UK – Features

Palestinian and Israeli Human Rights Organisations call for End to International Donor Complicity in Israeli Violations of International Law

JOINT PRESS RELEASE
REF.: 18.2009E
5 May 2009

On 2 March 2009, major international donors convened in Sharm al-Sheikh to collectively respond to the destruction caused by Israel ’s 23 day military offensive on the Gaza Strip (the offensive). During the conference, a total of $4.5 billion was pledged in reconstruction funds for Gaza . In light of the extensive destruction across the Gaza Strip, especially the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure, reconstruction is urgent.

However, as Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations, we must note that by agreeing to reconstruction without specific, binding assurances from the State of Israel, international donors are effectively underwriting Israel ’s illegal actions in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). International law – including, international human rights law, international humanitarian law (IHL), and the law of state responsibility for wrongful acts – places specific, binding obligations on the State of Israel (based, inter alia, on its duties as an Occupying Power) with respect to the maintenance and development of normal life in occupied territory. By repeatedly restricting their action to providing aid, without holding Israel accountable for its specific obligations, international donors are relieving Israel of its legally binding responsibilities.

Aid must be accompanied by strict assurances that are effectively monitored: Israel must not be allowed to act with impunity. The State of Israel must accept responsibility for its actions, and fulfil all of its legal obligations. By repeatedly covering the cost of the occupation, without insisting that Israel comply with international law, the international community is implicitly encouraging violations of international law – including grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and war crimes – perpetrated by Israeli forces in the oPt. As High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, individual donor States may be in violation of their legally binding obligation “to ensure respect” for the Convention “in all circumstances.” While the international community turns a blind eye and pays the cost of the occupation, Israel is encouraged to continue acting outside the limits of international law.

Read More »Palestinian and Isaraeli human rights organisations call for end to international donor complicity in

By Yvonne Ridley

(source: the ugly truth.wordpress)

The Arab world’s sleeping giant has finally woken from its slumbers after years of being drugged and mugged by the West.  Having witnessed – and experienced – first hand the brutality of the Egyptian and Tunisian police and their undercover stooges, I can tell you that the uprisings of the masses took real courage.  Over the years, dictator Hosni Mubarak has traded on their fear using some of the foulest methods of intimidation imaginable. But like their counterparts in Tunisia, the Egyptian people are losing their fear and tearing away the chains of oppression. The Pharoah’s police state is now teetering as a second day of protests begin.

Whatever the outcome over the next few weeks, I think it is clear that America and Britain can no longer manipulate and control the politics – or lack of it – in the Middle East.

Washington’s silence over the weeks of civil unrest on the streets of Tunisiawas almost deafening, so when Barack Obama chose to congratulate the uprising only once Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s plane was in the air, his message of support rang hollow. Today he urged the Egyptian authorities to show restraint.

The world’s most powerful man’s weasel words tripped from his lips as blood was shed on the streets of Cairo, Assiut, Alexandria, Mansura, Tanta and Aswan as the people faced down 2.5 million uniformed and plain clothes thugs using water cannon and teargas.

Read More »Sleeping arab giant stirsUSfears

Israel and Nazi Germany, Tweedldee and Tweedldum

Khalid Amayreh

Adolf Lieberman. by Ben Heine

Avigdor Lieberman, the brashly-racist foreign minister of the apartheid Israeli state, reportedly recently ordered Zionist embassies around the world to circulate a 1941 photo showing the former Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Husseini meeting with German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Lieberman hopes that the picture would help counter growing international pressure on the Zionist regime to stop ethnic-cleansing measures against the Palestinians, especially in occupied Jerusalem .

The release of the picture is widely viewed as a desperate feat by the widely-reviled Lieberman to make a difference as a foreign minister.

Lieberman has been largely boycotted by the international community, mainly due to his radical and expressly racist views.

Given his pariah status around the world, the Israeli government went as far as asking other Israeli officials, such as Defence Minister Ehud Barak, to carry out the Foreign Minister’s functions, especially in talks with American and European officials.

Lieberman’s desperate act is likely to raise many eyebrows since it comes from a man whose mindset and ideological convictions differ little from those of Adolf Hitler.

Indeed, Lieberman’s infatuation with Jewish nationalism (the correct term is Jewish fascism) can be viewed as a virtual carbon copy of Hitler’s obsession with German nationalism.

Moreover, Lieberman’s brazenly racist discourse against non-Jews in general and Israel’s Palestinian population is nothing short of a later-day echo of the Aryan Nazi ideology.

Read More »Israel and nazi germany tweedldee and tweedldum

By William Blum

(source: Counterpunch.org)

On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of “war criminal” and “torturer”. (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can’t Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: “Aren’t you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?” She also threw in another line that’s become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that’s used when all other arguments fail: “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.”

My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that “you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God.” … The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.

Unfortunately, they’ve lost just about everything else as well. Twenty years of American bombing, invasion, occupation and torture have led to the people of that unhappy land losing their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … more than half the population either dead, disabled, in prison, or in foreign exile … the air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

Read More »How stupid is condoleezza Rice?