What’s Israel up to in Jerusalem?

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Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah tells Al Jazeera English that Israeli extremists who want to take over al-Aqsa are stoking violence in Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing to remove metal detectors at the gates of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound, despite advice from the Israeli army and Shin Bet secret police that he should do so.

Ali Abunimah told Al Jazeera English on Saturday evening that Netanyahu’s rejection of this advice is a further indication that his move is political – part of Israel’s plan to consolidate its control over al-Aqsa, one of the holiest sites for Muslims

Electronic Intifada 23 July 2017.

Why is UN pushing for Gaza’s surrender?

Gaza City, March 2015. Anne Paq ActiveStills

By Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada, 20 July 2017.

The new report on Gaza by a team led by Robert Piper, the United Nations’ chief humanitarian coordinator in Palestine, makes for disturbing reading.
That’s not only because of the alarming statistics or “indicators” about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, of which there is no shortage in the report.

That the situation in Gaza is untenable, its population living in a pressure cooker that gets worse by the day, is clear to anyone who pays attention.

The UN has previously predicted that Gaza would become “unlivable” by the year 2020.

Piper’s report “tries to look past the polemic and review – as we approach 2020 – the socioeconomic, humanitarian and human rights disaster that is unfolding in Gaza and to advocate on behalf of the two million people trapped in this sad reality.”

Pushing for Gaza’s surrender

Yet what the report actually does is reveal how the UN has apparently aligned with Israel and its international backers in pushing for Gaza’s total surrender to its tormentors.

This is made evident with the background context provided in the report which frames Israel’s economic blockade on Gaza as the response to Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, which Piper’s report perversely describes as a “coup.”

Hamas was the unexpected winner in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections held in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.

Investigative reporting by David Rose in Vanity Fair and a trove of leaked documents revealed by Al Jazeera describe a 2007 coup attempt in Gaza, but not by Hamas.

Following Hamas’ victory at the ballot box, Israel and its allies, principally the United States, spared no effort in undermining the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government with the goal of restoring power exclusively to Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based PA president whose Fatah party lost the election.

After months of street fighting, Hamas and Fatah formed a “national unity government” headed by a Hamas prime minister. The US then enlisted Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan to rout Hamas militarily in Gaza. This plot ultimately failed, and Dahlan’s US-backed militias were run out of the territory.

According to the anodyne language used in the Piper report, Hamas’ subsequent administration of Gaza is deemed illegitimate because of its refusal “to recognize the Middle East Quartet’s (EU, Russian Federation, UN and US) demands to accept all previous agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence.”

In other words, the preference of Palestinian voters living under Israeli occupation is null and void because Hamas does not subscribe to the normalization program – including the requirement for active cooperation with Israeli occupation forces – imposed by Israel and its international allies, in contrast to the subservient role played by Abbas’ Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

This is the fundamental, irreconcilable political difference between the American and European-backed Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The impasse has compounded the socioeconomic deterioration in Gaza resulting from Israel’s decade-long siege and half-century of military occupation.

“Right to exist”

The Piper report’s insistence on Hamas’ recognition of Israel’s “right to exist” and the demand that it “renounce violence” should be further scrutinized.

Why should Palestinians be forced to submit to demands that Israel itself rejects?

Only on planet Peace Process would a resistance faction be demanded to recognize an occupying state’s “right to exist,” while that same occupier has historically violated the Palestinian people’s very right to life, wiping out families by the dozens and killing more than one out of every thousand of Gaza’s residents during its onslaught in the summer of 2014.

Israel violates Palestinians’ right to life so routinely that the weekly extrajudicial executions perpetrated by its forces go largely unreported by the mainstream corporate media. Israel is not held accountable for its systematic and daily violations of Palestinians’ most basic rights.

When Palestinians do use violent resistance against Israeli occupation forces, as is their right under international law, it has been characterized as “terror,” even by UN officials.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has in the past bizarrely called on “Palestinian authorities to take all feasible measures to prevent attacks on Israelis,” lumping in attacks on civilians with those against occupation forces and suggesting that Palestinians have no right to defend themselves against Israel’s threats to their very existence.

In the Piper report, Hamas’ military capacities are blamed for impeding access and movement of people and goods to and from Gaza, particularly “the development, stockpiling and firing of rockets capable of reaching deep into Israel and the construction of sophisticated tunnels used for kidnappings and terrorist attacks in Israel.”

In the report’s timeline of the siege, the first phase is portrayed as a response to the capture (misconstrued as a “kidnapping”) of an Israeli soldier by Hamas in 2006.

Israel’s winter 2008-2009 military onslaught in Gaza is not mentioned in the timeline, and the 2012 and 2014 assaults only in passing. But the number of rockets fired from Gaza is given with precise figures during each phase of the siege, while regular Israeli airstrikes, shelling and gunfire on the territory are not mentioned in the timeline.

Nor does the timeline mention Israel’s habitual violations of negotiated ceasefires that had drastically reduced levels of violence.

The omission of Israel’s regular strikes on Gaza, and the inclusion of the number of mortars fired from Gaza, reinforces the lie that each of Israel’s massive military assaults in 2008, 2012 and 2014 were justified responses to rocket fire, rather than Israeli violations of truces followed in good faith by Hamas.

“Terror”

And as for those tunnels, Piper’s report describes them as being used for “terror.” Yet the UN’s own independent inquiry into the 2014 war on Gaza states explicitly that tunnels were used by Palestinian groups to conduct attacks only on “legitimate military targets.”

The Piper report is one of many from international agencies and human rights groups expressing concern over and demanding unspecified international action to improve the current situation in Gaza.

Like every other report before, it will be ignored by world powers that view Palestinians in Gaza – most of them refugees from the lands on which Israel declared its state, and nearly half of them under the age of 15 – as surplus and expendable.

What is significant about the Piper report is that it demonstrates that the UN – which brokered a secretive and illegal system that gives Israel ultimate control over the rebuilding of homes and other civilian infrastructure it destroyed in Gaza, allowing it to profit from the reconstruction paid for by third-party states – has totally capitulated to Gaza’s oppressors.

Reading between the lines of Piper’s report, one understands that Israel controls everything that gets into Gaza, and everything that gets out. It has a total chokehold on Gaza’s economy, whatever remains of it after Israel destroyed or damaged 250 factories and 300 businesses in the summer of 2014 alone.

Genocidal aims

The Piper report obscures the reality that the devastating siege on Gaza is a willful strategy to bring its population to their knees. It makes no mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal aims to “send Gaza back to the Middle Ages,” their claims that “there are no innocents in Gaza … mow them down,” their calls to “concentrate” and “exterminate” Palestinians, or their demands to slaughter Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”

In Gaza, Israel aims to snuff out the last bastion of Palestinian resistance against its settler-colonial project, an endeavor that requires massive, genocidal violence to be maintained.

Detached from this reality, the outcomes of Israel’s calculated policy are treated by the Piper report as technical problems to be dealt with by international development groups – groups that would not be needed if there was real pressure to end the siege, to end the occupation, to secure Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

In many instances in the report, damage to civilian infrastructure such as schools and medical facilities is passively described as having been incurred “during successive rounds of hostilities,” obscuring the fact that they were systematically targeted by Israel’s sophisticated air force.

Meanwhile, a false parity between the Israeli military, massively subsidized by the US and supported by EU members, and Hamas’ guerrilla fighters is reinforced throughout the report, including in the discussion of war crimes in Gaza.

The Piper report even says that “The State of Palestine is also responsible for implementing its human rights obligations in the entirety of the oPt, including Gaza,” using the insufferable jargon employed by international agencies for the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

There is no State of Palestine – a reality the report concedes elsewhere when it refers to “the future state of Palestine.”

There is only a quisling Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank with extremely limited autonomy and which doesn’t even have the authority to build a school in the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military control. It is only there to serve as an enforcement arm of Israel’s occupation and to try to break Palestinian resistance.

Yet the Piper report laments that “the Strip remains beyond the reach of the legitimate Palestinian Authorities and under Hamas control.”
The catastrophe in Gaza is not caused by acts of nature, it is one of careful design and control. The situation born of Israel’s experiment in human despair in Gaza will never improve so long as the genocidal state behind it is whitewashed and appeased by the very institutions that are supposed to hold it accountable.

Gideon Levy: ‘We expected more of Thom Yorke’

Singer Thom Yorke plays with the group Radiohead in Tel Aviv on July 19, 2017. Liron Schneider and Ariel Ephron

Gideon Levy, Haaretz (Israeli daily newspaper) 19 July 2017

Opinion: He Sang ‘Creep,’ but We Expected More of Thom Yorke

One can fight politicians, global warming, big corporations and Donald Trump without needing much courage. Not so with the occupation.

“When we got the call / Saw dollars in my eyes / We’re supporting apartheid / But the pay’s really high / I float like white phosphorous / Over Beit Hanoun skies / I wish I was ethical / We’re so very unethical / But I’m a creep / I’m playing Israel / What the hell am I doing here? / I don’t belong here I don’t even notice / No Palestinians around.”

These lyrics were superimposed by BDS activists in England on a video from a Radiohead performance of their hit song “Creep,” to protest the band’s appearance Wednesday night in Tel Aviv. Similarly, Scottish activists posted a cover of another Radiohead song, “Karma Police,” with the lyrics “They’re playing apartheid / While Palestinians wait / They’re the worst kind of hypocrites.”

So these versions circulated online, while Radiohead gathered tens of thousands in Yarkon Park. Gaza is enveloped in darkness and they laughed all the way to the bank. While doors all over the world are being slammed in Roger Waters’ face as part of the delegitimization of the BDS movement, Radiohead can appear anywhere and not pay any price for identifying with Israel and the occupation, and it only got more ridiculous as lead singer Thom Yorke became more entrenched in his positions.

This battle of music icons, between the protest singer, Waters, and the checkbook singer, Yorke; between the voice of morality and conscience and the voice of escapism and apathy, always ends in victory for Yorke’s “music without borders.” It’s always more comfortable to be an apolitical singer, one who “doesn’t mix music with politics.”

We expected more from Yorke. Perhaps if he knew more about the occupation than what he probably heard from the Israeli wife of his guitarist, he would change his stance. After all, he’s known to be an artist who gives a damn, a vegan who battles against globalization, supports fairness in trade, opposes Donald Trump and fights for the environment. But that’s just the point: You don’t pay any price for these battles, justified as they may be. They are luxury struggles, like those of Aviv Geffen, our own protest singer.

One can battle against politicians, against global warming, multinational corporations and the U.S. president without needing much courage. You can be in favor of liberating Tibet and against the occupation of Kashmir; against whale hunting and the oppression of the Falun Gong in China, in favor of animal rights, Native Americans, the Inuit, the Roma and the Aborigines – all of which are justified causes – without it costing a thing.

There’s only one struggle for which anyone putting his hand in the fire gets immediately burned. Anyone who dares to say “No” to the occupation is immediately accused of anti-Semitism. Say “BDS” and you risk prosecution. That’s why the real test of an artist’s guts and integrity is the struggle against the occupation and Israeli apartheid. That’s the litmus test. The cowards flee from it, only the brave dare take it on. That’s why there are so few Waterses in the world and lots of Yorkes.

There is no more powerful, rich, well-oiled, effective and aggressive lobby like the one that fights opponents of the Israeli occupation. You can be Yorke, fight Wall Street, be considered a person of conscience and not get hurt. Or you can be Waters, who’s in the middle of a dizzying world tour, and in the midst of this success hasn’t neglected the struggle that burns within him more than any other, and for which he’s paying a heavy price. Nothing will stop him, not even when American governors and mayors threaten to block his appearances. Not even when they call him an anti-Semite or even a Nazi. Waters dreams of appearing in Gaza, and isn’t intimidated when the mayor of Miami Beach threatens to prevent him from appearing in his city. The scandalous criminalization of BDS is already taking its toll, but Waters and his ilk are not afraid.

Yorke was born with a sealed left eye, which was opened by a series of operations. There’s something symbolic about that. Waters was born with both eyes open. They’ve never met. Their respective level of daring and integrity separates them, apparently forever. Which of them will be more admired? Which will be remembered?

       

Break the silence on Gaza with people power

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By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, 15 July 2017

After 10 years of Israeli siege, the United Nations says Gaza is effectively unlivable.

Israel has consigned the people of Gaza to “living in abject poverty under practically inhuman conditions unparalleled in the modern world,” the human rights group B’Tselem said last month.

In recent weeks the situation has deteriorated even further, as Israel has sharply cut the electricity supply, bringing available energy in Gaza to the lowest level ever.

Health, water and sewage treatment systems are breaking down, making life unbearable.

“This is not a natural disaster. This is a policy choice by Israel to do this to 2 million people, and it’s a policy choice the so-called international community are supporting,” I told Aaron Maté of The Real News.

“At best the so-called international community scrambles to do an appeal to various donor governments to patch up, to do palliative care,” for people in Gaza, I told Maté. “What they don’t do is challenge Israel and hold it accountable.”

By refusing to provide people in Gaza with basic health and other services, Israel, as the occupying power, is committing war crimes, I argued.

And it’s happening in silence – even Democracy Now, a flagship progressive outlet, has mentioned the situation only in brief and infrequent headlines.

The humanitarian catastrophe is also the result of collusion between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

Abbas wants to put political pressure on Hamas, which governs the interior of Gaza, by inflicting additional suffering on the 2 million Palestinians who live there.

This pressure has included curtailing medicine supplies to Gaza and refusing medical referrals for hundreds of patients who need urgent treatment outside the territory, leading to more than a dozen deaths.

“It’s up to us to challenge the institutional complicity and silence,” I told Maté. If regime media don’t make noise about Gaza, “people should be demonstrating, holding protests at the UN and Israeli embassies, at Palestinian Authority embassies, because they’re all complicit in this siege.”

  

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Sole Gaza power station turned off due to fuel crisis

A severe shortage of fuel leaves the besieged Palestinian territory in a complete blackout, say local officials.

Gaza has been under Israeli blockade for a decade and residents have been subjected to persistent blackouts [File: Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

AlJazeera report, 13 July 2017

The Gaza Strip’s only operating power plant was turned off late on Wednesday due to a severe shortage of fuel, leaving the coastal enclave in a complete blackout, local officials said.

Gaza is headed for a deeper political & humanitarian crisis

By Haidar Eid, Ayah Abubasheer IMEMC News & Agencies, Gaza Strip, 13 July 2017

Gaza is Headed for a Deeper Political and Humanitarian Crisis

Political players both in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and the region are repositioning themselves after the recent emergence of a coalition between Hamas and Mohammed Dahlan, the former leader of Fatah in Gaza and Hamas’s long-standing enemy, as well as the sanctions placed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt. The Palestinians of Gaza are anxiously waiting to see how these significant political changes for the Gaza Strip will affect their daily lives.

Gazans fear worse conditions, and rightly so. The Strip’s likely loss of Qatar as a funder and ally, as well as the all-but-guaranteed continuation of collective punishment measures inflicted on Gaza by the Palestinian Authority (PA), signal even more miserable living conditions. This may be hard to imagine after ten years of a brutal Israeli blockade, interspersed with assaults that have left thousands of civilians killed or wounded and infrastructure devastated, but the recent electricity crisis has shown how conditions can go from worse to even worse: As we went to publication, Gaza was totally without power. Beyond the human suffering, this situation exacerbates political fragmentation and undoubtedly weakens the Palestinian quest for self-determination and freedom.

In the two reflections below, Al-Shabaka Policy Analysts Haidar Eid and Ayah Abubasheer, both based in Gaza, examine the political ramifications of the Qatar crisis on Gaza, particularly Hamas’s desperate attempts to retain its rule and authority in the Strip using its newfound rapprochement with Dahlan. They also recount how everyday lives are being affected.  Their conclusion? Gaza’s future has perhaps never looked bleaker.

Al-Shabaka Program Director Alaa Tartir served as the roundtable’s facilitator.

Haidar Eid

There is near consensus in the Gaza Strip that the enclave is experiencing the beginning of an era marked by unprecedented punitive measures imposed by the Fatah-backed PA. This period began in March, when Hamas formed an administrative committee to govern Gaza. Threatened by the move, the PA retaliated by suspending or reducing Gaza-based government employees’ salaries; withholding allocations of power, medicine, and health care; shelving freed prisoners’ pensions; and denying Gaza patients’ referrals for treatment in West Bank and Israeli hospitals. Last week, the PA forced more than 6,000 Gaza civil servants, most of whom were working in the education and health sectors, into early retirement.

These decisions were made in the name of the “Palestinian people” or the “Palestinian national project,” but without input from anyone outside the PA, which is justifying the measures as a way “to push Hamas toward reconciliation” and arguing that “the national project is more important than citizens’ needs.”

In response, Hamas turned to Egypt and its arch-rival Mohammad Dahlan, though not before attempting to lobby the US administration for a role in the “peace process” by adopting the two-state solution through changes to its charter. The US snub made it possible for Hamas to ally with a regime that has waged a violent campaign against its mother movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the Hamas-Egypt partnership is not altogether surprising, as it comes amid Hamas’s freeze on resistance for the sake of maintaining authority.

It is impossible to understand these developments without considering those taking place elsewhere in the Arab world, particularly in the Gulf. The recent crisis between Qatar and some of the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has affected Gaza and, by extension, the Palestinian cause, by placing it even lower on international and Arab leaders’ list of priorities. In addition, Qatar provides humanitarian aid to Palestine. Though it does not take a clear-cut political stance – and thus fails to challenge Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism – the potential loss of Qatar as an ally puts Hamas in a more vulnerable position. These developments also come amid the US administration’s drive to consolidate Arab normalization with Israel without achieving the minimum basic rights for the Palestinian people guaranteed under international law.

Hamas is thus at the mercy of Israel, the US, and the PA, and is desperately trying to maintain its grasp on power in the Gaza Strip. This appears to be driving Hamas to institute more policies that may help it in the short term, but in the long run will serve to maintain a punishing status quo that will also ultimately weaken it. Oraib Rantawi, for instance, argues that Hamas is contemplating joining a new camp close to the Arab Quartet (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), and that Mohammad Dahlan is its escort on this path.

Why is Mahmoud Abbas letting children die in Gaza?

Palestinians hold placards condemning PA leader Mahmoud Abbas for his complicity of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, at a rally in Gaza City, 9 July. [Mohammed Asad APA]

By Ali Abunimah, Opinion: the Electronic Intifada, 13 July 2017

Why is Mahmoud Abbas letting children die in Gaza?

The deeply unpopular Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is helping Israeli occupation authorities inflict horrendous suffering on people in the blockaded Gaza Strip, as part of a cruel and cynical political game.

It is a campaign that in recent weeks has led to the deaths of more than a dozen Palestinians denied medical treatment outside Gaza – the most recent, a little girl called Yara Ismail Bakhit.

Israel and Abbas are doing this with the complicity of a so-called international community that remains silent about the unfolding catastrophe.

Closely allied with Israel, Abbas has long defined collaboration with its occupation forces as a “sacred” duty.

This collaboration has included encouraging Israel, from the very start, to tighten its blockade of Gaza.

The decade-long siege has brought the 2 million residents caged into the territory to perhaps their most dire crisis in a period that has included successive military assaults that have killed thousands of people.

On Thursday, Gaza’s only power plant shut down after emergency fuel supplies ran out.

The territory is now dependent on just 70 megawatts of power supplied from Israel, a fraction of the 500 megawatts it needs each day.

A “power watch” feature in the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz shows that Gaza City received just three hours of electricity on Wednesday, while some areas received four hours.

But with the power supply now below the all-time low it reached earlier this week, most residents face long stretches without any power at all amid the sweltering summer heat.

On top of the darkness and the heat, many in Gaza face a cut off of any contact with the outside world: the PA telecom company Paltel said that internet and telephone services to thousands of customers in Gaza have been severed as generators fail.

Unheeded warnings

On Wednesday, UN human rights officials emphasized that the latest power cuts “have deepened the humanitarian crisis with hospitals in precarious conditions, water shortages growing and untreated sewage being dumped into the Mediterranean.”

Their warnings will likely go unheeded, just like so many in recent months, including from the International Committee of the Red Cross that said in May that Gaza was on the brink of “systemic collapse.”

For months, health facilities across the territory have been in crisis and Gaza City’s main hospital has slashed vital surgeries because there isn’t enough power to run life support systems.

As treatment plants fail, the territory is swimming in sewage.

Yet the European Union, which never rests from trumpeting its alleged commitment to “human rights,” has maintained a determined silence which can only be interpreted as full support for the measures inflicting such suffering on Gaza.

Instead, the EU’s embassy in Tel Aviv as well as a top UN official, touted Abbas’ authority for collaborating with Israel to increase the electricity supply to Jenin, a town in the northern occupied West Bank.

The timing of the announcement, along with a grotesque ribbon-cutting ceremony in which PA officials appeared alongside Israeli military officers, looked calculated to rub salt into the wounds of people in Gaza.

Finally, on Thursday, after months of ignoring Gaza, the EU, as part of the so-called Quartet, issued a vague statement of “concern” that said nothing about Israel’s responsibilities.