as an eye-witness, and I am prepared to undergo any lie-detector test:

When we were about 50 meters from the concentration of soldiers and horses in the main street of a-Ram, a voice from a megaphone announced that the area had been declared a "Closed Military Zone" and that our demonstration was illegal. While we were standing, facing the soldiers, a huge salvo of tear gas canisters suddenly rained down on us. It was not preceded by any provocation.

Clouds of gas rose up between us, in front and behind. More salvos of stun grenades raised hell, and so we escaped to the nearby houses. I entered the nearest one and found myself in the company of Abu Ter, who received me with great friendliness. Our eyes were burning and tearful, and we could not talk much, but we decided to have a more meaningful conversation soon.

When the gas dispersed, we emerged to join the continuing demonstration. The activists formed again and again on the road, the policemen and soldiers attacked us again and again with tear gas and stun grenades, storming forward in waves - armed and well-protected soldiers, Humvees and police riders (wearing spurs, which are forbidden by Israeli laws for animal protection.)

Only at this stage - and that's the main thing! - did some local children and youngsters start to throw stones at the policemen - stones that could do no damage, since they fell short of the policemen, whose gas launchers have a far longer range. The demo organizers did their best to restrain them, but the anger of the youngsters against the soldiers who had invaded their town was too strong. After two hours, through a dialog with the senior police officer, contact was broken off and the Israeli activists returned home.

In the course of the event, 12 people - seven Palestinians and five Israelis - were detained. The Israelis were released a few hours later, the Palestinians remained in custody, with our lawyers dealing with their cases.

THAT WAS what happened in a-Ram. From then on, it was a story of the media.

The demonstration was widely covered, for two main reasons - the violence used and the meeting between me and Abu-Ter, which provided a piquant angle, since until now there has been no dialog between Hamas and Israelis. The news on all the three Israeli TV networks reported on the event extensively. That by itself was unusual - generally, most TV stations ignore our demonstrations, or devote a few seconds to them (except for a few reports by brave reporters.)

This time, too, no Israeli medium - TV, radio or newspaper - troubled to send reporters or photographers to the event, so there was no eyewitness Israeli media report from the scene. The TV stations showed clips taken by foreign networks. The reporters just made the most of what they heard from the police and us.

And lo and behold: all the media reported the same: the demonstrators had started the violence by throwing stones, two policemen "had been wounded and treated on the spot". (This lie repeats itself at all our demonstrations. One could begin to suspect that there are two policemen whose sole duties are to be "wounded and treated on the spot" each time we demonstrate.)

The police and army statements were outright lies. They knew in advance that our demonstration would be non-violent. I rely on them to have their agents at all our meetings, and we spoke about our preparations openly over the phone and in our e-mails. Two paid ads were published before the events in Haaretz. It is absolutely clear that the army and police had prepared in advance to suppress the demonstration by force. Otherwise they would not have brought horses and Humvees.

For many years we have witnessed the mendacity of official spokespersons, and I have no doubt that the reporters covering the occupied territories are aware of it. In some media, a sentence saying that "the demonstrators argue that it was the policemen who started the violence" appeared, but in all the media it was stressed that the violence started with us, so the police had no alternative but to react.

This is an Israeli tradition, which has unfortunately also been accepted by the international media: the Israeli security forces always "react" to the violence of the other side. But, curiously enough, the killed and wounded are mostly on the other side.

The small example of a-Ram illustrates what happens on a larger scale throughout the country: in matters concerning the army and police, the news in all the media, without exception, from Maariv to Haaretz, from Channel 1 to Channel 10, is indistinguishable from government propaganda. (with honorable exceptions in opinion columns and the op-ed pages.)

The chances of the victims getting fair coverage are close to nil. After all, the victims are always to blame.