LATEST NEWS FROM PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

September 15, 2008 marked the 26th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. The Perdana Global Peace Organisation mourns this tragedy and along with people throughout the world, we remember and salute the victims of the massacre.

For two fatal days, from September 15 to17 in 1982, Lebanese fascist paramilitaries, with the disgusting consent of the Israeli military occupiers, slaughtered more than 2,000 Palestinian residents of two refugee camps in Beirut. The overwhelming majority of those murdered were women, children and elderly men.

The perpetrators of this war crime, especially members of the Israeli Military, who presided over the massacre, must be brought to justice. It is an affront to peace that these criminals continue to live freely while the victims of the tragedy carry on to suffer.

The Perdana Global Peace Organization recognizes the International Day of Peace as an important event that serves as a benchmark in our arduous journey towards global peace.

We are pleased to be in support of United Nations Resolution 55/282 that declares September 21 of each year to be observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence. This is in line with our objectives of criminalising wars and that those involved in the killings in war must be subject to the international law of crimes.

The Perdana Global Peace Organisation will continue to work towards a world without wars, and a vital step towards this is to ensure the war criminals that have killed millions of innocent people in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan in the past decade are arrested and charged with crimes against humanity.

May peace prevail.

The Guardian Online
16 September 2008

Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel laureate, said yesterday there was a “possibility” Israel had committed a war crime when 18 Palestinians from a single family were killed by Israeli artillery shells in Gaza two years ago.

Tutu said the Israeli attack, which hit the Athamna family house, showed “a disproportionate and reckless disregard for Palestinian civilian life”.

The archbishop presented his comments in a final report to the UN Human Rights Council, which had sent him to Gaza to investigate the killings in Beit Hanoun in November 2006. For 18 months Israel did not grant the archbishop or his team a visa. They entered Gaza in May this year on a rare crossing from Egypt.

On the three-day visit, Tutu and his team visited the house, interviewed the survivors and met others in Gaza, including the senior Hamas figure and former prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh. At the time, Tutu said he wanted to travel to Israel to hear the Israeli account of events, but he was not permitted.

“In the absence of a well-founded explanation from the Israeli military - which is in sole possession of the relevant facts - the mission must conclude that there is a possibility that the shelling of Beit Hanoun constituted a war crime,” Tutu said in his report to the 47-member council.

Tutu also said that rockets fired by Palestinian militants into southern Israel should stop and should be investigated. “Those firing rockets on Israeli civilians are no less accountable than the Israeli military for their actions,” he said.

For the past three months a ceasefire between Israel and the militant groups in Gaza has been in place. It has significantly reduced the number of incidents and the death toll from the conflict there. Israel maintains a tough economic blockade on the territory, restricting imports and banning nearly all exports.

“It is not too late for an independent, impartial and transparent investigation of the shelling to be held,” Tutu said.

He said those responsible for firing the shells should be held accountable, whether the cause of the incident was a mistake or wilful.

After the incident, Israel’s military said the shelling into Beit Hanoun that day was a mistake and was the result of a “rare and severe failure in the artillery fire-control system” which created “incorrect range-findings”. It said the shells had been aimed 450 metres away from the edge of town. No legal action was taken against any officer. However, it is unclear why the artillery was fired so close to a residential area that morning and why shells continued to be fired after the first one hit the Athamna house.

Tutu also said he recommended that Israel pay adequate compensation to the victims “without delay”. His report said “reparation” should also be made to the town of Beit Hanoun itself, and suggested a memorial to the victims would also help the survivors. He suggested a physiotheraphy clinic as one possibility.

The survivors in the family remain bitter and most of the large extended family no longer live in the building. Since the shelling they have received no financial help, apart from a monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority of £50 for each of the 18 dead.

Aharon Leshno-Yaar, Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, where the Human Rights Council was meeting, rejected Tutu’s report as “another regrettable product of the Human Rights Council”.

“It is regrettable that this mission took place at all,” he added.

Leshno-Yaar said the report gave de facto legitimacy to Hamas, the Islamist movement that won elections in 2006 and then seized full control of Gaza last year. “This does not serve the interests of Israel or the Palestinians or the cause of peace,” he said.

by Jeff Halper

ZNet
8 September 2008

So rapid is the pace of systemic change in that indivisible entity known as Palestine/Israel that it almost defies our ability to keep up with it. The deliberate and systematic campaign of driving Palestinians out of the country in 1948 was quickly forgotten, the plight of more than 700,000 refugees becoming an invisible “non-issue.” Instead a plucky, European, “socialist” Israel became the darling of even the radical left, and for many years after 1967 Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza also remained a non-issue. Even the mention of the word “occupation,” not to mention “Palestinians,” would get you labeled an anti-Semite in a wink of the eye, especially given the identity of Palestinians with terrorism in the 1970s and early ’80s. Only with the outbreak of the first Intifada in late 1987 did the situation of the! Palestinians under Israeli rule show upon the radar of public consciousness, in Israel as elsewhere, becoming a full-fledged and official “issue” with the opening of the Madrid and Oslo peace talks in the early 1990s. Still, Israeli ruled the all-important realm of PR. Once Arafat refused Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” - a mythical proposal which put a positive spin on a blatant attempt to impose an apartheid regime of “cantons” on the Palestinians - the campaign to re-demonize Arafat and his people proved a relatively simple exercise. Sharon’s imprisoning the Palestinian president in a dark room of his demolished headquarters, eliminating him politically, and I believe, physically, raised virtually no major opposition or even criticism in the international community.

Still, a growing movement among civil society groups - human rights and political organizations, church and critical Jewish groups, trade unions, intellectuals and even certain political figures, in Israel as well as abroad - succeeded in the past decade or so in raising the Occupation to the status of global issue. A critical mass of descriptions of Israel’s “facts on the ground, combined with the witness of international activists on the ground and a growing body of analyses critical of Israel’s policies and intent, rendered both the term “occupation” and critiques of it valid in public and political discourse, despite the fact that Israel continued to deny the fact of occupation, casting its rule as one of “administration” over a “disputed territory.”

The rapid expansion of the facts on the ground, however, continued to overtake language and political analysis. An occupation is defined in international law as “a temporary military situation.” While the establishment of more than 200 settlements and outposts in the Occupied Territories, all tied inextricably into Israel proper by a massive network of Israeli-only highways and, ultimately, the Separation Barrier, seemed to indicate that the Occupation was no longer temporary, that it grown into one indivisible system between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, many Palestinians, Israelis and international observers and decision-makers alike, committed to a two-state solution, were loathe to admit the transformation of the Occupation into a permanent state of apartheid. The implications of so doing were simply too daunting. The transformation of the Occupation into a country-wide system of apartheid meant the end of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state - unless apartheid could somehow be packaged as a two-state solution, a sleight-of-hand to which many liberal Israeli and Jewish peace groups have succumbed. Nevertheless, slowly, painfully (as Jimmy Carter discovered), the realization that we now have a de facto regime of apartheid over all Israel-Palestine - officially sanctioned if the Annapolis Process succeeds - has begun to sink in, although resistance, even among the Israeli peace movement, is still strong.

Yet no sooner have we begun to shift from occupation to apartheid than political realities, defined in large part by an accelerated Israeli campaign of expanding its facts on the ground, have rendered even that conception, radical only a few months ago, completely outmoded. Signs of this came, fittingly enough, from South Africans who knew the apartheid regime there intimately. While experiences of oppression cannot be compared in any objective way and cannot be minimized, a number of prominent South Africans - most of whom were labeled “terrorists,” a favorite term employed by colonial regimes to discredit indigenous struggles for freedom - have commented that what is happening to the Palestinians goes beyond even the despicable system they lived under. While black South Africans were deprived of their rights, apartheid’s policy of “separate development” did not deny the very existence of black African peoples and nations, as does Israel’s policy of “Judaization.” Demolishing the homes of African blacks was a common policy, but it was never as extensive as Israel’s practice, which has seen some 18,000 Palestinian homes demolished in the Occupied Territories since 1967, on the background of tens of thousands of other within Israel, a policy extending from 1948 until today - ethnic cleansing in a most tangible form. Torture and imprisonment under Israel’s Occupation and more widespread and institutionalized than they were in South Africa, Israeli courts are far less likely to challenge military policies or actions, and the level of violence is far higher: Apache helicopters never strafed Soweto nor were ANC leaders systematically assassinated in their dozens. Even segregation, the very essence of apartheid, is more complete, more institutionalized and more rigorously enforced that it was in South Africa.

Overall, while both peoples suffered extreme economic oppression leading to the impoverishment of their entire populations, the daily repression suffered by Palestinians is on a scale that apparently surpasses that of South Africa in its apartheid days. “The absolute control of people’s lives,” said Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, a former deputy minister of defense and of health and a current member of Parliament on a recent visit to the West Bank, “the lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the total separation and the extensive destruction we saw….What I see here is worse than what we experienced..” Ronnie Kasrils, a Jewish South African cabinet minister and former ANC guerrilla, concurred. “This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.” John Dugard, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 to the United Nations Human Rights Council: “Many aspects of Israel’s occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel’s large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.” Dugard, a prominent South African judge, wrote in his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council: “Many aspects of Israel’s occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel’s large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.”

Apartheid is nevertheless a useful term. It advances the political discussion in that it helps people to “get it,” to understand that we are speaking of a system that has gone beyond occupation in its scale and permanence. Boiled down to its essentials, apartheid comprises two elements: the separation of populations, whether on a racial basis or, in the case of Israel, according to religion or nationality, and the subsequent domination of one privileged people over others, institutionalized into a permanent system, supported by law. Not only do these elements accurately describe the system Israel has instituted over the entire country, Israel and the Occupied Territories included, but the Israeli government itself calls its system apartheid: hafrada in Hebrew, “separation” in English. The wall Israel is constructing is officially named the “Separation Barrier” (Mikhshol HaHafrada), not the “Security Barrier.” Its tortuous route deep into the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, where it incorporates seven major “settlement blocs” into Israel comprising 80% of the settlers, is known as Israel’s “demographic border.” In the end, Israel will expand to about 85% of the country, take all of its resources and elements of sovereignty (such as control of movement and borders), and leave the Palestinian majority to live in a truncated bantustan with no meaningful sovereignty, no freedom and no economy.

Apartheid is linked to occupation in the sense that both are conceived as political situations, as political issues that must be resolved by the parties with the intervention of the international community. Both possess a political dynamic involving grassroots resistance, the mobilizing of public opinion and political forces, appeals to international law, human rights and competing political claims. Israel’s “Occupation,” now more than four decades old, fully entrenched and with no end in sight, appears to have moved beyond both of these systems. It has evolved into a system of warehousing, a static situation emptied of all political content (Israel’s policies are cast as a “war on terrorism” with no reference to occupation, which Israel officially denies having), which Israel is attempting to present as a permanent “given,” a non-issue, a ! state of status quo (another Israeli term for its policy towards the Palestinians) immune to any genuine solution. “What Israel has constructed,” argues Naomi Klein in her powerful new book, The Shock Doctrine, is a system,…a network of open holding pens for millions of people who have been categorized as surplus humanity….Palestinians are not the only people in the world who have been so categorized….This discarding of 25 to 60 percent of the population has been the hallmark of the Chicago School [of Economics] crusade….In South Africa, Russia and New Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the dangerous poor (p. 442).
Warehousing is the best, if bleakest, term for what Israel is constructing for the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. It is indeed worse than the apartheid-era South African bantustans. The ten non-viable mini-states established by South Africa for the black African majority on only 11% of the country’s land were, to be sure, a type of warehouse. They were intended to supply South Africa with cheap labor while relieving it of its black population, thus making possible a European dominated “democracy.” This is precisely what Israel is intending - its Palestinian Bantustan encompassing 15% of historic Palestine, but with a crucial caveat: Palestinian workers will not be allowed into Israel, which has found a cheaper source of labor, some 300,000 foreign workers imported from China, the Philippines, Thailand, Rumania and West Africa, augmented by its own Arab, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Russian and Eastern European citizens. From every point of view, historically, culturally, politically and economically, the Palestinians have been defined as “surplus humanity;” nothing remains to do with them except warehousing, which the concerned international community appears willing to allow Israel to do.

Not only should the permanent warehousing of an entire people be of concern to the Palestinians and those who support them, it should, as Klein stresses, concern anyone troubled with warehousing as a global phenomenon. In fact, it may constitute an entirely new crime against humanity, one that affects, Klein says, those who have been judged irrevocably superfluous: the urban poor (more than a billion of whom are imprisoned in what Mike David, in his seminal book Planet of Slums, calls global slums), the rural poor, particular minorities, refugees and undocumented immigrants and, most recently, peoples, religions and countries demonized for political purposes as “evil” or “uncivilized.” To the extent that what we call Israel’s “Occupation” is, in fact, a model of warehousing, it has implications far beyond a localized conflict between! two peoples. If Israel can package and export its layered Matrix of Control, a system of permanent repression that combines Kafkaesque administration, law and planning with overtly coercive forms of control over a defined population hemmed in by hostile gated communities (settlements in this case), walls and obstacles of various kinds to movement, then, as Klein writes starkly, every country will look like Israel/Palestine: “One part looks like Israel; the other part looks like Gaza.” In other words, a Global Palestine.

This goes a long way towards explaining why Israel is unconcerned about entering into genuine peace processes or resolving its conflict with the Palestinians. By warehousing them it has the best of both worlds: complete freedom to expand its settlements and control without ever having to compromise, as a political solution would require. By the same token, it explains why the international community lets Israel “get away with it.” Instead of presenting the international community with issues that must be resolved - violations of human rights, international law and repeated UN resolutions, let alone the implications of the conflict itself - it is instead providing a valued service: it is offering a useful model that can applied to “surplus populations” everywhere, including right at home.

Israel, then is in complete sinc with both the economic and military logics of global capitalism, for which it is being rewarded generously. Our mistake, encouraged by such terms as “conflict,” “occupation” and “apartheid,” is to view Israel’s control of the Palestinians as a political issue which must be resolved. Instead, it will be “resolved” when the Palestinians are “disappeared,” just as people were “disappeared” in Latin American under its military regimes. Dov Weisglass, the architect of the Sharon government’s “disengagement” from Gaza, said as much in a revealing interview (”The Big Freeze,” Ha’aretz Magazine, Oct. 8, 2004):

The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president’s formula [that Israel can retain its settlement “blocs,” including a Greater Jerusalem] so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

Is what you are saying, then, is that you exchanged the strategy of a long-term interim agreement for a strategy of long-term interim situation?

The American term is to park conveniently. The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians. There is a decision here to do the minimum possible in order to maintain our political situation. The decision is proving itself. It is making it possible for the Americans to go to the seething and simmering international community and say to them, “What do you want.” It also transfers the initiative to our hands. It compels the world to deal with our idea, with the scenario we wrote….

Warehousing is the most stark of political concepts because it represents the de-politization of repression, the transformation of a political issue of the first degree into a non-issue, a regrettable but unavoidable situation best dealt with through relief, charity and humanitarian programs. It is a dead-end, a “given,” for which no remedy is available. This, of course, is not the case. Warehousing is a policy, an economic and political consequence that can be addressed to the degree that a just “structural adjustment” is made to the system, including the possibility of replacing it if it proves recalcitrant. Using the term “warehousing,” then, is not meant to name the final stage of repression but, rather, to highlight it so as to better eliminate it. For despite the almost unlimited and unchecked power Israel has over every element of Palestinian life, it has failed to nail down either apartheid or warehousing. Palestinian resistance continues, supported by the Arab and wider Muslim peoples, significant sectors of the international civil society and the critical Israeli peace camp; the conflict’s destabilizing effect on the international system grows steadily; and neither the Israelis nor the Americans (with European complicity) can force the outcome they seek, despite their overwhelming power.

The term “warehousing,” then, is meant as a warning. We must continue our efforts to end the Israeli Occupation, even if this is meant in a wider sense, of creating a genuine Palestine/Israel, or a wider regional confederation, rather than an apartheid-cum-two-state solution or outright warehousing. Yet looking at Palestine as a microcosm of a broader global reality of warehousing enables us to more effectively identify those elements appearing elsewhere and grasp the model which Israel is developing, all the better to counter it. Regardless, our language and the analysis it generates must not only be honest and unsparing; they must keep pace with political intentions and ever more rapidly developing “facts on the ground.”

________________________________________________

Jeff Halper is the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.

Web link
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18750

www.independent.co.uk
7 September 2008

The Israeli Attorney General has been urged to launch a criminal investigation into whether Shaul Mofaz, a leading prime ministerial candidate, ordered “war crimes” to be committed when he was the military’s chief of staff.

A leading Israeli law professor has written to justice officials, calling for the investigation into claims ? highlighted by The Independent last month ? that during a briefing to army officers in May 2001, after the start of the second Palestinian uprising, Mr Mofaz ordered a daily “quota” of Palestinian deaths.

Last night, Israeli police recommended to prosecutors that the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, be indicted in a corruption investigation. With Mr Olmert committed to resigning after his Kadima party holds a leadership vote a week today, the recommendation will have no immediate impact on his tenure and does not guarantee an indictment by the Attorney General.

The Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, is the front-runner in the contest for the leadership of Kadima. Mr Mofaz, the Deputy Prime Minister, is his main rival.

David Kretzmer, emeritus professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that accounts of the briefing by Mr Mofaz give rise “to a grave suspicion” that he “committed serious offences, some of which at least, fall into the category of war crimes”.

The letter to the Attorney General, Menachem Mazuz, refers to a book by two Israeli journalists, Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, which says that Mr Mofaz, after ensuring he was not being officially recorded, called for a Palestinian death toll of 70 per day.

Professor Kretzmer tells Mr Mazuz that one lesson of the corruption inquiry into Mr Olmert is that it is best to investigate candidates for high office before they reach it. “Otherwise the public is liable to be exposed once more to the disgrace of having police officers arrive at the Prime Minister’s official residence in order to interrogate him.”

Police have urged Mr Mazuz to indict Mr Olmert on two counts ? that he funded personal trips abroad for himself and his family with money secured by the multiple billing of public organisations, and another arising out of claims by a US businessman, Morris Talansky, that he illegally used political donations for personal expenditure. It is up to Mr Mazuz to decide if Mr Olmert should be indicted.

The Shelah/Drucker book, Boomerang: The Failure Of Leadership In The Second Intifada, says that while Mr Mofaz’s alleged instruction caused disquiet among some senior officers, a Hebron district commander said that the subsequent fatal shooting of a Palestinian policeman was in accordance with the briefing.

Professor Kretzmer, who also holds a senior academic post at the University of Ulster, says that an order to kill people “by quota” is “not consistent with the norms of humanitarian law”, and that the test of proportionality is especially relevant in cases of military occupation, in which even the actions of armed groups do not “relieve the Army of its obligations to residents of the territory”.

The letter cites reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2001 and 2002 which, he says, raise suspicions that Mr Mofaz ordered officers to shoot at every armed Palestinian regardless of the threat posed to Israeli forces.

It points out that at the start of hostilities in 2000, Palestinian police in particular were armed by agreement with the Israeli government, that the military had insisted the conflict was with armed groups and not against the Palestinian Authority or people, and that the Geneva Conventions prohibited killing people not taking part in hostilities.

Noting that countries are obliged to investigate grave breaches of the conventions, he warns that if the Israeli authorities do not do so, “there is a fear that it may be carried out by the authorities of another country”.

Professor Kretzmer has been told his letter has been passed to “relevant persons” in the justice ministry who will read it. A ministry spokesman said this did not mean that it accepted there was a case against Mr Mofaz, or that an investigation would be launched, and it was normal that “any complaint or letter” was studied before a reply was drafted. There was no response from Mr Mofaz’s office.

In 2002, while Mr Mofaz was visiting Britain, the British lawyer Imran Khan, representing a group of Palestinians, presented the Director of Public Prosecutions with claims of other war crimes by Mr Mofaz, including targeted assassinations and the demolition of Palestinian homes. While Mr Khan claimed the DPP had passed the file to Scotland Yard’s “crimes against humanity” section, no action was taken before Mr Mofaz departed

1 September 2008

GAZA CITY (1 September 2008) - Human Rights Observers from the Free Gaza
Movement and the International Solidarity Movement launch campaign to
monitor Israeli naval aggression against Gazan fishermen.

According to a recent article in The Guardian, “Under the Oslo accords,
which in 1993 were supposed to herald the coming of an independent
Palestinian state, Gazan fishermen were to be allowed 20 nautical miles out
to sea, where they could catch sardine as they migrated from the Nile delta
up towards Turkey during the spring. But Israeli naval ships in recent years
have imposed their own, much-reduced limits, sometimes fewer than 6 miles
out.” Israel enforces these arbitrary limits with lethal violence. Many
fishermen have either been killed or injured as a result. Just 3 days ago 4
such fishermen were attacked and “arrested” by Israeli gunboats.

This Monday morning, human rights workers from the Free Gaza Movement will
accompany fishermen from Gaza City as they venture out to assert their right
to fish their own coastal waters. The aim of these internationals will be
to record and document the continued harassment of the Palestinian
fishermen, and the arbitrary attacks and threats to which they are
subjected. It is hoped that their presence will also act as some form of
deterrent to these abuses.

The scope of the campaign extends beyond Gaza City all the way along Gaza’s
coast. Human Rights Workers may be present on any Gazan fishing boat, at
any time from this point onward. The boats on which they are present will
not be specially marked.

For more information, please contact:
Gaza: Vittorio Arrigoni, +972 598 826 516
Gaza: Donna Wallach, +972 598 896 420 / FriendsOfGaza@gmail.com
Cyprus: Osama Qashoo, +357 97 793 595 / OsamaQashoo@gmail.com

http://www.FreeGaza.org