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 

Racism and the state of Israel

One doesn’t have to agree with the wilder, deeply reactionary views of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Jews to spot the hypocrisy of the walk-out by Western diplomats at yesterday’s UN conference on racism in Geneva.

Ahmadinejad’s denial of the historical fact of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis gave Britain and other nations the opportunity to parade themselves as anti-racists. But the walk-out also reinforced their more or less unconditional support for Israel, which nonsensically equates any criticism of it with anti-Semitism, and exposes a continuing indifference to the plight of the Palestinians.

The conference itself was always going to be a farce because the organisers had already determined that there would be no discussion at all, in official or unofficial sessions, on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the questions this continues to raise about racism. In the end, 170 Palestinian groups involved in boycott and disinvestment campaigns organised their own conference in Geneva at the end of last week. At the conference, internationally renowned legal experts, researchers, academics and activists discussed legal strategies to hold Israel accountable for its illegal policies and practices of racial discrimination.

The view that the state of Israel practises racist policies towards the Palestinian people is held by a wide range of people and ought to be debated. In 2002, for example, Desmond Tutu, the South African cleric and anti-apartheid activist, described how he saw on his visit to Israel "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about".

The history of Israel and South Africa are, of course, not the same. However, the actions and laws used against Palestinians, both in and outside Israel, are founded on discrimination by one ethnic group against another. The 2008 annual report of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) found that Arab Israelis are disadvantaged, persecuted, endangered, and live under third-world conditions, especially in "unrecognised villages" in the Negev and Galilee.

In Occupied Palestine, conditions are far worse and oppressive. "For forty-one years, Israel has denied fundamental rights to four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza," effectively controlling their lives, and repressively denying them their rights under military occupation, says the report.

Dealing with the right to equality, ACRI says that Arab Israelis and Palestinians are “fundamentally denied them” in all respects. Though legally entitled to full equality, they're effectively victimised by institutional discrimination. For example, Arab children are educated separately from Israeli Jews.

This blatant discrimination is ignored by the major Western powers like the United States, which continue to fund Israel because it suits their geo-political interests and the strategy of divide and rule in the Middle East. Many Israeli Jews, however, are deeply disturbed by the catastrophe that has befallen the Palestinians and the fact that the country’s new foreign secretary, Avigdor Lieberman is in favour of ethnically cleansing the country of Arabs.

Uri Avnery, who in the period after World War Two fought with the right-wing terror group Irgun to drive the Palestinians out, wrote during last week’s Passover of “the catastrophe that we have caused the Palestinians” and denounced “religious fanatics and fascist hooligans, who claim to be the heirs of the [Zionist] pioneers”.

So civil liberties organisations in Israel can talk of discrimination and Avnery can denounce Jewish fascists, but the UN is not allowed to talk about what’s going on! No wonder the Palestinians have all but given up hope of the UN taking any practical action to further their just claim to self-determination.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor