Latest Entries - Mikeyboy63

Latest Entries
mikeyboy63
May 12 2008, 07:18 PM
Israel has a dilemma. If it truly annexes the West Bank and Gaza, as supported by Iran, the Arab Israelis would soon outnumber the Jewish Israelis, so Israel doesn't do it. But right now, the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank have no rights, no ability to conduct international business, no policing capacity (Israel won't allow a strong police presence), no power to enter into trade agreements, no right to travel, even from city to city within the West Bank. etc.

The West Bank and Gaza are slowly becoming like the Jewish ghettos inNazi Germany and Europe.

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Laboratory Gaza

Laboratory for a fortressed world
NAOMI KLEIN
The Nation, 2 July 2007

Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president's chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hezbollah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith.

At a glance, things aren't going well for Israel. But here's a puzzle: Why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it's 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China's?

Thomas Friedman recently offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel "nurtures and rewards individual imagination," and so its people are constantly spawning ingenious high-tech start-ups--no matter what messes their politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in engineering and computer science at Ben Gurion University, Friedman made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements: Israel "had discovered oil." This oil, apparently, is located in the minds of Israel's "young innovators and venture capitalists," who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.

Here's another theory: Israel's economy isn't booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-'90s, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution--the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel's economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

Within three years, large parts of Israel's tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom--a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

Discussions of Israel's military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country--US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel's huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States--up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products--well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems--precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror."

It's no coincidence that the class projects at Ben Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like "Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images" and "Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance." Thirty homeland security companies were launched in Israel in the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country's universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups (something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott).

Next week, the most established of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the arms industry's equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk that asks air travelers to answer a series of computer-generated questions, tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a "biofeedback" sensor. The device reads the body's reactions to the questions, and certain responses flag the passenger as "suspect."

Like hundreds of other Israeli security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel's secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians. Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West Bank checkpoint; it claims the "concept is supported and enhanced by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel."

Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defense giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as May, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: The Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals are being auditioned at an unnamed US airport; and Elbit, one of the companies behind Israel's "security barrier," has partnered with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security's $2.5 billion "virtual" border fence around the United States.

Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel's homeland security sector, a topic I explore in greater detail in a forthcoming book (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians--whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling "Hamasistan"--are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

So in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn't the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects." And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

The Jews learned the wrong lessons from Hitler...........
Former President Jimmy Carter is correct in saying Israel is an apartheid state.
Eventually, the common man in Israel will be heeded, that Israel cannot be a true and righteous democracy while holding 2 million Palestinians hostage in the West Bank and Gaza. Zionism will eventually succumb to common sense and justice. When, though, is anybody's guess.

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Israeli minister calls for Gaza 'holocaust'

Israeli minister warns of Holocaust for Gaza if violence continues
RORY McCARTHY
Guardian, 1 March 2008

Israel's deputy defence minister yesterday warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a "bigger shoah," using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust.

The choice of vocabulary from Matan Vilnai, an often outspoken former army general, was unusually grave - the word is not normally used for anything other than the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.

Vilnai was speaking about his government's plans to tackle the continued firing of makeshift rockets, known as Qassams, from Gaza.

"The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," he said, in a telephone interview with army radio yesterday morning.

His spokesman later tried to play down the force of his language, saying he meant only "disaster".

"He did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide," the spokesman said.

Vilnai appeared to suggest a big military operation was inevitable. "It will be sad, and difficult, but we have no other choice," he said.

"We're getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we've used a small percentage of the army's power because of the nature of the territory."

In just two days this week, Israeli military strikes killed 33 Palestinians in Gaza, among them several civilians, including four young boys who were playing football and an infant.

Palestinian militants fired dozens of rockets into southern Israel, killing one man in Sderot, and reaching as far as the city of Ashkelon, 11 miles away.

It was the latest in several recent rounds of violence in Gaza, a conflict that Israeli officials already describe as a "war."

According to the United Nations, 80 Palestinians were killed and 82 injured by Israeli military strikes in Gaza in January alone.

At the same time 267 rockets and 256 mortars were fired towards Israel, injuring nine Israelis.

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, travelled to Ashkelon yesterday and said a response was "required." "Hamas bears responsibility for this deterioration and it will also bear the results."

In Gaza, Hamas leaders said they too now believed a big Israeli operation was coming. "This is proof of Israel's pre-planned aggressive intentions against our people," said Ismail Haniyeh, the deposed Palestinian prime minister.

"They want the world to condemn what they call the Holocaust and now they are threatening our people with a Holocaust."

Hamas is reported to have indirectly offered a ceasefire with the Israelis. However, the Egyptian intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who often mediates between the two sides and who was due in Israel next Tuesday, cancelled his trip after the latest escalation of fighting.

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Israel's failure to learn
By Nir Rosen
- from AL JAZEERA English

When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White House as the commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were being killed in the al-Aqsa intifada.

Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel is carrying out one of the largest massacres in its 60-year occupation of Palestine.

The US, then and now, strongly backs Israel's offensive, justifying it as being, in fact, defensive.

An Israeli general recently threatened to use military force to set Gaza back decades in much the same language used before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

But despite the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, Hezbollah emerged victorious and the Shia resistance and social movement emerged a hero to the Arab world.

Israel is about to make the same mistake with Hamas.

Its notion of a truce with Hamas was that the Palestinians would quietly accept the siege. Israel would deny them the basic means of survival, let alone the basic means to create a functioning society.

If the Palestinians attempted to resist, they would be crushed.

As in Lebanon, Israel should have learned years ago that military might cannot crush Palestinian resistance movements.

Media matters

While the Israeli military again bombs the starving and imprisoned population of 1.5 million Gazans, the world watches their plight live as Western media scrambles to explain and, in some cases, justify the ongoing carnage.

Even some Arab outlets have attempted to equate Palestinian resistance - and homemade rockets - with the might of the Israeli military machine.

However, none of this is a surprise; the Israelis just concluded a global public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of some Arab states.

An American periodical once asked me to contribute to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified.

My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, such as the Native Americans 150 years ago, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians today, to answer.

Terrorism is a normative term which is used to describe what the 'other' does, not what 'we' do.

Powerful nations such as Israel, the US, Russia or China will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism.

However, they fail to acknowledge as acts of terror the destruction of Chechnya, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the repression of Tibetans, and the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Normative rules and what is legal and permissible are determined by the powerful. They formulate the concept of terrorism in normative terms and make it appear as if a neutral court derived such definitions instead of the oppressors.

For the weak to resist becomes illegal by definition.

This excessive use of legal jargon actually undermines the fundamentals of what is truly legal and diminishes the credibility of international institutions such as the UN. The law becomes the enemy of those who struggle.

It becomes apparent that the powerful - those who make the rules - insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Desperate resistance

Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the natives, be they indigenous populations in North America or Palestinians in what are today Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Attacking civilians, then, becomes the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds and imminent eradication.

The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that such violence will destroy or defeat Israel.

When the native population understands that there is an irreversible dynamic stripping them of their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can muster.

PLO, then Hamas

In 1948, when Israel was being established as a new state, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed.

Their lands were settled by colonists who even today deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world.

Israel, its allies in the West and some regional Arab countries have managed to corrupt the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and entice them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people.

This eventually neutralised and transformed the PLO into a liberation movement which collaborates with the occupier.

The focus then shifted to Hamas, a movement which won legislative elections nearly three years ago and thus became a target for the Israelis.

By enforcing an embargo and allowing Israel's siege of Gaza, the world has effectively told the Palestinians that they are unfit for democracy.

Isolation and radicalisation

By informing them that they are not free to choose the leaders they trust but must conform to the requirements set in place by others, the world community is only further isolating and radicalising the Palestinians.

Demonstrations across the world have expressed anger at Israel's offensive [AFP]
This radicalisation has increased several-fold as Israel pounds Palestinian infrastructure, saying it is solely targeting Hamas targets.

This is not true, however; Israeli forces have targeted Palestinian police forces, killing some such as Tawfiq Jaber, the chief of police - a former PLO official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza.

With the vestiges of security and order debilitated in successive Israeli military campaigns, chaos will prevail in Gaza. If Hamas is weakened it will not be a more moderate Palestinian group which will take the helm.

It will not be the weakened, corrupted and unpopular Fatah, but a more extreme group who have been persuaded through blockades and incessant Israeli attacks that compromise and negotiations with Tel Aviv are ill-fated.

Failed policies

In the past 60 years, Israeli leaders have toed the line that 'the only language Arabs understand is force'.

However, it is Israel that has routinely used violence to solve problems. During the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut, the Arab League collectively offered Israel a framework to end the bloodshed and move towards a comprehensive regional peace deal. Israel responded by invading Jenin and killing hundreds.

Last month, Fatah launched a media campaign to revive the 2002 peace initiative, but this, too, has been answered with Israel's extreme brutality.

A Zionist Israel is no longer a viable long-term project. Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two-state solution impossible.

There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with a fundamental question - whether to ensure the peaceful transition towards an egalitarian society in which Palestinians are given the same rights as Jews.

The alternative in a few years will become untenable.

History has shown that colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and accept one state for both people, and the Jewish colonists will be forced to leave.

Restoring Palestine

Despite its lack of initiative for the Middle East peace process, the White House has in recent years been unable to dislodge the occupation of Palestine as the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond.

It is the common denominator by which Arab populist policies are shaped. Invading Iraq or offering economic benefits to frontline states will not make the Palestinian issue go away.

During my travels and research, I have spoken with jihadists in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere; they all mentioned the Palestinian struggle as one of their motivations.

The US will pay a price for backing Israel. Soon the so-called moderate Arab dictatorships that collaborate with the US hegemony in the region will find themselves in untenable positions.

Loss of credibility

Already we see tensions increasing in the region. Damascus has pulled out of third-party talks with Tel Aviv and Arab anger has been mounting not just at Israel, and not just at America, but also at their own regimes which have collaborated with Washington.

Some Israelis have started to realise their government's flawed approach. While 81 per cent of Israelis support the military campaign, a poll has showed only 39 per cent believe it will succeed in removing Hamas or reducing violence.

An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli daily, even went so far as to label Israel "the region's bully".

Barack Obama, the US president-elect, remains silent as Israel kills Palestinians with impunity. In his silence he expresses his complicity.

Nir Rosen is a Beirut-based journalist, fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and the author of The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter's Journey into Occupied Iraq.

The views expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.