Media Review Network – Page 1219 – Providing Context and Substance

Paying tribute to palestinian resistance

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

Paying tribute to Palestinian resistance

IQBAL JASSAT reviews Jaqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance (UK: Verso, 2007), 256 pages, Hbk: £16.99.

A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, Jacqueline Rose has written a compelling new book which Sarah Roy of Harvard University correctly predicts is destined to become a standard in the field of literature on Zionism. Professor of English at Queen Mary’s College, University of London, Rose is also known for the Channel 4 documentary “Dangerous Liaison – Israel and America”, which she wrote and presented.

What makes The Last Resistance a powerful testament of contemporary Israeli politics is its ability to transcend the notorious Nazi era persecution of the Jewish people to position Zionism’s legacy of making life intolerable for another people: the Palestinians. The zionists’ favourite tool is to use the horrors inflicted on the Jewish people as a blunt instrument to stifle discussion, much less criticism of their own persecution of the Palestinians.

Israeli war crimes against children

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

Israeli War Crimes Against
Children During
Operation Cast Lead

By Stephen Lendman

Following Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented the toll on Gaza’s children and published it in May. It did so "in response to the unprecedented number of children who were killed (and injured) by (the Israeli Defense Forces) during the offensive on Gaza." According to international standards, the Convention on the Rights of the Child’s (CRC) definition was used to apply to anyone under age 18.
PCHR reviewed IDF killing of Gaza’s children since the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000, then focused on the 313 youth deaths during the recent conflict. Its evidence comes from eye-witness accounts of the willful targeting of civilians, including women and children. Also covered are the psychological scars and "alarming scale of physical injuries" leaving some children blind and many others (as well as adults) permanently disabled by the loss of limbs and psychological trauma.
PCHR’s report bears testimony to Israel’s contempt for international laws, its imperial agenda, culture of violence, disdain for peace, genocidal intentions, disparagement of Arabs and Islam, and its scorn for Palestinian lives and welfare.
PCHR presented 13 case studies in its report. Briefly discussed below, they represent a small fraction of the many hundreds killed and thousands more grievously harmed.

Introduction
Since the September 2000 Second Intifada, Israeli forces killed 1179 children, including 865 in Gaza as part of a decades-long policy of collectively punishing millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, mostly civilian men, women, and children.
Israel calls self-defense "terrorism" and justifies its actions as responses to militant missile or other attacks. PCHR’s investigations "have consistently undermined these claims," and condemns all killing, especially of children.
In September 2006, the London Independent’s Donald Macintyre headlined his story: "Gaza: The children killed in a war the world doesn’t want to know about." He wrote about more than 37 children under 18 killed since June 25 during Israel’s Operation Summer Rain, according to PCHR figures, out of an overall 228 total, mostly civilians.
He highlighted a "forgotten war in the Middle East" with young boys, girls and adults blown apart by Israeli shells and missiles, but who notices. He said the IDF attacks heavily populated areas indiscriminately on the pretext of fighting a "terrorist infrastructure." He stressed that "attention (was) diverted from Gaza as Israel launch(ed) a full military invasion of southern Lebanon" yet civilian deaths mounted in both areas. He listed by name Gazan children under 18 killed and by what means – from airstrikes, while playing football, missiles, shrapnel, tank or artillery shells, and shot in the head or chest at close range. Khitam Mohammed Rebhi Tayey was one – age 11. Aya Salmeya another – age 9.
Israel rarely responds to public outrage or investigates its crimes, including against children. The few times it does turn into whitewashes. After 11 days on March 30, 2009, military advocate general Avichai Mandelblit closed the IDF’s inquiry into Israeli soldiers’ accounts of Operation Cast Lead crimes and dismissed them as unfounded.

Nothing new from netanyahu mrn

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

Nothing new from Netanyahu: MRN

Far from being a groundbreaking new policy initiative, Israel’s rightwing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recast shallow old Zionist yarns into a narrative that lacked depth, courage and vision. This was the opinion of Iqbal Jassat, chairperson of the Media Review Network (MRN) on Sunday evening in response to a speech by Netanyahu wherein he called for the creation of a demilitarised Palestinian state as the key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But according to Jassat, the speech was all “smoke and mirrors”, a forced response to US President Barack Obama’s demands on Israel to place an immediate freeze on settlements and to accept the legitimacy of Palestinian rights in the shape of two-states. “Netanyahu failed to pull any rabbits out of a hat. In what appears to be a speech directed more at rightwing zealots in his coalition government and hardline Zionist settlers, whom he referred to as ‘principled’, Netanyahu may have miscalculated the levels of exasperation amongst influential sectors within America and Europe.”

According to Jassat, this much was clear from comments and analysis from western capitals that swiftly concluded that Netanyahu made no major detour from Zionist ideals apart from subscribing to a watered down version of a ghetto that he repeatedly qualified as a “demilitarized” entity. “The three challenges he outlined at the start of his speech, not surprisingly included Iran as an existential threat, alongside ‘economic recession’ and ‘peace’ itself. Quite ridiculous to regard ‘peace’ as a threat, yet it demonstrates how successive Israel regimes have found political utility in displaying security vulnerability.”

The other apartheid state

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

THE OTHER APARTHEID STATE

Address by Ronnie Kasrils: CAPE TOWN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: RE-ENVISIONING ISRAEL/PALESTINE 12 JUNE 2009

May I start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as far back as 1961 that “The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel like South Africa, is an apartheid state” (Rand Daily Mail, 23 Novemeber 1961). Those were not the words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu or Ruth First, but were uttered by none other than the architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime Minister, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

He was irked by the criticism of apartheid policy and Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech and the growing international outcry following the Sharpeville massacre , in contrast to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.

To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel were colonial, settler states created on the basis of the harsh dispossession of the land and birthright of the indigenous people. This is unblushingly documented in Israel’s case from the time of Herzl through Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan to Sharon et al. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolised rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines – even both countries marriage laws are designed to safeguard racial “purity”. The fact that the Palestinian minority within Israel is allowed to vote hardly redresses the injustice in all other matters of basic human rights. In any case those Palestinians allowed to stand for election to the Knesset do so on condition that they dare not question Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

The so-called “non-whites” in apartheid South Africa, indigenous Africans, others of mixed race or of Asiatic origin – like second or third class non-Jews in Israel itself let alone the military occupied areas – were consigned to a non-citizenship status of Kafkaesque existence, subject to all manner of discrimination and prejudice, such as the laws prohibiting their free movement, access to work and trade, dictating where they could reside and so forth.