The Fanonite

By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Variant, Issue 32, Summer 2008; Spinwatch, June 23, 2008; Scoop (New Zealand), June 25, 2008; UK Watch, June 25, 2008; Media Monitors Network, June 25, 2008; Dissident Voice, June 27, 2008

“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.

The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.[1] Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.

In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
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Damadola, in Bajaur, Pakistan struck by 2-drone missiles; US suspected to be behind bombing

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Strong stuff, from Amira Hass (via Norman Finkelstein)

In the middle of November a new method of “smuggling” Palestinians into Israel was exposed: in the northern Jordan Valley, two cars from East Jerusalem disguised to look “police-like” were used in an attempt to transport Palestinians without permits through the Bezek crossing. The same week a private smuggling attempt from the West Bank to Israel came to light: a woman was transporting someone concealed in her car, and by her behaviour she aroused the suspicions of soldiers at a checkpoint. This was reported in passing on the radio, as a curiosity. Neither of the two incidents represented a security danger; they were merely additional attempts by unemployed people to work in Israel. There are probably hundreds like them every month, who have not yet been discovered en route to “infiltration” into Israel in a desperate search for livelihood and food for their children. It could even be added: while heroically endangering themselves.

The discovery of a breach in the “separation wall” immediately sets off security alarms in Israeli ears. If those routes are known to workers, then they are probably also known to organizations that espouse suicide bombing. Can the fact that those routes have not been used lately to send suicide bombers be attributed only to the activities of Shabak [Israel's internal intelligence agency and security police -- trans.], or is it due in part — or perhaps mainly — to the fact that the various organizations have changed their approach? Or maybe there is something more: there are organizations and splinters of organizations that are probably looking for candidates for suicide attacks. But today, unlike in the past, the atmosphere of support for suicide attacks — which was motivated mainly by the desire to avenge the many civilians that the IDF killed immediately after September 2000 — is not prevalent.

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Mario Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian author, on ‘How Arabs have been driven out of Hebron‘. I may not like Vargas Llosa’s politics — once a progressive, he made a sharp move to the right after a fistfight with Gabriel Garcia Marquez — but he is without a doubt one of Latin America’s greatest authors.

Hebron is the image of desolation and pain. I’m talking of the H-2 sector, the oldest part of this ancient city, which is under Israeli military control and where some 500 colonos – settlers – live in four settlements. It is one of the holiest places of Judaism and Islam, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where in February 1994, the settler Baruch Goldstein machine-gunned Muslims at prayer, killing 29 and wounding dozens.

To protect these settlers, the zone bristles with barriers, camps and military posts, and is overrun by Israeli patrols. But such mobilisation will soon be unnecessary because this part of Hebron, subject to ethnic and religious cleansing, will soon have no Arab residents.

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Palestinians versus Tibetans. ‘Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet‘, writes Gideon Levy. Neither, I might add, have people in the US. All the arguments by Levy — whom I consider a true moral giant — also apply to the US liberal champions of Darfur. (thanks Paulo)

Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The president of the Israeli Friends of the Tibetan People, the psychologist Nahi Alon, who was involved in the murder of two Palestinians in Gaza in 1967 — as was revealed in Haaretz Magazine last weekend — chose to make his private “atonement” by fighting to free Tibet, of all places. He is not alone among Israelis calling to stop the occupation — but not ours. No small number of other good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy — who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

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A report in the Sunday Herald from Louisa Waugh, a volunteer with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza. (thanks Douglas)

Karim, the Palestinian who drove me to the Gaza Strip, was very quiet. As we sped out of Jerusalem in his comfortable private taxi, he said very little, except to ask if I would give his friend Rami a box of cigarettes when I arrived. “I’ve worked with Rami for eight years now,” he said, “but I’ve never seen him. He cannot come out of Gaza, and I can’t go inside.”

An hour later we reached the Erez terminal. It looks like an airport hangar; grey, immense, featureless. Erez is the main Israeli crossing to the Gaza Strip; but the journey starts long before you reach Erez. First you have to apply in writing for Israeli security clearance to enter the Strip. Since declaring the Gaza Strip “a hostile entity” on September 19 last year, Israel has tightened its siege of Gaza, and many people, including UN personnel, are refused clearance without explanation.

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‘Sanctions causing Gaza to implode, say rights groups‘. The honourable John Dugard states something that the international ‘community’ and servile media would much rather ignore: that the occupation makes terrorism inevitable. But now the horror of the occupation has been supplemented — with full Arab complicity — by the ravages of sanctions.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are living through their worst humanitarian crisis since the 1967 war because of the severe restrictions imposed by Israel since the Islamist movement Hamas seized power, a report says today.Movement is all but impossible and supplies of food and water, sewage treatment and basic healthcare can no longer be taken for granted. The economy has collapsed, unemployment is expected to rise to 50%, hospitals are suffering 12-hour power cuts and schools are failing - all creating a “humanitarian implosion”, according to a coalition of eight UK humanitarian and human rights groups. Read the rest of this entry »

Palestinian medics carry a wounded child after an Israeli missile destroyed the labor union headquarters in Gaza, 28 February 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

‘Israeli minister threatens “holocaust” as public demand ceasefire talks‘, writes Ali Abunimah of the excellent Electronic Intifada.

Israeli officials began damage limitation efforts after the country’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip with a “holocaust.”

The comments came a day after Israeli occupation forces killed 31 Palestinians, nine of them children, one a six-month-old baby, in a series of air raids across the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed that the attacks were in retaliation for a barrage of rockets fired by resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip which killed one Israeli in the town of Sderot on Wednesday, 27 February. Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, said the rockets were in retaliation for the extrajudicial execution of five Hamas members carried out by Israel on Wednesday morning. Israeli occupation forces have killed more than 200 Palestinians since the US-sponsored Annapolis peace summit last November. In the same period, five Israelis have been killed by Palestinians.

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Europe is ‘Heading for a New Security Deal with Israel‘, David Cronin of the excellent IPS reports. (Thanks Ann)

BRUSSELS, Feb 22 (IPS) - The European Union is considering new steps to deepen its cooperation on scientific research with Israel, despite admitting that previous funds earmarked for that purpose have gone to firms operating illegally in the Palestinian territories.

Between now and 2013, the Israeli government is to contribute 440 million euros (652 million dollars) per year so that it can participate in the EU’s so-called framework programme for research.

An unpublished document prepared by EU diplomats reveals that because much of the joint research will relate to security issues, Israel has requested a formal assurance that any information it gives to Brussels will be treated confidentially.

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‘Israel’s creation made Palestinians victims of Holocaust‘, say German intellectuals visiting Israel.

A group of visiting German intellectuals called on Berlin on Monday to change what they termed its Holocaust-rooted blind support of Israel, saying the creation of the State of Israel turned Palestinians into victims of the Nazi Holocaust as well.

The four, Dr. Reiner Steinweg, Prof. Gert Krell, Prof. Georg Meggle, and Jorg Becker, took part in a debate Monday evening at the Netanya Academic College on the future of German-Israeli relations. They were among 25 signatories to a petition on the issue that was circulated in the German media following the Second Lebanon War.

According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the Palestinians is “one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which receives far too little attention.” The paper goes on to argue that it was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about “the suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six decades and has at present become unbearable.”

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