Palestinian kids given electric shock torture

You have to hand it to US secretary of state John Kerry. In his dream of entering the history books, he has taken on mission impossible. He is fighting tooth and nail for his version of the two-state peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians.

So much so that his relentless diplomacy has lead to an outburst by the Israeli minister of defence, Moshe Yaalon, who reportedly described Kerry as “obsessive and messianic in his quest for Mideast peace”. Kerry has also suggested that failure by the Israelis to compromise could lead to growing support for a boycott of the country, a campaign which has now established roots in the United States as well as Europe.

This led to some members of the governing coalition to accuse Kerry of anti-Semitism, which then compelled ultra-Zionist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman to defend Obama’s foreign policy chief, describing him as a “true friend of Israel”.

Negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators have now been going on for over six months, including at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks ago. There Henry Kissinger quipped that “nobody ever lost money betting against a Middle East peace.”

But Obama’s administration is desperate for a “legacy”. With Kerry leading the charge, it is hoping to pressurise Israel into conceding some territory in exchange for the Palestinians recognising Israel as a Jewish state.

According to prominent US writer, Thomas Friedman, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has suggested that Israeli troops could remain in the West Bank for a transitional five-year-period. And then they should be replaced by NATO forces. This is something Israel is hardly likely to agree to. Indeed, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu wants Israeli troops in the Jordan Valley for up to 40 years.

But however much the Palestinian Authority may compromise, and however much the US may hope that it can get concessions out of the Zionist state, any agreement is likely to be blown out of the water by the sheer brutality of continued Israeli occupation.

The PA has lost considerable authority amongst its constituents. While it engages in meaningless negotiations, Israeli forces have resumed assassinations of key figures in the resistance, known officially as “targeted killings”.

Leading defence correspondent Amos Harel admitted today in Haaretz, that Israel had “quietly revived” its previous policy of murdering resistance leaders. Only yesterday a targeted killing in Gaza was aimed at Abdallah Kharti, a senior member of the Popular Resistance Committees.

Today, Australian television’s ABC Four Corners programme will broadcast the findings of lawyers who say that Palestinian children are being used to gather intelligence, thus destroying their childhood innocence forever.

One 14-year-old boy was taken from his bed “during a night raid on his family home in a Palestinian village”, according to the report. Qsai Zamara said he “was whipped and threatened” into falsely confessing that he threw stones at the army. "There was this big machine with all the electric wires in it, connected to the electricity. He wanted to give me electric shock with it," he said.

Fathi Mahfouz, 15, was given electric shocks and when he didn't confess: “I was sent to a room that has a cross in it, and hung me on it. I was hung and he kept hitting me," he said. Barrister Gerard Horton has documented rape threats against young children after interviewing hundreds of them through his organisation Military Court.

Lawyer Gaby Lasky, who represents Palestinian children before Israel’s military courts, said on the BBC’s World Service this morning, that the army aimed to use children as informants. Horton backed her up account, saying children were offered a combination of money and threats to give information.

While the United Nations children’s organisation UNICEF has deliberately played down Israel’s abuse of children, it is so bad that a group of 850 serving and former Israeli soldiers, speaking through Breaking the Silence, have also been highlighting the issue.

This is a policy of terror by a state that has no intention of giving up any territory or removing any of the 250,000 settlers from the West Bank. For the Zionists, the demonisation of Palestinians is crucial to their own raison d’être and rule. Whatever deal Kerry brokers, it won’t be worth the paper it’s written on.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary 

Hands off Gaza - one state the only solution

The latest Israeli assault on Gaza is the act of a state with nothing to offer but the politics and economics of war and terror. With an election coming up in January, Netanyahu’s Likud government is killing Palestinians with the aim of creating fear at home to help them hold on to power.

Netanyahu’s regime has turned once more to state terrorism to find a distraction for an Israeli population burdened by debt and devastated by spending cuts. In July, mass protests once more erupted on the streets of Tel Aviv and two men died after setting themselves on fire in protest at social conditions.

Inequality in Israel is amongst the highest in the world, according to the OECD. One in five Israelis live in poverty, one in three children. But between 2008 and 2009, the number of millionaires increased by 43%, largely from hi-tech start-ups in the weapons, security and communications sector.  

As usual, the world’s media slavishly follows the Israeli line that increased rocket attacks from Gaza led to the current assault, but an open letter from ten leading academics, including Noam Chomsky, is eye witness to a different chronology.

On November 5, a 20-year old Gazan man with a learning disability was shot when he wandered too close to the border. It was six hours before Israeli troops would let medics reach him, so he died. On November 8, a 13-year old boy playing football in front of his house was killed when the Israeli Defence Force made an incursion into Gaza.

By November 11, five Palestinian civilians including three children had been killed in 72 hours. Four deaths occurred when shells were fired at a football match. Some 52 civilians had been wounded, including six women and 12 children.

A Canadian doctor working in Gaza reports wounded arriving at Shefa hospital with shrapnel wounds – brain, neck, throat, intestinal and bone injuries leading to “traumatic amputations”, carried out with “very little morphine for analgesia.”

These were deliberate provocations against a relatively defenceless people armed with a few home-made rockets who live in what has been dubbed the world’s biggest prison camp. Cut off from their fellow Palestinians on the West Bank, most Gazans are registered refugees dependent on help from United Nations agencies and conditions are deteriorating.

Not one Israeli civilian died before the IDF attack began – today three are dead as Hamas stepped up rocket attacks. Netanyahu has to answer for them, too.

Increasingly desperate violence is the Zionist state’s only response to the massive changes in the region. Iran has announced new advanced drones, more sophisticated than those they gave Hezbollah in Lebanon which were sending satellite pictures of Israel’s military and nuclear bases.

The Egyptian government, formerly a supine supporter of US policy in Israel, has recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Its border with Gaza is open and Egyptian hospitals are preparing to accept casualties. Israel has been exchanging fire with Syrian artillery batteries on the Golan Heights, where anti-Assad rebels are located.

Later this month the United Nations will discuss a request from the Palestine National Authority for observer country status, a de facto recognition of statehood. The Israeli government has warned that if this happens, they will invade the Palestinian area and topple the government of Mahmoud Abbas.

The Zionist state is in a profound, existential crisis. It has nothing to offer the Israeli people, but the same could be said of the Hamas and Fatah leaderships – and the Iranian government with its military adventurism.

The only people offering a way forward are those from both sides of the Arab/Israeli divide who propose a one-state solution in place of the doomed two-state approach which becomes more impractical each day that Israeli settlement building continues.

Surely the aim has to be remove all the walls and checkpoints and to create a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for all its citizens, whatever their religious or ethnic background. That is the only way to rally Israelis and Palestinians against their common enemy.

Penny Cole

G4S - securing their world, not ours

Despite its inability to fulfil its London 2012 contract, the rise and rise of G4S is the story of the privatisation of the state and an increasing emphasis on “threats” and “security concerns” aimed at keeping people in thrall to authority.

G4S is no ordinary corporation. It operates in more than 125 countries and has 675,000 employees. Group turnover last year was £7.5 billion, mostly derived from state contracts around the world, with 30% of revenues coming from “developing markets”. Pre-tax profits were up 2.1% to £531m.

The self-styled “world's leading international security solutions group” has cashed in on the drive by the state to divest itself of more and more functions like prisons, crowd control and significant parts of the police service. As the company’s website declares: “In more ways than you might realise, G4S is securing your world.”

Of course, it’s not “our world” so much as their world – the rich, the bankers, the state, and the corporations that G4S helps to secure. And nowhere is “security” more on the state’s lips than in Israel, which continues to occupy Palestinian lands in defiance of countless UN resolutions.

As a sub-contractor of the Israeli occupation, G4S, according to the Palestinian grass roots movement Stop the Wall, is involved in human rights abuses and violations of international law. Through its subsidiary G4S Israel (Hashmira) it provides:

• equipment for Israeli-run checkpoints and terminals in the West Bank and Gaza, including luggage scanning machines and full body scanners

• security systems to the Israeli armoured corps base of Nachshonim

• (and operates) the entire security system of the Ktziot Prison, the central control room of the Megido Prison and security services to Damon prison where Palestinian political prisoners are held.

 • peripheral defence systems on the walls surrounding the Ofer prison, located in the West Bank, near the settlement of Givat Ze'ev.

 • security services to businesses in illegal settlements, including security equipment and personnel to shops and supermarkets in West Bank settlements. 

Palestinian prisoners are, of course, mostly tried in military courts while others are held in detention under laws dating from the British mandate. Many prisoners have taken to hunger strikes to force their plight into the public arena. G4S also transfers Palestinians to and from interrogation centres.  

Campaigners add: “Yet Israel continues to build new settlements and expands older settlements, stealing Palestinian land and resources. While G4S profits from ‘securing’ these illegal settlements, the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] restricts Palestinian movement and violently repress any dissent in the name of ‘security’.”

In Britain, over 700 complaints have been filed against G4S over the treatment of immigrant detainees, of which 130 were upheld. There have been 48 assault complaints. There has been particular criticism of the treatment of detainees held at Brook House immigration removal centre near Heathrow .

In 2010 it lost a Home Office forcible deportation contract after the death of an Angolan deportee, Jimmy Mubenga, while being restrained on a flight back to Angola. A report by the Commons home affairs committee condemned G4S over its treatment and said the number of complaints likely did not reflect the true number of cases of abuse.

In South Yorkshire, where G4S won a £30 million contract to take over asylum seekers housing, a sub-contractor has started evicting people and moving them into unsuitable accommodation miles away.

G4S is laughing all the way to the bank, however. Confidential Home Office documents seen by the Daily Telegraph show that fees paid to G4S for managing civilian security staff for the London Games have soared from £7.3 million to £60 million. The same company failed to recruit sufficient staff, leaving the government to call in the army.

It’s not just cost savings that have driven the capitalist state to “outsource” security to firms like G4S. The aim is also to shed responsibility for services like health, housing, pensions and education as far as possible, creating new markets for all sorts of companies. So where does that leave the present state’s legitimacy, its “right” to rule over us. The Olympic security farrago confirms that it is virtually non-existent.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Israel stands accused of child 'torture'

Imagine a child arrested and taken from the family home by heavily armed soldiers in the middle of the night. Bound with plastic ties and blindfolded, the child is transported to another country for interrogation.

Neither the child nor their parents are told the reason for arrest, which is frequently accompanied by both physical and verbal abuse. This is a daily experience suffered by Palestinian families on the West Bank at the hands of the Israeli army.

Since 2000, around 7,500 Palestinian children have been detained and prosecuted in the military court system, established as part of the illegal Zionist occupation of the West Bank.

Children are questioned without a lawyer or family member present; they are not informed of their right to silence and they are frequently threatened and physically assaulted.

They are forced to sign forged confessions, in Hebrew - which they neither speak or write - and interrogators focus on getting them to name names of older siblings, family friends, even parents.

Children as young as 12 are brought before the military courts. Most are denied bail and most plead guilty. Some 99.74% of cases end in conviction and 98% of the children are given a custodial sentence.

Regular reports detailing this treatment are submitted to the UN Rapporteur on Torture, by children's rights organisation DCI and others.

Their most recent report states that children "continue to be systematically ill-treated during their arrest, transfer and interrogation. This treatment consists of both physical and verbal abuse, as well as threats and intimidation. Further, the cumulative effect of the ill-treatment each child is subjected to, may in some cases, amount to torture".

More than 70% of the detained children are transferred to prisons and detention centres inside Israel, in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As a result they get no family visits, because their parents can't get a permit to enter Israel. Palestinian children are not permitted to use the telephone or send and receive letters whilst in detention.

The soldiers act on frame-up reports made by the paramilitary settlers who roam the West Bank armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. In 67% of cases, the children report being ill-treated by soldiers or policemen whilst inside a settlement.

Here's testimony from Husam S aged 16:

They put me in a metal cage at the entrance to Huwwara interrogation centre. They made me stand against the wall and there were so many flies inside the cage. I tried to chase the flies off my body, but a soldier kept shouting at me and ordering me to face the wall. I kept standing there facing the wall for about an hour. About an hour later, the soldier said: “Come here motherfucker". He took me out of the cage and made me stand in the burning sun. "Take off all your clothes," he ordered me and I became scared of him. I took of all my clothes except my underwear. Then he ran a metal detector over my body and gave me big prison clothes and detained me in Room 2 with three adults

.

And from A, whose name and age were concealed as he named an Israeli officer:

“Don't you want to confess?" the interrogator kept shouting. "I got nothing to confess to," I kept responding, and he kept kicking me on my bottom. He grabbed my head and started slamming it against the metal closet while saying: "You son of a whore, I'll bring your mother down here." He would take a break and then resume hitting and kicking me. He kept doing this for about two hours. Then I got tired. "I threw Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers," I finally said [...] After that he took me to another room and removed the blindfold. A man talked to me and introduced himself as Captain Dawoud.

The state of Israel sanctions systematic brutality against Palestinian children, not only in military courts and prisons but in breach of all their rights - to education, to health care, to a childhood free of fear. These are crimes against humanity but they go unpunished because the major powers like the US and Britain in effect allow them to happen because Israel is their client state.


Penny Cole

Obama waves big stick at Iran

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Tony Blair’s appearance before the exceptionally tame Iraq war inquiry was his pointed remarks about Iran being next in line for military action. And it seems it was more than the usual Blair “I’d do it again” bravado and that his connections to the White House are as strong as when he was prime minister.

For almost at the same time as Blair told the inquiry he didn’t have a single regret about invading and occupying Iraq, despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction, Washington was announcing a major shift in its military posture towards Iran. After a year of megaphone politics directed at Tehran, president Obama has given up the ghost (just like he’s done on Israel-Palestine).

So now the US is to provide new anti-missile systems to at least four Arab countries, and help Saudi Arabia triple the size of the 10,000 strong force that protects key installations. The US navy will also deploy ships capable of intercepting medium-range nuclear missiles off the Iranian coast on a permanent basis. The same ships will, of course, have offensive capability too.

All this suggests that a pre-emptive attack on Iran by US forces is being prepared. Ostensibly it would be aimed at Iran’s nuclear installations but ultimately it is another episode of regime change in the making. In the fantasy world of Washington, the Islamic republic would give way to some kind of Western-style democracy (the Gulf states about to receive US military help are, of course, exempt from this project because they have oil and are pro-Washington).

The danger of an international conflict is made more likely by the fact that China is a major ally of Iran (it needs the country’s oil). Washington has also decided to sell arms to Taiwan despite China’s protest that this threatens the integrity of its own borders with the island state that Beijing claims as part of its territory.

How the Israelis must be enjoying all this. A mere hint that they would attack Iran unless the US got its act together was enough to send Obama scurrying into the hands of the military. Israel’s own nuclear weapons are, of course, not talked about in polite circles. And Iran serves a convenient diversion from the accelerated ethnic cleansing taking place in Jerusalem and full-scale apartheid on the West Bank.

The noted Middle East commentator Robert Fisk asks why Washington and London are turning a blind eye to the destruction of the peace process, adding:

“This majority of the West Bank – known under the defunct Oslo Agreement's sinister sobriquet as ‘Area C’ – has already fallen under an Israeli rule which amounts to apartheid by paper: a set of Israeli laws which prohibit almost all Palestinian building or village improvements, which shamelessly smash down Palestinian homes for which permits are impossible to obtain, ordering the destruction of even restored Palestinian sewage systems. Israeli colonists have no such problems; which is why 300,000 Israelis now live – in 220 settlements which are all internationally illegal – in the richest and most fertile of the Palestinian occupied lands.”

The double standards applied are consistent with US policy down the ages and Obama has fallen into line, chastened by the crisis within his own presidency. Iran is not a pleasant place to be right now, to say the least. The execution and torture of supporters of democratic change by the reactionary theocratic state play right into the hands of Washington. Nonetheless, we should oppose any military attack on the country or the imposition ofsanctions. The Iranian people themselves must be free to determine their own history.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Israel's harsh 'reality on the ground'

Creating “realities on the ground” is the speciality of the Israeli government. This week Israel has implemented a major land-grab around four Palestinian West Bank villages, precisely in order to create “realities” that will be the starting point for the talks to be held in Maryland in November. The land seized from Palestinian farmers will be used to expand illegal Jewish settlements, split the West Bank in two and create an apartheid road. Palestinian drivers would have to drive deep into the desert to get from Bethlehem to Ramallah, effectively barring them from the central part of the West Bank.

Jeff Halper, an Israeli geographer who specialises in Israel's development of the West Bank, said: "They want to push everything as far as possible before the November meeting…. Anything done before that meeting will be set in stone… part of a timeline in which Israel wants to get all its development of the West Bank finished before Bush leaves office."

Any Palestinian opposing these facts will be branded a terrorist; any opponents outside the Middle East will be branded an anti-Semite. Because the other “reality on the ground” that Zionist supporters are trying to create is that it is unacceptable, unlawful - or at the least career suicide - for anyone to criticise Israel and its brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

For example the UK’s University and College Union recently caved in to pressure and informed its members that it has legal advice that it would be unlawful even to discuss a boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. Members voted at their conference that the union should carry out a regional discussion about implementing a boycott to highlight the failure of Israeli institutions to support Palestinian academic life and institutions, destroyed by the Israeli army’s actions. Many Israeli academics also signed the call for a boycott.

In a very confused statement, the UCU’s Strategy and Finance Committee has told members that discussion cannot go ahead because a boycott call would be unlawful and could not be implemented. A regional debate could “infringe discrimination legislation”. Of course it would only take five minutes to find another lawyer to show that to have a discussion is not in any way unlawful.

Zionist pressure to block debate in the United States has claimed other victims too. Nobel peace prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu has just had an invitation to speak to the Peace and Justice group at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota withdrawn after the university’s president spoke with the local Jewish Community Relations Council and two rabbis. Tutu’s crime? He has dared to suggest that Israel is pursuing apartheid policies. The chair of the Justice and Peace Studies program, Prof. Cris Toffolo has been removed from her post as head of department.

Fortunately she has tenure or she would no doubt have met the same fate as Professor Norman Finkelstein of the De Paul University in Chicago. He finally agreed to resign this week, after a long campaign to deny him tenure, orchestrated by pro-Zionists from outside the university. Finkelstein, himself Jewish, was targeted because of his book “Beyond Chutzpah” which argued that it was wrong to say any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

Back in the UK, Danny Rubinstein, Arab affairs editor of Haaretz newspaper was also in trouble when the Zionist Federation withdrew its sponsorship of a meeting he was addressing in London. This leading journalist had dared to state at a United Nations event, something his Israeli readers can read in his column any day of the week, that “Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities”. That simple home truth is the actual reality on the ground.

Penny Cole
October 10, 2007