No boundaries for Israel's state-terrorism

First of all, the best first hand updated information about Israel's attack on Lebanon at http://electronicLebanon.net

As I follow the news about the new Israeli horror campaign in Lebanon I keep sinking in rage, frustration, sadness and more rage.

Kosovar TV is reporting it extensively. My friends here translate from Albanian for me, even though the images speak for themselves and I already have all the details by reading the dozens of articles and reports that pour into my email everyday from conscious organizations and friends around the world.

Frustration and rage. I can’t listen any more or read the comments of the racist amoral members of the Israeli government or the shameful UN representatives. It just makes me sick. At this point, I don’t feel like quoting the dozens of International regulations Israel is permanently breaking any more, because at the end is not about law, it’s about justice, but the real human justice, the one that doesn’t hold hands with the rotten ambitions of the colonizers and the powerful, and which exists despite the set of rules and institutions they manipulatively use on the name of International law and Justice to back up their ill, amoral, behavior. That justice.

This article from counterpunch website reflects some of the thoughts I have been immerse in all day:



"The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel"
Atrocities in the Promised Land. By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON

18 July 2006 http://www.counterpunch.org/

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in theU.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into amonster, and it has come time for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, allAmericans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as anexistential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its ownexistence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The statelashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. "This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral," wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis ofIsraeli Society. Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel's arrogance.

We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a military establishment that drops a500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.

A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza fourdays ago, is not the military of a moral country.

A society that can brush off as unimportant an armyofficer's brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a conscience.

A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is nota government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)

Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel isself-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in "moral collapse." Michel Warschawski writes of an "Israeli madness" and "insane brutality," a "putrefaction" of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a "gang of hoodlums," he says, a state "that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive."

As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is theauthor of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.


Some examples of actions being done around the world to oppose the Israeli brutal attack:

On Friday July 14th, 100 Stockholm-based activists blocked the entrance to the Foreign Ministry building in the Swedish capital. They formed a human chain at the front gate for 2 hours, and delivered a letter of protest to a representative of the Ministry. Police tried to break them up by means of violent pushes, pepper spray and dogs.

On Sunday July 16, 600 people joined together in Tel-Aviv to protest the war in Lebanon. The demonstration included veterans, young people, refuseniks, and various Israeli and international peace groups. The demonstrators marched through the streets of Tel-Aviv until they were stopped by riot police.

On Monday July 17, over 200 Palestinians and internationals marched through the center of Ramallah to protest Israel's actions in Lebanon and Gaza.

Also on Monday, English protesters blockaded EDO MBM Technologies Ltd, a Brighton-based company that produces electrical components for Israeli weapons. The action was designed to prevent the production of Israeli weapons for use in Lebanon and Gaza. Early Monday morning, protesters erected two roadblocks outside each gate of EDO MBM Technology, preventing vehicle access to the factory. Activists locked themselves to barrels filled with cement in front of the gates to create immoveable human obstructions.


Several Human Rights and activist groups are planning more actions for the next days.

If you are in the US, check out http://www.endtheoccupation.org/ to see what can you do in your area. Other interesting links:
http://electronicintifada.org
http://www.democracynow.org

For those in Catalonia, get in touch with XEP (Palestine Linkage Net) at info@xarxapalestina.org to learn about the new actions being planned. Also:
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/
http://www.vilaweb.cat/

Building on rotten foundations

Six years after the war, the picturesque city of Prizren, in the South West area of Kosova, seems fully recovered, with his old streets packed with young people searching for the right spot to have a drink and listen to some music on the weekend nights. The city lies at the bottom of a beautiful valley, watered by a river and several streams coming down from the surrounding hills.

Climbing up one of these hills to visit the city’s castle, finally some signs that remind us of the current situation are visible: an old orthodox church under permanent surveillance of a NATO patrol, and several destroyed houses on the hillside; houses that once belonged to Serbs and were burned during the March 2004 events, a series of protests and riots of albanians, which were a reaction to the very slow and uncertain process of rebuilding life in Kosova by international community.

Similar events had occured in other areas: after the NATO air rides against Serb positions, when the Albanians were able to return to their homes and towns, there were some cases of destruction of Serbian houses and churches in revenge. For the international community, that proves their point of the need to give Kosovo only “conditional independence” as, for them, Albano-Kosovars seem to have a problem with respecting their minorities, and working towards reconciliation.

Reconciliation… the great sounding word. Well, the question is: what concept of reconciliation are UN, NATO or EU trying to sell to the population? Reconciliation at any price, without dealing with the past oppression and abuses, will not bring real peace as it will not bring justice, and, of course, the local population is not going to buy it.

Going back to Prizren: the Serbian destroyed houses on the hillside are visible scars that make the international community feel uncomfortable; the hundreds of Albanian houses destroyed by the Serbian troops are not obvious any more because they have been rebuilt, but that doesn’t mean the wounds are healed. From the Human Rights Watch report on Prizren:

At the outset of the NATO bombing campaign, the OSCE has reported, Serbian military and police shelled a few areas of the city and destroyed the historic seat of the "League of Prizren," an important historical monument for Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. Yet, with the exception of the Tusus neighborhood, the "ethnic cleansing" of Prizren was carried out with a lesser degree of violence and fewer wanton attacks than in many other parts of Kosovo. […] In April 1999, on at least two occasions, Serb police and military rounded up hundreds of men in Prizren and forced them to serve on trench-digging brigades near the border with Albania. […] The May 26 attack on the Tusus neighborhood of Prizren, in which Serb forces killed some twenty-seven to thirty-four people and burned over one-hundred homes, was the most violent episode in Prizren during the conflict.

(Read the full Human Rights Watch Report here)

Of course, no one can deny that some factions of the KLA (Kosova Liberation Army) also committed atrocities on the Serbs after the NATO air raids. But the tendency of the international community to level the systematic, widespread and state supported abuses of the one powerful side with the fewer cases coming from factions of the enraged, for years oppressed other side, without going further in their analysis, cannot be a good fundament for reconciliation. And cannot be so because this approach lacks the fundamental principles of justice.

There is no justice in giving “conditional independence” (isn’t that a contradiction in itself?) to Kosova arguing that they are not ready to deal with minorities rights based on their tense relations with the Serbian minority that, on the other hand, is not doing anything either to integrate into the local institutions and keeps tightly linked to the Serbian government in Belgrade.

And with that I’m not denying that there are minority issues to take care off in Kosova. There are, and some very urgent, but curiously the international community is not really taking effective care of these ones, thus making its whole discourse about minority rights sound like a big excuse to preserve the interests of Belgrade in the region.

I already learned that when most of the international actors here talk about “minorities’ problem”, they are really talking about “Serb minority”. But there are also some important Turkish and Bosniac minorities in Kosova and also a good number of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian population, being these last three groups the ones in the worse situation right now. It is true, their numbers are smaller than those of the Serbs, and they are definitely not as powerful as the Serbian minority -with the support of Belgrade- is; but, precisely because of that, shouldn’t the international community have especial care of them and make sure that these historically prosecuted and discriminated groups had their rights ensured?.

The truth is that, while NATO troops and barbed wire surround orthodox churches and Serbian enclaves in Kosovo to protect them from possible attacks and Serbian minority’s rights are a keystone in the negotiations about Kosova’s final status, Roma and Ashkali population are still fighting for their basic rights. Their situation after the war was extremely difficult, as they were seen by the Albanian population as collaborators of the Serbs, and were prosecuted and denied basic Humanitarian help. Six years later, most of them still live in the called Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camps, places without the most basic sanitary conditions where several cases of deaths by lead poisoning have already happened. From a European Roma Rights Center report:

The United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) has known of the scale of the health emergency since as early as 2000, when the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its first report analyzing the effects of lead pollution on the Mitrovica region. […] By October 2004, the WHO had declared the area in and around the IDP camps uninhabitable, issuing a report that revealed that the soil in Zitkovac camp was 100.5 times above recommended levels, while in the Cesmin Lug camp, the levels exceeded by 359.5 times those considered safe for human health. […] In spite of the volume of evidence indicating the extreme harms to the inhabitants of the camps caused by their continued residence there, the Roma concerned have still not been moved to a safe place after 6 years.

(Read the full article here)

Where is the interest of the international community for protection of minorities Human Rights in this case?

The relation between the different cultural groups in these region is not easy, it’s true, especially regarding the issue of independence: Serbian government is playing the card of the rights of its minority in Kosova to pressure the international community and avoid independence of the region, while independence is a MUST for the Albanian population that suffered the oppression of the Serbian government for decades. But, on the other hand, minorities such as the Roma and Ashkali, which were trapped in the games of power of the other two during the conflict and are seen by Albanians as collaborators of the Serbs, are afraid that an independent Albanian-ruled country will oppress them. Seems like a closed circle…

I’ve been thinking a lot about these circles -or rather spirals- of oppression and power, in which it seems to be always a more, disfavored group being mistreated by whom is at the same time being oppressed by a most powerful group. The spiral in Kosova, like everywhere else, needs to be broken, and I admit I don’t have the absolute answer on how to do it in the most just possible way. But it is clear to me that favoring the more powerful, the top layer of the spiral of oppression, forcing a reconciliation without justice into one of the oppressed groups, is just a way to feed the stream of violence and distrust all the way up and down. It is like building our house on rotten foundations. And we know that the international community is very fond to this option in the name of the sacred “stability”.

See more pictures of Prizren here

Sorry for the lonng post, I think I'm having too much time to think lately...