Video of lethal Israeli prison raid provokes little concern in Israel

Forward, Nathan Jeffay: “Scant Response to Video of a Violent Israeli Prison Night Search”

See video

Israel Channel 2 aired footage in early April that the government had tried to keep secret of a post-midnight raid by Prison Service guards on sleeping Palestinian inmates at Ketziot Prison. The raid sparked a violent clash in which one prisoner died.

Tel Aviv — In the video, there was screaming, cursing and shooting that left one prisoner dead. But when, in early April, Israelis were given a fly-on-the-wall view of one of the most violent nights in the history of their prison service, other media outlets met it with a collective shrug.

Israel Police’s Facebook page rife with racist comments, calls for violence

Ha’aretz – The Israeli police’s official Facebook page faces criticism after allowing a stream of offensive and racist comments to be published on its page. The police say they regularly delete inappropriate comments, and have deleted over 1,500 responses during the past three weeks.

Here are some of the comments Haaretz found on the Facebook page: “We’re leading the Arabushes around by the nose;” “With God’s help let this be the first one killed today and not the last;” “They have to be sprayed like cockroaches;” “Every stinking SOB Muslim who dies is a holiday for me.”

These comments and many others were published by registered surfers, who are identified by their name and picture – and were not deleted by the police. A spokesperson for the police says that if they missed the offensive quotes, this was due to human error.

The official Israel Police page is considered a lively Facebook page, with more than 43,000 friends. The police use it for reporting various topics, from traffic jams to security incidents.

However, in many reports concerning security issues, the discussion on the page degenerates into curses, manifestations of racism, incitement to violence and more.

The violent rhetoric of the Israeli surfer may not come as a shock, but what does surprise is the police response: The force is in charge of enforcing the law and protecting the public, but many of the comments continue to adorn the page for a long time.

Mitchell reportedly resigned over Dennis Ross’s “extreme bias” toward Israel, Ross working against US interests

Ma’an – A political adviser to the late president Yasser Arafat issued a statement Tuesday, alleging that US Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell resigned because of the “extreme bias” of his deputy Dennis Ross.

Bassam Abu Shareef said Ross obstructed all US initiatives aiming to achieve progress in the peace process, and blamed the deputy’s bias for Mitchell’s resignation Saturday.

Abu Shareef said senior American officials informed him that Mitchell viewed the appointment of Ross a step to obstruct the peace process. He added that Mitchell believed Ross was working against US interests.

The official paraphrased comments he said were made by Mitchell during a meeting, where he asked: “How can Dennis Ross assist in the peace process when he refuses to meet with the Palestinians, when he despises their leadership and hates their president?”

Abu Shareef also said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “rejects peace,” and would have no part of a Palestinian state with Hamas in its leadership.

“This means they are opening war on Palestinians and their nation,” he added.

JTA: Republican Jewish Coalition blasts Ron Paul

JTA: “Republican Jews express concern about Paul candidacy”– The Republican Jewish Coalition blasted U.S. Rep. Ron Paul before he announced his third bid for the presidency.

“As Americans who are committed to a strong and vigorous foreign policy, we are deeply concerned about the prospective presidential campaign of Congressman Ron Paul,” the RJC’s executive director, Matt Brooks, said in a May 12 statement about the Texas lawmaker. “While Rep. Paul plans to run as a Republican, his views and past record place him far outside of the Republican mainstream.”

Paul launched his campaign for the Republican nomination on Friday. Like his son, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Paul has advocated cutting $3 billion in annual defense assistance to Israel, as well as to deny funding to its Arab neighbors.

In 2008, Paul mounted an insurgent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and built a passionate base of support with his libertarian views and denunciations of American foreign policy. He was not a serious contender, however, in the primaries.

Paul had run as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1988.

“His candidacy, as we’ve seen in his past presidential campaigns, will appeal to a very narrow constituency in the U.S. electorate,” Brooks said. [In reality, Paul draws from across the political spectrum.] “Throughout his public service, Paul has espoused a dangerous isolationist vision for the U.S. and our role in the world. He has been a virulent and harsh critic of Israel during his tenure in Congress.”

Paradigm Shift: The transformative effect of Egypt may begin to counter Israeli power

CounterPunch, Ramzy Baroud – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas-Fatah deal in Cairo was both swift and predictable. “The Palestinian Authority must choose either peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. There is no possibility for peace with both,” he said, in a televised speech shortly after the Palestinian political rivals reached a reconciliation agreement under Egyptian sponsorship on April 27.

Despite numerous past attempts to undercut Mahmoud Abbas, stall peace talks, and derail Israel’s commitment to previous agreements, Netanyahu and his rightwing government are now arguing that Palestinians are solely responsible for the demise of the illusory ‘peace process’. Israeli bulldozers will continue to carve up the hapless West Bank to make room for more illegal settlements, but this time their excuse may not be ‘natural expansion’. The justification might instead be Israel has no partner. US and other media will merrily repeat the dreadful logic, and Palestinians will, as usual, be chastised.

But frankly, at this juncture of Middle East history, Israel is almost negligible. It no longer has a transformative influence in the region. When the Arab people began revolting, a new dimension to the Arab-Israeli conflict emerged. As the chants in Cairo’s Tahrir Square began to adopt a pan-Arab and pro-Palestinian language, it became obvious that Egypt would soon venture outside the political confines of Washington’s patronizing labels, which divide the Arabs into moderates (good) and radicals (bad).

Israel’s “lawfare” against the Palestinian people is rooted in a ficticious narrative of having a “right” to exist

Al Jazeera, Joseph Massad – The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, now entering their twentieth year had been hailed from the start as historic, having inaugurated a “peace process” that would resolve what is commonly referred to as the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict”.

For the Palestinians and the international community, represented by the United Nations and the myriad resolutions its Security Council and General Assembly issued since 1948, what was to be negotiated were the colonisation of land, the occupation of territory and population, and the laws that stipulate ethnic and religious discrimination in Israel, which, among other things, bar Palestinian refugees from returning to their land and confiscate their property. In their struggle against these Israeli practises, Palestinian leaders, whether in Israel, the Occupied Territories, or the diaspora, have always invoked these rights based on international law and UN resolutions, which Israel has consistently refused to implement or abide by since 1948. Thus for the Palestinians, armed by the UN and international law, the negotiations were precisely aimed to end colonisation, occupation, and discrimination.

On the other hand, one of the strongest and persistent arguments that the Zionist movement and Israel have deployed since 1948 in defence of the establishment of Israel and its subsequent policies is the invocation of the rights of Israel, which are not based on international law or UN resolutions. This is a crucial distinction to be made between the Palestinian and Israeli claims to possession of “rights.” While the Palestinians invoke rights that are internationally recognised, Israel invokes rights that are solely recognised at the national level by the Israeli state itself. For Zionism, this was a novel mode of argumentation as, in deploying it, Israel invokes not only juridical principles but also moral ones.

What good is Palestinian unity if Gaza-West Bank travel is still impossible? The caging of gaza began in 1991

Ha’aretz, Amira Hass – Back in February, Egyptian diplomats predicted that Egypt would help bring about an internal Palestinian rapprochement, but what good is reconciliation if Palestinians from Gaza still won’t be able to travel to the West Bank?

Video: Leaders of Israel’s founding movement describe their intentions to take over Palestine and expel the inhabitants

Never Before Campaign – If one wants to know why and how the conflict started in Palestine more than 60 years ago, the “confessions” of Israeli and Zionist leaders should make it very clear.

700,000 Palestinians (more than half of the Palestinian population at the time) were expelled in 1948. More than 600 towns and villages were ethnically cleansed. See the map here. Thousands were killed and maimed.

Here is the list of quotes used in the video, their sources and the context:

Analysis of New York Times spin on Fatah-Hamas agreement

By John Whitbeck – I am frequently frustrated by the Western mainstream media practice of almost never mentioning Hamas without immediately adding “sworn to Israel’s destruction” (or a variant) and usually “Iranian-backed” (or a variant) as well. Often, care is also taken to point out that the United States and the European Union consider Hamas “a terrorist organization”.

These helpful background identifiers are clearly intended by journalists (or their editors) to alert readers or viewers that these are “bad guys”, untouchables, people who must richly deserve extra-judicial assassinations past (Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic, Abdulaziz Al-Rantisi and many other) or future (a resumption of assassinations of Hamas leaders having been publicly urged, post-Bin Laden, by MK Shaul Mofaz, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset, who has simultaneously claimed Israeli credit for inspiring America’s own assassination strategy).

I cannot recall ever seeing Hamas helpfully identified in the Western mainstream media as “the party which, in 2006, decisively won the most democratic elections ever held in the Arab world”.

This propagandistic practice is on view again in today’s New York Times news story [by Ethan Bronner, whose son serves in the Israeli army] on the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement (of which an English text is transmitted below) which was signed in Cairo on Tuesday and celebrated with speeches by Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Meshal yesterday. The first mention of the word “Hamas” is immediately followed by “– the Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip, rejects Israel’s existence and accepts arms and training from Iran –”.

Nevertheless, a few paragraphs later, the Times quotes Khaled Meshal as proclaiming in his speech: “We will have one authority and one decision. We need to achieve the common goal: a Palestinian state with full sovereignty on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital.” Obviously, this would leave ample room for Israel on the other side of the 1967 borders.

Does no one at the Times sense a “disconnect” here?

This is not a new position for Hamas. This has been the organization’s position for some years already. It is a position fully consistent with the position of Fatah, with UN Security Council 242 and with the proclaimed positions of virtually every member state of the United Nations except Israel and the United States.

Are Western mainstream media journalists and/or editors really so ignorant and uninformed as not to be aware of this? Or do they simply live and work in fear, believing that their personal and career interests require them, on this and other issues relating to Israel/Palestine, to feed disinformation to their readers and viewers so as to keep them ignorant and uninformed — indeed, brainwashed? [Or is Israel "family" for many of these journalists?]

Who is the Real Reactionary? Is Ron Paul more progressive than Obama?

CounterPunch, Charles Davis – Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I’ll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn’t protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn’t overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government’s criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you’ll quickly be informed that yeah, Ron Paul’s good on the war stuff — yawn — but otherwise he’s a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who’d kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He’s more cosmopolitan, after all; less Texas-y. He’s a Democrat. And gosh, even if he’s made a few mistakes, he means well.

Sure he’s a murderer, in other words, but at least he’s not a Republican!

Put another, even less charitable way: Democratic partisans – liberals – are willing to trade the lives of a couple thousand poor Pakistani tribesman in exchange for a few liberal catnip-filled speeches and NPR tote bags for the underprivileged. The number of party-line progressives who would vote for Ron Paul over Barack Obama wouldn’t be enough to fill Conference Room B at the local Sheraton, with even harshest left-leaning critics of the president, like Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, saying they’d prefer the mass-murdering sociopath to that kooky Constitution fetishist.

Egypt begins to support Palestinians, Israel worried – headed toward crisis

CounterPunch, Jonathan Cook: “A new mood in Cairo: Egypt and Israel headed for crisis” – Israeli officials have expressed alarm at a succession of moves by the interim Egyptian government that they fear signal an impending crisis in relations with Cairo.

Finkelstein omissions: 95% of Jewish Americans feel pride in Israel, 75% approved Cast Lead, only 13% recognize that Israel occupies Palestinian land

“Not Far Enough: Fact-Checking Finkelstein” –I’ve been reading This Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion by Norman G. Finkelstein (OR Books, 2010). Even though Finkelstein is “functionally a Zionist of the Left-liberal persuasion” there is no denying his passionate and often principled argumentation in support of positions that are generally helpful to those unemcumbered by Finkelstein’s tribal loyalties.

The “Gaza Invasion” of Finkelstein’s subtitle was the 22-day Hanukkah Massacre in the winter of 2008-2009 wherein forces of the Jewish state killed 1,417 Palestinians and wounded 5,303 in Gaza. I can’t say I made a thorough examination of Finkelstein’s book but I did flag two pages in chapter six, “Ever Fewer Hosannas,” in the hardcover edition for follow-up.

At the top of page 110 there appears the last sentence of a lengthy quote from “Poll: Attachment of U.S. Jews To Israel Falls in Past 2 Years” by Steven M. Cohen in the Jewish Daily Forward (March 04, 2005). It says: “Just 57% affirmed that ‘caring about Israel is a very important part of my being Jewish,’ compared with 73% in a similar survey in 1989.” In chapter six Finkelstein is making the case that American Jewish support for Israel is declining.

Finkelstein, apparently, didn’t go far enough in reading the article. When read in its entirety a more complex picture of the attitudes of Americans Jews towards Israel emerges. For example, there’s the finding that 95% of Americans Jews feel some degree of pride in Israel with fully two-thirds saying they “always” or “often” “feel proud of Israel”; only 5% said “never”. Then, too, “Only 13% said they are ‘sometimes uncomfortable identifying as a supporter of Israel,’ with an additional 14% ‘not sure’ “; 73% disagreed with the statement.

Concerning the attitudes of American Jews regarding Palestinians, Cohen writes:

When offered sharply critical characterizations of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, more respondents disagreed than agreed. However, substantial numbers were unsure. Thus, by 60% to 11% the sample rejected the assertion that “Israel persecutes a minority population,” with 29% not sure. Similarly, by a 65% to 13% margin, they rejected the notion that “Israel occupies lands that belong to another people,” with 22% not sure.

To restate that, only 11% of Americans Jews recognize that Palestinians are oppressed by Israel and only 13% admit that Israel occupies Palestinian territory. Curiously, only 17% of American Jews answered “Yes” when asked, “Are you a Zionist?”

Regarding a poll more closely related to the subject of his book, Finkelstein spins the results of J Street’s March 2009 “National Survey of American Jews”. On pages 118-119, Finkelstein writes, “a poll of American Jews found that 47% strongly approved of the Israeli assault, but—in a sharp break with the usual wall-to-wall solidarity—53 per cent were either ambivalent (44 per cent ‘somewhat’ approved or ‘somewhat’ disapproved) or strongly disapproved (9 per cent).”

Now, before I tell you what Finkelstein didn’t tell his readers about that poll, I want to emphasize two points: First, these are American, not Israeli, Jews. Second, the poll was conducted from February 28, 2009 through March 9, 2009. The Hanukkah Massacre ended on January 18, 2009.

So, these American Jews were expressing their attitudes more than a month after the fog of war and Israeli gov’t. propaganda had begun to clear. The one-sidedness of the ‘conflict’ was well-known by then, graphic images of Palestinian suffering had circulated widely, and respected international human rights groups had already begun to weigh-in against Israel.

What did American Jews tell J Street pollsters? Fully 75% said they “strongly approved” or “somewhat approved” “of the recent military action that Israel took in Gaza”; a plurality (47%) of American Jews “strongly approved”. This despite the fact that 59% “felt that the military action had no impact on Israel’s security (41 percent) or made Israel less secure (18 percent)”. This is not quite the picture Finkelstein paints.

Progressives and Conservatives: More in common than the media makes us think

CounterPunch, Sam Husseini, “Time to Break Out:How Obama and Trump Imprison Voters” – …..This is particularly tragic because most Principled Progressives and Conscientious Conservatives agree on so much, though it might not seem that way because establishment politicians (and corporate media) dwell on the differences between each other, which are frequently trivial. Consider:

• Foreign policy: Cutting the military budget, ending the U.S.’s wars, dismantling the network of military bases around the globe, stopping support for tyrannical governments like Saudi Arabia, ending support of Israel’s aggressions and occupations.

• Economy: Stopping the Wall Street bailouts, ending the Federal Reserve, curtailing runaway corporate power and corporate welfare, ending trade deals like NAFTA that obliterate jobs in the U.S. while impoverishing many in other countries, challenging the IMF and WTO.

• Freedom Agenda: Ending the so-called “Patriot” Act, stopping government use of secret “evidence” to prosecute individuals, insisting on accountability for torture and illegal detentions and renditions, stopping government spying on citizens, ending the drug war and the mass imprisonment that causes, and challenging the media establishment while enhancing solutions like local low power radio and net neutrality.

Oh yeah, and supporting WikiLeaks and whilstleblowers like Bradley Manning.

But Big Media keep telling progressives they’re supposed to hate “The Tea Party” — as if there were no difference between Sarah Palin and Ron Paul. And the establishment and corporate media have kept conservatives from seeing the insights of authentic progressives, people like Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and Mike Gravel — demonizing or marginalizing them in a plethora of ways.

Will Goldstone’s retraction provoke another Cast Lead?

Goldstone gave pro-Israel spin from the start – covered up the fact that the Israeli attack was an act of aggression

Le Monde Diplomatique, Jonathan Cook – Richard Goldstone, the international jurist whose now-notorious report on Gaza tarred the Israeli army with war crimes, backtracked unexpectedly and very publicly on 2 April in the pages of the Washington Post.

For 18 months Goldstone had suffered a campaign of character assassination by Israel and its supporters as they sought to discredit his United Nations investigation into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09. Goldstone, a South Africa judge who made his name undermining the legal foundations of apartheid rule and later prosecuting war criminals from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, was quickly cast as the self-hating Jew who had helped to author an anti-Semitic report. His professions of “love for Israel”, made as he defended his role, served only to further incense critics.

Israel, ADL pressure Facebook to remove page calling for Arab Spring for Palestine to begin May 13th

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat, THIRD PALESTINIAN INTIFADA: All Arabs to March on Israel on May 15th – All of the popular uprisings that swept through the Arab world have been preplanned and officially launched on facebook pages weeks in advance.

Pro-Israel lobbying. An Israeli Cabinet minister, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and a massive American-Zionist campaign have succeeded in pressuring Facebook into removing the“third Intifada” page, which clearly calls for an all-Arab uprising against Israel.

Egyptians reject Israeli-Egyptian natural gas deal and blockade on Gaza

Salem-News, Dr. Ashraf Ezzat – …The list of charges against Mubarak’s regime is a long one that included harming national interests, profiteering, selling government assets and public enterprises, squandering and wasting public money and shooting peaceful protesters. But the deal of exporting Egypt natural gas to Israel that Mubarak himself endorsed back in 2005 stands at the top of the list.

The end of a deal.

According to the crooked deal, Egypt is to sell its natural gas with a fixed price of $1.25 per million British thermal units (Btu) – while Global gas prices in the meantime jumped to $4 per million Btu- for 15 years.

Economists estimated that Egypt wasted at least $714 million in potential revenue from the deal to date, while independent analysts opposed to the deal put the number of losses much higher, up to $8 million per day.

Declaring an Independent Bantustan, by Haidar Eid

Al-Shabaka – The “induced euphoria” that characterizes discussions within the mainstream media around the upcoming declaration of an independent Palestinian state in September, ignores the stark realities on the ground and the warnings of critical commentators. Depicting such a declaration as a “breakthrough,” and a “challenge” to the defunct “peace process” and the right-wing government of Israel, serves to obscure Israel’s continued denial of Palestinian rights while reinforcing the international community’s implicit endorsement of an apartheid state in the Middle East.

Interview with UCLA Professor Saree Makdisi about Palestinian Unity Deal

What’s in it for us, Mr. Obama? Billions more for Israel while Congress cuts Americans

Council for the National Interest, Philip Giraldi

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served 18 years overseas and is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

Apologists for Israel sometimes argue that critics of that nation hold the government in Tel Aviv up to an impossibly high standard, that many condemn Israelis for doing things that other countries in the world also do routinely. That argument has a certain persuasiveness in that Bahrain’s Sunni rulers treat the country’s Shi’a majority just as badly as Israeli Jews treat Palestinian Arabs, but it misses the point. How Israel treats its own minority citizens, Gazans, and residents of the West Bank, and its neighbors might be significant from a humanitarian point of view, but it is not a vital interest of the United States.

That Washington has become a victim of the internal politics of the Middle East is largely due to manipulation by Israel and its lobby, which has turned all Americans into enablers of Israeli policies, no matter how short-sighted or ill-conceived. It is the US national interest that has been sacrificed in the process. That is the point.

For those who would argue that such a view of the US interest versus that of Israel is simplistic, I would point out three developments over the past several weeks that together make the case that Israel has extraordinary ability to manipulate Washington. First would be the budget debate, in which Republicans united to call for deep cuts in the proposed federal budget before settling for less than one tenth of one percent. Senator Rand Paul had courageously raised the possibility of ending all foreign aid, including to Israel, but generally speaking any reduction in assistance at the current $3 billion plus level was off the table. Several congressmen, including Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor explicitly stated their opposition to any reduction in aid to Israel. But the real surprise came in the final spending bill. Israel not only was not cut in its assistance level, it received $205 million in additional funding for its Iron Dome defensive missile development, which competes with US defense firm Raytheon’s Patriot system.

In Light Of Palestinian Unity Deal, U.S. Threatens To Cut Aid To P.A.

The United States and Israel have launched a large-scale international campaign meant to block the Palestinian declaration of an independent state.

IMEMC, Saed Bannoura – The United States issued a statement on Wednesday denouncing the provisional unity deal signed between the rival Fateh movement of President Mahmoud Abbas, and the Hamas movement. The U.S. said that such a deal could lead Washington to cut U.S.. aid to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.).

According to “Your Jewish News”, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, U.S. House Affairs Chairwoman, issued a statement denouncing the unity deal, and stating that under existing U.S. laws, the P.A. cannot receive fund from the U.S.

Ros-Lehtinen further stated that Abbas’s reach to Hamas, and his efforts for reconciliation “with a group considered by the U.S.. as a terrorist organization, will oblige Washington to end its aid”.

Questions about “Hamas-Fatah reconciliation” – Ali Abunima

If there is an agreement on a joint “government” how can it possibly function without Israeli approval? Will Israel allow Hamas ministers be able to operate freely in the occupied West Bank? Will PA officials be able to move freely between the West Bank and Gaza? Israel is effectively at peace with the current Abbas wing of the Palestinian Authority and at war with Hamas. Impossible to see how such a government can operate under Israeli occupation. If anything this proves the impossibility of democracy and normal governance under Israeli military occupation.

Electronic Intifada – Big news today about a reported “Hamas-Fatah reconciliation” deal. What does it mean? First, here’s what we know from Reuters:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement has struck an agreement with bitter rival Hamas on forming an interim government and fixing a date for a general election, officials said Wednesday.