Human Tragedy in Gaza

By Cihan News Agency, Anadolu News Agency (aa), Jerusalem, Gaza
Published: Saturday, July 01, 2006
zaman.com

The United Nations (UN) has warned that a human tragedy is emerging in Gaza; the target of attacks by Israel.

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland asked Israel to refurnish electricity and fuel to the town, and said, “The situation in Gaza will otherwise become a quick sand.”

Israel arrested 64 people including eight government ministers on Thursday, and yesterday it cancelled the residential permit of a minister and three deputies in Eastern Jerusalem.

A number of politicians arrested by Israel have reportedly begun a hunger strike.

The international community has intensified its efforts to solve the crisis sparked by the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan yesterday and asked for Turkey’s support. Erdogan called for restraint.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said HAMAS (Islamic Resistance Movement) had agreed to a conditional release of the kidnapped soldier, however, Israel refused to agree to any conditions.

Egeland said they are anxiously monitoring the events following the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in Gaza last Sunday.

Egeland informed that 1.4 million Palestinians may be left without power and water.

Israel targeted power stations in the region; some 130 wells in Gaza run on electricity and back up diesel pumps are without fuel because Israel has also fuel to Gaza for four days.

“We are astonished to see how both parties play with the future of civilians including children,” Jan Egeland said.

The UN official stated that Israel’s selective bombing of the power station in Gaza that meets 40 percent of the region’s electricity needs is a violation of human rights and the situation is expected to get worse if aid is not sent directly to the region.

Egeland called on the Palestinians to release the kidnapped Israeli soldier and prevent Palestinian militants from conducting missile attacks against Israel, and said “I am sure neither party wants to further deaths in Gaza populated with 1.4 million people, half of whom are children.”

As part of the massive Israeli operation in Gaza to secure the return of the soldier, the Israeli army arrested 64 HAMAS officials including eight ministers on Thursday in the West Bank.

The Israeli army recommenced the severe practices it used during the Intifada and took measures to make it difficult for East Jerusalem residents to enter West Bank towns.

The Tel Aviv administration also cancelled the residential permit of a HAMAS minister and three deputies and issued an order to close the main passage between Jerusalem and Baytullahim to residents of East Jerusalem holding ID cards issued by Israel.

The 237,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem and East Jerusalem residents living in the West Bank towns near Jerusalem including Ramallah and Baytullahim and with family ties and commercial relations with Palestinians have been issued “Blue” ID cards by Israel.

The HAMAS minister and most of the deputies arrested by Israel as part of the Gaza operation began a hunger strike.

The 45 HAMAS politicians taken to Israel’s Ofer Prison near Ramallah have reportedly begun a hunger strike to protest “their abduction.”

Thousands of Gaza residents bombarded by Israel gathered in the town center on Thursday evening condemning Israel and promised to support the HAMAS government.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniya addressing the public for the first time since the Israeli operation said the operation does not only aim at securing the release of the kidnapped soldier but was an attempt to overthrow the HAMAS government.

“This entire war is evidence of a pre-designed plan,” Haniya said and stated Israel’s roundup of ministers and deputies will not affect the government’s activities and the duties of these ministers will be undertaken by other members of the government.

Meanwhile, the arrest of HAMAS ministers met with widespread reaction from the international community, and France called on the Tel Aviv government to immediately release all Palestinian government ministers.

Source: zaman.com
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&trh=20060701&hn=34434

Israel Engineers Another Cover-Up

Leaving the Truth Buried in Gaza's Sands

By JONATHAN COOK

If you keep lying long enough and with enough conviction, people start to believe you -- or at least doubt the evidence in front of their own eyes. And so it has been with the Israeli army’s account of how seven members of a Palestinian family were killed, and dozens of other Palestinians injured, during shelling close by a beach in Gaza.

This week, according to reports in the Israeli media, even Marc Garlasco, a Pentagon expert on the effects of battlefield weapons hired by Human Rights Watch to investigate the deaths, "conceded" that he could not contradict the findings of the Israeli army’s own inquiry.

Presumably that is because Israel is not letting him or anyone else near their evidence. But Garlasco’s slight change of tune -- even if it is not exactly a ringing endorsement -- leaves the door ajar just wide enough that the Israeli army will doubtless slip through it to escape being held accountable yet again.

The army has been claiming for more than a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing.

The army’s case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western "thought" about Arabs and Muslims.

To be plausible the army account requires two preposterous assumptions: first, that Palestinian militants are so fanatical that they consider it acceptable to lay a mine secretly in an area frequented by local families; and second, that they are so primitive that their best military minds could not work out the futility of placing a single mine along miles of coastline that could be used for a landing (or are we to assume that there are many more of these mines waiting to explode?).

To support its case, the army has produced two pieces of evidence that apparently make its denials of responsibility "airtight".

First, it claims that a piece of shrapnel removed by doctors from an injured Palestinian transferred to an Israeli hospital was not from one its shells but more likely from a Palestinian explosive device.

Given that, unlike Israel, the Palestinians do not have any factories manufacturing mines or rockets and are forced instead to make them out of any spare metal parts they can get their hands on -- doors, pipes, wrecked cars, fridges -- this evidence is meaningless. Palestinian witnesses have already said the beach victims were standing close to taxis when the shell exploded. So if the shrapnel was not from an Israeli shell, it suggests only that the missile also damaged other metal objects -- possibly the cars -- sending a shard into at least one of the victims.

The army will have a lot of explaining to do if reports on Israeli TV, not usually noted for its independent approach, confirm that another piece of shrapnel found in a victim is from an Israeli shell. So far, of course, the army is denying the report.

The second piece of evidence is supplied by the army, which says one of its many drones that circle overhead spying on Gaza round the clock shows the families calmly still on the beach, and later an ambulance arriving, tens of minutes after the army had finished shelling the area.

The problem with the Israeli evidence is that we have to take the army’s word for it: that the families shown are the ones who were about to be shelled, and that the timings given are accurate.

It also means we have to discount a lot of counter-evidence supplied by Garlasco, journalists, doctors and Palestinian witnesses -- and even the Israeli army. The army, for example, has admitted that one of the shells it fired in the area is unaccounted for, a striking admission in itself. The drones apparently were no help in locating this "missing" explosion, even though they were spying on the area.

Garlasco has already determined that the injuries sustained by the beach victims accord with a blast above ground -- an Israeli shell -- rather than one underground -- a Palestinian mine.

The many Palestinian witnesses have all put the time of the blast close to when the shelling occurred, and report that the reason they were queuing for taxis was because of panic sown by the shells they were hearing landing nearby.

Independent journalists have shown that, according to the clocks on the hospital computers that admitted the dead and injured, the timing of the first blood tests were taken soon after the Israeli army shelling -- and certainly too soon to accord with the army’s account of when the Palestinian mine supposedly exploded. Doctors have also confirmed that they were called to the nearest hospitals well before 5pm -- at about the time, or even before, the army claims the mine went off.

The outrage expressed in some quarters at the failure simply to believe the army’s version might sound more convincing were Israel welcoming an international investigation to adjudicate on the matter. But of course it is not. Just as in spring 2002, following the deaths of many civilians in the Palestinian town of Jenin and the destruction of the heart of the local refugee camp during a prolonged attack by the Israeli army and air force, Israel is rejecting all suggestions of an independent inquiry.

So why not just take Israel’s word for it? Its army is the most moral in the world, after all, and a state of law like Israel would gain nothing from lying in such a bare-faced manner.

The only problem is that Israel and its security forces have been caught out lying repeatedly during this intifada and before it, not just to people on the other side of the world who cannot verify the facts but also to its own courts and public.

Ths week, for example, the Supreme Court ordered the army and Ministry of Defence to pull down several kilometres of the steel and concrete barrier they have erected on Palestinian land in the West Bank after it was proved that the security considerations behind the choice of the wall’s route were entirely bogus. Official documents reveal that the wall was located there to allow for the future expansion of nearly illegal Jewish settlements on yet more Palestinian land. The army and government concocted the fib and then stuck to it for more than two years. Chief Justice Aharaon Barak called their systematic lying “a grave phenomenon”.

And at the start of the intifada, back in October 2000, the government and police covered up the fact that live ammunition and sniper units trained to deal with terror attacks had been used against unarmed Arab demonstrators inside Israel. For more than six months the government and security services denied that a single live round had been fired, despite mounting evidence to the contrary that lawyers and journalists like myself had unearthed.

They might have got away with their brazen lies too, had it not been for an unusual series of events that led to the appointment of a state inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor Or, who quickly exposed the truth.

That happened not because of any urge by official bodies to come clean or the inevitable triumph of Israeli justice. It happened for one reason alone: the prime minister of the day, Ehud Barak, feared losing the impending general election to his rival Ariel Sharon and thought he could buy back Arab votes by setting up an inquiry.

The inhabitants of Gaza have no such leverage inside the Israeli legal and political system. They have no friends inside Israel. And now it looks like they have no friends in the international community either.

Jonathan Cook, a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State”, published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/cook06202006.html

The World Cup and Middle East Peace

Mon Dieu, Mondial!

The World Cup and Middle East Peace

By URI AVNERY

IF PRESIDENT Bush wanted to deal with Iran by "bombing them back into the stone age", (as an American general once put it during the Vietnam War), now would be the time. With everybody riveted to the World Cup, who would notice?

The Israeli government knows this well. In their fight against the Qassam rockets that are landing in the town of Sderot, the Air Force has been given free rein. Since the beginning of the 2006 World Cup, more than 20 Palestinians, including boys and girls, a pregnant woman, a doctor and several paramedics have been killed. It seems that nobody in the world is paying any attention. Why should they? After all, the World Cup is more important.

When I come back from Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv, I generally make a slight detour to Abu Gush, an Arab village with a unique oasis: a coffee shop where mixed groups of Jewish youngsters and Arab youngsters (male only), and sometimes groups of Border Guard soldiers, Jewish and Druze, sit together on couches and fauteuils, relaxed, smoking Nargilahs (water-pipes). They devour sugary Baklava, talk, laugh and listen to the Lebanese singer Fairuz and the Oriental Israeli singer Zahava Ben. An unusual phenomenon in Israel.

When I passed there this week, they were all sitting in great excitement before a large screen, fixated on the game between Argentina and the Netherlands. They got excited together, jumped up together, shouted together.

A few days before, I saw the same in Sarajevo. In the coffee shops in the center of the town, lots of local youngsters, Muslims, Croats and Serbs, were sitting together, staring together, getting excited together, jumping up together, shouting together.

The same is happening at the same time all over the world, from Canada to Cambodia, from South Africa to North Korea.

It that good? Is that bad?

I AM NOT a football fan. Like many people in the world who think of themselves as intellectuals (whatever that means), I usually dismiss this phenomenon with a condescending, slightly ironic smile, even if I catch myself nowadays looking for long minutes at the game. When I was a child, my father told me that sport was "Goyim Naches" (Yiddish from Hebrew, "pleasure of Gentiles"), and that the only Jewish sport was to ponder the philosophies of Spinoza and Schopenhauer, or, alternatively, the Talmud. Yeshayahu Leibovitch, an observant Orthodox Jew, described football teams as "eleven hooligans running after a ball." (Another Jew suggested, for the sake of peace: "Why quarrel? Give each team their own ball.")

From this point of view (too), Israel has long since ceased to be a Jewish state, in the spiritual sense. The Israeli Goy is like any other Goy on earth. The World Cup proves it.

A PHENOMENON that arouses such deep emotions in a billion human beings cannot be dismissed with a shrug. Here we have a profound human trait. What does it mean? Where does it come from?

Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of the science of Ethology, which deals with the behavior of animals (including the human animal), maintained that human aggressiveness is an inborn trait, a product of millions of years of evolution. Cavemen lived in tribes, each of which depended for survival on a specific territory. The aggressiveness was needed to defend this territory and drive others away.

Predators in nature, which have natural weapons - such as teeth, claws or poison - are generally equipped with an inhibiting mechanism that prevents them from attacking their own kind. Otherwise they would not have survived until today. But humans have no effective natural weapon, and therefore nature has not equipped them with such a mechanism. That was a terrible mistake. True, humans have no dangerous teeth or claws, but they have something more effective than any natural weapon: the human brain which invents clubs, pikes, cannons and nuclear bombs. So human beings have a deadly combination of three attributes: inborn aggressiveness, murderous weapons and a lack of inhibitions concerning the killing of their own kind. The result: the human inclination for war.

How to overcome it? Lorenz pointed to a remedy: sport, and especially football. Football is the surrogate for war. It directs human aggressiveness into harmless channels. That's why it is so important - and so positive.

AGGRESSIVENESS AND nationalism go together. In this respect, too, football allows a glimpse into the recesses of the human soul.

The human animal has a profound need to identify itself with a collective. It lives in a group. Ancient man lived in a tribe. Since then, social forms have changed many times. The "We" changed from time to time with the change of social structures. People lived in religious and ethnic frameworks, in feudal society, in monarchies, etc. In the modern world, they live in nations.

Self-identification with a nation is an absolute necessity for modern man (with very few exceptions). Football gives expression to this identification in a way that outwardly resembles war. That's why the national flag and the national anthem play a central role in football. The masses wave flags, paint their faces with the national colors, shout nationalist slogans, give an emotional expression to this phenomenon.

Sometimes this becomes downright ridiculous, as happened to us last week. Israel has no part in the World Cup, having been knocked out before it really began. But a member of the Ghana team, who plays for Hapoel Tel-Aviv, for some reason waved the Israeli flag on the field - and the whole State of Israel erupted in an outburst of joy: We are there! We are at the World Cup!

A less ridiculous apparition: for the first time since the destruction of the Third Reich, masses of Germans have been waving their national flag with an enthusiasm that borders on ecstasy. Some observers speak of a rebirth of German nationalism and whatnot. Yet I believe that it is a positive thing. A nation cannot live a normal life when its citizens are ashamed of it. That can cause a collective mental disturbance and give birth to dangerous tendencies. Now, thanks to football, Germans can wave their flag.

The nationalism of football overcomes all other sentiments. A classic example: at the end of the 19th century, Vienna had a mayor, Karl Lueger, who was a rabid and outspoken anti-Semite. But when the Jewish "Hakoah Vienna" played against a Hungarian team, the mayor was observed cheering the local boys. When it was pointed out to him that they were Jews, he made the famous remark: "It is I who decide who is Jewish or not."

When a French-Algerian was the star of the French team, French racists cheered him on until they were hoarse. The same happened in Israel, when an Arab played on our national team.

RECENTLY, A European intellectual told me: There are jokes about a Pole, a German, a Frenchman and any other European nation. But he has never heard a joke about a European, which proves that a European does not yet exist.

I would apply a similar criterion to football. Every nation in Europe has a national team, but there is no European team. Until the team of Europe, under the European flag, plays against the team of Asia or Africa, there will be no popular European consciousness. (A utopian may well dream of a match between the team of Earth and the team of Mars or Planet X.)

My Palestinian friend, Issam Sartawi, who was murdered 23 years ago because of his contacts with us, once said: "There will be no peace until the team of Israel plays against the team of Palestine - and we win."

THERE IS, of course, a gender angle to it.

A brilliant advertising copywriter has plastered Tel-Aviv with posters of a woman's note to her husband: "Itzig, let the goalie of Brazil prepare coffee for you. I am off with the girls to the drugstore. Gali." In a cartoon, a woman asks her husband, who is riveted to the World Cup on TV: "Are you sure you don't want to come with me to the book fair?"

Football is a raucous guy thing, even if there are also women fans. In this respect, too, it is a substitute for war, and perhaps also for ancient man's lust for hunting. (In the United States, European football - called soccer- is preferred by women, because American football is far more violent.)

In football, men dare to do things that, in other surroundings, would be taboo: they embrace each other, kiss each other, lie on top of one another. This expresses, no doubt, deep needs, and does not harm anyone.

From all these perspectives, football is a positive thing that replaces many negative ones. Provided, of course, President Bush does not use the opportunity to attack Iran, and we don't use it to bomb children in Gaza.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/avnery06272006.html

Iran's Jews learn to live with Ahmadinejad

Ewen MacAskill, Simon Tisdall and Robert Tait in Tehran
Tuesday June 27, 2006
The Guardian

Maurice Motamed has one of the loneliest jobs in the Middle East. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his controversial Holocaust statements, the sole Jewish MP in Iran's 290-member Majlis (parliament) felt he had no option but to confront him.

"When our president spoke about the Holocaust, I considered it my duty as a Jew to speak about this issue," Mr Motamed said in his office in central Tehran. "The biggest disaster in human history is based on tens of thousands of films and documents. I said these remarks are a big insult to the whole Jewish society in Iran and the whole world."

Mr Ahmadinejad, president of an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, has not apologised. But Mr Motamed said the president had since qualified his statement by insisting that he had not denied the Holocaust and he was not an anti-semite.

Mr Motamed represents Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community, the largest such group in the Middle East outside Israel. Since 1906, Iran's constitution has guaranteed the Jewish community one seat in the Majlis. The Armenian, Assyrian and Zoroastrian minorities together hold another four seats.

Although he took on Mr Ahmadinejad over the Holocaust, Mr Motamed supports the president on other issues, including the stand-off with the US, Europe and Israel over the country's nuclear programme. "I am an Iranian first and a Jew second," he said.

He acknowledged there were problems with being a Jew in Iran, as there were for the country's other minorities. But he said that Iran was relatively tolerant. "There is no pressure on the synagogues, no problems of desecration. I think the problem in Europe is worse than here. There is a lot of anti-semitism in other countries."

Most of his family, including his mother, father and sisters, left after the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, as did 75,000 other Jews, heading mainly for Israel, the US and Europe. But Mr Motamed, 61, an engineer, opted to remain. "I love my homeland."

Jews have been living in Iran in large numbers since Cyrus the Great freed them from slavery when he captured Babylon in 539BC. Members of the Jewish community in Iran today, for the most part, keep a low profile and many Iranians are unaware of their presence. Mr Motamed said there were about 14,000 Jews in Tehran, which has 20 active synagogues; 6,000-7,000 in Shiraz; 2,000 in Estafan and small groups scattered throughout the rest of the country.

He confirmed Jews and other minorities were all excluded from "sensitive" senior posts in the military and judiciary. And the authorities refuse to allow Jewish schools to close on the sabbath, a normal working day for the rest of Iran.

But Mr Motamed said there had been improvements in other areas. Legislation was introduced three years ago overturning a judicial practice of awarding more compensation to the families of Muslim accident victims than to those of Jews. And when he complained in the chamber about a TV soap opera regularly portraying rabbis as evil, he said the speaker of the Majlis expressed support for him.

Nasser Hadian-Jazy, associate professor of political science at Tehran University and a childhood friend of the president, said Mr Ahmadinejad was keen to put the Holocaust row behind him.

"I asked him, 'Are you anti-Jew?' He said, 'I am not.' I said, 'Why not go to a synagogue to express regret for what Iranians have done to Jews?' ... He said, 'I have another idea, a better idea.'

"He will do something to show he is not anti-Jewish. I hope he will do it soon. He will make a gesture to the Jews in Iran and that has implications for Jews elsewhere. What he will say is very important and will remove the idea that he is anti-semite."

Saeed Jalili, Iran's deputy foreign minister and another close friend of Mr Ahmadinejad, said the Jewish seat in the Majlis "tells you that we have no problems with Judaism" but he added that he had not heard of any planned gesture by Mr Ahmadinejad.

"The Jewish community in this country are very fairly treated ... Of course, a symbolic gesture is good and well, but we think that what we do is more than symbolic."

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1807160,00.html

Univision's Board OKs $12.3 Billion Sale

Univision Communications Inc.'s board agreed to sell the nation's largest Spanish-language broadcaster for $12.3 billion in cash to a consortium of investors, the parties involved in the sale announced Tuesday. The company's shares soared more than 7 percent.

The consortium, led by private equity firms Texas Pacific Group Inc. and Thomas H. Lee Partners, also includes Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, Providence Equity Partners Inc., and media mogul Haim Saban.

Mexican broadcaster Grupo Televisa SA, which led a rival consortium of investors, issued a statement Tuesday saying it was "disappointed" with the outcome of the Univision auction.

"Notwithstanding our repeated offers to discuss all aspects of our proposal, including price, Univision and its advisers refused to enter into any discussions with us after we submitted our initial bid," the company said. "Given this action by Univision's board, Televisa has a number of alternatives it is considering."

Univision's bylaws allow Televisa, which owns an 11 percent stake in Univision and supplies it with much of its programming, to veto a sale of the company, but such a move can be defeated by a 60 percent approval from Univision shareholders.

The Texas Pacific Group-led consortium initially bid $35.50 a share, or just under $11 billion total, last week. But Univision, which had reportedly been seeking an offer of $40 a share, rejected the group's initial bid as too low.

The investor group's offer remained on the table until Friday, when it expired. Both sides talked over the weekend and came to terms, a person familiar with the deal told The Associated Press.

Each of the private equity groups is expected to invest around $1 billion initially and Saban somewhat less, the person said.

The deal, if approved by Univision shareholders and regulators, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year or first quarter of 2007, according to the news release.

Univision dominates the U.S. Hispanic media market through its three television networks - Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision - more than two dozen television stations, a recorded music division, Internet portal and Spanish-language radio stations.

First, private equity firm Carlyle Investment Management LLC dropped out, followed by Blackstone Management Associates V LLC, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

On Friday, Televisa lost the investment arm of Venezuelan broadcaster Venevision, a unit of The Cisneros Group of Companies. Venevision owns a 14 percent stake in Univision and also supplies the U.S. network with programming.

Still, Televisa and its remaining partners, private equity firms Bain Capital Partners LLC and Cascade Investment LLC, which invests for billionaire Bill Gates, managed to submit an offer Friday that they claimed at the time exceeded the Texas Pacific Group's initial offer.

Full story: Forbes.com