UN-Truth

Palestinian Presidential and Legislative Council Elections are on hold — but local and municipal elections will be held in the West Bank on 17 July, it was announced today.

It must be because the elections for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) went so well this past Friday and Saturday…

(Apparently, one reason may be that there are no journalists with an open affiliation with Hamas who are members of the PJS, though there may be a few silent sympathizers … A good number of the journalists who are members of the PJS are affiliated with the other Palestinian “factions”, and there are also independents. In any case, the main reason that the elections went ahead, according to one journalist, was the intense desire for a change. A secondary reason, he said, was the interest and excitement created by the fact that new posts of responsibility would become available.)

The decision to declare the local and municipal elections was made by the Palestinian cabinet of ministers working with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is in Japan).

The Associated Press reported this evening that “Abbas’ rivals in Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, signaled they will not participate in the July 17 election, virtually guaranteeing that Fatah will reclaim key cities where Hamas won in the last round of local elections five years ago. But a Hamas boycott would also likely exclude Gaza from the voting and diminish the potential of the election to compare the present strengths of the bitter rivals … Fatah took a drubbing from Hamas in parliamentary elections in 2006, largely because voters wanted to punish Fatah for years of corruption, arrogance and mismanagement. The Abbas government decided Monday that elections will be held in dozens of West Bank communities with more than 5,000 residents. The voting will take place in stages, with the first towns voting July 17, said Palestinian Cabinet Minister Mohammed Ishtayeh. ‘It will be open to any person who wants to participate, including (those from) Hamas’, Ishtayeh said. However, Hamas signaled it would not field candidates because of a crackdown on the movement in the West Bank. Since the Gaza takeover, Abbas’ security forces have arrested hundreds of Hamas activists, closed Hamas charities and sent home Hamas mayors”… This AP story can be read in full here.

The AP story added that “voting patterns in local elections differ from those in general elections. Clan interests often supersede faction loyalty”.

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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Gaza, Palestine & Palestinians

UNSG BAN Ki-Moon transmitted the information he has received in the past week or so from (1) Israel, (2) the Palestinian Authority, and (3) Hamas, in response to a UN General Assembly resolution adopted last November calling on the three parties to establish credible independent and impartial investigations into the last winter’s Gaza war.

The UNSG said, however, in a short cover note, that “no determination can be made on the implementation of the resolution by the parties concerned”, although he expressed the hope that the General Assembly’s resolution will, in fact, result in probes “that are independent, credible and in conformity with international standards”.

What does that mean?

Well, the ball is back in the UN General Assembly’s court.

Read more…

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Filed under: BAN Ki-Moon, Gaza, Human Rights, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians, UN General Assembly

Citing “security reasons” – the ubiquitous and unanswerable catch-all phrase against which it is almost impossible to mount any defense — Israel’s Ministry of the Interior has just issued a six-month travel ban on map expert Khalil Toufakji.

(His name is also spelled, in an alternative transliteration from Arabic into English, as Tafakji).

Toufakji, like almost all other East Jerusalem Palestinians, is a “Permanent Resident” of the State of Israel, but is not a citizen.

“You know I am not a political man”, Toufakji said today. But, this is a place where even ordinary everyday life becomes political.

However, he has been called the Palestinian Authority’s chief geographer.

He is frequently interviewed as an expert on Al-Jazeera television, as well as on Palestinian television and other media. He said in a phone interview today that he just returned 20 days ago from his most recent tour, to lecture at the Lebanese Arab University in Beirut.  Earlier in January, he lectured at the Philadelphia University in Jordan, and went to Libya to lecture in response to a Libyan invitation issued to the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Agriculture, and he also visited Morocco, Syria and Lebanon, and Turkey.  He spoke , he said, about the problems facing Palestinians because of Israeli policies in in East Jerusalem.

Toufakji said he was invited by Dennis Ross to come to Washington a year or so ago (but had to apologize due to a family emergency), to discuss The Wall at a conference together with Israeli former military officer Maj.-Gen. (Ret.) Giora Eiland, who is now an analyst at the Tel Aviv-based  Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).  Toufakji added that he was invited by the American Consulate in Jerusalem, on behalf of the U.S. State Department, to tour the USA for a month in 1998, and visited Washington once in 1992 or 1993, he said, at the start of the Oslo process of negotiations.

Toufakji said he did not know of any other person who has been handed such a travel ban.

[The only one I can think of is Mordechai Vanunu, who was released prison in April 2004 after serving an 18-year sentence for talking to the British media about operations at Israel's nuclear power plant at Dimona, where he had worked as a technician. Vanunu is also banned from speaking about this to foreigners.]

Toufakji, still surprised at the development, said that “Yesterday they called me and said come to Moskobiyya [n.b. the Russian Compound in West Jerusalem which contains a police station, temporary detention facilities, and a court, very near the Jerusalem Municipal Building] – Room 4. They said ‘This is an order, sign it, you have 14 days to make an objection. It is forbidden for you to travel from today for six months’.”

Will he contest the six-month travel ban within the next 14 days? Toufakji said that he has been in constant consultation with lawyers, who have all said that since the explanation he was given was only the generic — but all-encompassing — “security reasons”, it is almost hopelesss to contest.

Toufakji was not given any other restriction, he said.

“We are trying, through relations with Jordan and Egypt, America, Britain and France, to see if we can do anything” to remove the restriction, Toufakji said.

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Filed under: Academic studies and research, Boundaries & Borders, Human Rights, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians

Somehow, the Jerusalem correspondent of the British newspaperThe Independent, Donald Macintyre, got ahold of an unpublished article written after what was clearly very extensive work by an Israeli journalist for Israel’s largest-circulation Hebrew-language newspaper (Yediot Ahronot).

Somehow — despite the immense pressure being exerted on Israeli soldiers not to talk about their experiences in Gaza a year ago — the (unnamed) Israeli journalist who wrote the article got access to — and gained the confidence of — some Israeli military officers who served in key positions during the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009.

These sources have given some sensational testimony — still unpublished in the Israeli newspaper, but revealed publicly for the first time today in The Independent.

One of the soldiers is reported to have said that ” ‘any movement must entail gunfire. No one’s supposed to be there’. He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that ‘if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement’.” Another soldier in the war-room reportedly explained that: “This doesn’t mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That’s not something you’re going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that”. According to The Independent, this same soldier “added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. ‘Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote … compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted’.”

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Filed under: BAN Ki-Moon, Gaza, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, Israel, Journalism and Journalists, Palestine & Palestinians

What has been revealed is not new, and it is not a surprise.  It is no longer a shock, but it is still sickening.

There are many who will, nonetheless, argue that this is distorted and not true — who will hurl accusations and denunciations, and try to damage those who collect this testimony as well as those who report it.

But, these are stories that have been told, and must be faced: the Israeli group of veteran members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Breaking the Silence has just published a new collection of testimony from women — soldiers, military policewomen, and female members of the Border Police — recounting what these women say is routine, habitual, “normal” and expected mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and at the Erez crossing into the Gaza Strip.

According to an article published on the Israeli YNet website, the testimony shows that female soldiers are not more “sensitive” than their male counterparts.

To the contrary, and by their own testimony, the women have sometimes been quite remarkably cruel.

Breaking the Silence says, in an introduction to this new collection of testimonies, that its goal is “to stimulate public debate about the moral price that Israeli society as a whole has been paying in which young soldiers face a civilian population on an everyday basis and control its live” — in other words, about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Breaking the Silence states that “In contrast to widely-held beliefs, the mosaic of testimonies that only continues to expand proves that we are not dealing with a fringe phenomenon that touches only the bad apples of the military, but a gradual erosion of ethics in the society as a whole … This is an urgent call to Israeli society and its leaders to wake up and evaluate anew the results of our actions“.

This 136-page report comes just as the Israeli Government reported to UNSG BAN Ki-Moon on the results of the Israeli military internal investigations (some of which are still continuing) into the conduct of its forces during a massive Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip just over a year ago.

Some testimony collected by Breaking the Silence about what happened during the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza was included in the Goldstone report, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which presented nearly 600 pages of collected evidence, and called on both Israel and the Palestinians to conduct their own impartial and independent investigations into what happened.

Haaretz reported today that “In the report that Israel handed to the UN on Friday, it emphasized that its system of investigating alleged war crimes is comparable to the systems adopted by other democratic nations. ‘To date’, the Israeli report states, ‘the IDF has launched investigations into 150 separate incidents arising from the Gaza Operation. Of the 150 incidents, so far 36 have been referred for criminal investigation. Criminal investigators have taken statements from almost 100 Palestinian complainants and witnesses, along with approximately 500 IDF soldiers and commanders’.” This Haaretz report is published here.

[A few days ago, Haaretz reported that "Israel's response to the UN is expected to include a progress report on the IDF's
investigations into 140 incidents that occurred during Operation Cast Lead. Of these, 35 were investigated or are being investigated by the IDF's Criminal Investigations Division. About 8 Gazans testified at the Erez checkpoint in connection to the incidents, with the
mediation of international humanitarian organizations. In the wake of the Goldstone report, which dealt with more than 30 incidents, the IDF initiated 11 CID investigations. Two of them turned out to be different reports of the same incident and were closed when the Military Advocate General's Corp concluded that no crime was committed. The other nine cases are still being investigated". That Haaretz report was published here.]

Since publishing testimonies from soldiers who participated in the unprecedented Gaza military operation that lasted from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, Breaking the Silence has been subjected to criticism because it operates, in part, on funding from foreign donors — the innuendo is that the funding comes from outsiders who have an anti-Israel agenda.

The Goldstone report itself has collected a significant number of reactions of outrage from writers and commentators around the world eager to defend Israel, and in support of statements from Israeli military commanders defending the IDF as the “most moral army in the world”.

Breaking the Silence states right up front that, indeed, the European Union and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation have sponsored this new collection of testimonies.

These testimonies are the first with a specific gender perspective, gathered from direct interviews with female soldiers.

Read more…

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Filed under: Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians