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| Adalah: Withdrawal of the Prawer Plan bill is a major achievement!

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Adalah: Withdrawal of the Prawer Plan bill is a major achievement ~ MEMO.

Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, has called the Israeli government’s decision to withdraw the Prawer Plan bill a “major achievement in the history of the Palestinian community in Israel.”

On 12 December, former Israeli cabinet minister Benny Begin announced at a press conference that the government is withdrawing the proposed Prawer-Begin bill. The draft law was set to be considered for a second and third reading in the Knesset until Begin admitted earlier this week that the bill faced sweeping rejection from the Bedouin community, contrary to government assertions that they had approved of the plan. The bill was proposing to forcibly displace up to 70,000 Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab, or Negev, where many have lived for generations.

Adalah stated in a press release that the cancellation of the bill “shows that popular action, legal advocacy and international pressure can succeed in defending the rights of 70,000 Arab Bedouin residents of the unrecognised villages in the Naqab to live with freedom and dignity on their own lands and in their villages.”

Adalah described how the Israeli “decision to withdraw the bill follows the recent disclosure of maps, figures and details that echoed the numerous statements made by Adalah, human rights organisations and international bodies, which argued that the Prawer-Begin bill was created without consultation with the Bedouin community and without transparency to the villagers that it would effect.”

The centre further pointed out that: “The government was forced to reveal the Plan’s details after intensive media attention and public activism against the Prawer Plan in recent weeks,” noting that the Israeli police tried to suppress the widespread public activism against the bill by using “excessive force” and making “thousands of arrests”, adding that “Adalah and other volunteer lawyers defended the detained protesters in court and filed official complaints to the Police Investigation Unit (“Mahash”) against the police’s violent conduct.”

The statement continued: “The cancellation of the bill is a platform to continue the dedicated work in the struggle to prevent the Israeli government from implementing the Prawer Plan. The government’s plans for the Naqab will lead to the demolition, evacuation and confiscation of Bedouin homes and lands, among which is the village of Atir-Umm El-Hieran, which will be destroyed in order to build a Jewish settlement and a forest over its lands.”

The rights centre concluded that: “The state must recognise the Arab Bedouin citizens’ historical ownership of their lands, grant legal recognition to the unrecognised villages, and provide full services, infrastructure and proper living conditions that are denied to the Bedouin residents of the Naqab. Adalah remains committed to the struggle for the rights and recognition of the Bedouin villages, alongside local partners and international human rights actors.”

 Benny BeginOn 12 December, former Israeli cabinet minister Benny Begin announced at a press conference that the government is withdrawing the proposed Prawer-Begin bill.________________________________________________________________________

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| Strawman: Former UK foreign minister hits back at Israeli “anti-Semitism” smear!

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Former UK foreign minister hits back at Israeli “anti-Semitism” smear ~

Asa Winstanley, electronicIntifada.net, BLOGS » LOBBY WATCH.

Former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said today there was “no justification whatever” for Israeli reports he had made anti-Semitic comments last week.

Several Israeli news sources reported the claims of former Knesset member Einat Wilf on her Facebook page that Straw had talked of “ ‘unlimited’ funds available to Jewish organizations and AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] in the US.”

Her claim made it into Israeli paper Haaretzyesterday, spun with the headline: “Ex-UK FM: Jewish money biggest obstacle to Mideast peace.”

In a statement emailed to The Electronic Intifada by a spokesperson, Straw said:

“There have been reports that [Wilf] claimed I had embarked upon an “anti-Semitic rant,” I note that she did not use that term in her Facebook posting, although she is reported as saying that my remarks, “reflect prejudice of the worst kind.

In any event there is no justification whatever for such claims, arising from my remarks at this seminar, or on any other occasion.

I am not remotely anti-Semitic. Quite the reverse. I have all my life strongly supported the State of Israel, and its right to live in peace and security.”

Straw’s statement

In the statement, Straw said that at the meeting on Tuesday he had “pointed out that Prime Minister Netanyahu was a player in domestic US politics, on the Republican side, and that under US political funding rules (or their absence) huge sums were spent by AIPAC in support of some elected politicians (or candidates), and against others.”

Straw contrasted this with “the rules in the UK, where spending is tightly controlled” saying that he talked about AIPAC in his memoir, which “quoted from the critical study … by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.”

He also had condemned illegal Israeli settlements: “I said that this amounted to ‘theft’ of Palestinians’ land … the EU needed to take a tougher stand on this (and on the related issue of goods exported from the Occupied Territories by Israelis).”

Straw also addressed Germany’ position on settlements:

one of the difficulties in gaining EU agreement for this [tougher stand] has, in the past, been the attitude of Germany, who for understandable reasons have been reluctant to be out of line with the government of Israel. That said, I think I noted that the EU’s attitude had changed, and there are now restrictions imposed by the EU on goods from the settlements.

Straw’s statement concludes:

None of this is “anti-Semitic.” There are plenty of people in Israel who take a similar view to me – not least (as I do) because they believe that the current approach of the government of Israel will weaken the position of the state of Israel in the medium and long-term.

Einat Wilf

The comments in question were made in a meeting room in the British Parliament on 22 October, at a roundtable organized by the Global Diplomatic Forum which Straw and Wilf both addressed. The Palestinian Authority’s ambassador in London Manuel Hassassianalso shared the platform.

A spokesperson for the Forum told me today that Parliamentary rules meant that no video or audio recording of the event was taken. She said that the Froum would publish its usual report on the event by Wednesday (although it would not be a verbatim transcript).

Einat Wilf is a former member of parliament for Israel’s Labor party, and for its right-wing “Independence” faction (split from Labor by suspected war criminal Ehud Barak until it failed to contest the last elections).

She is also on the board of NGO Monitor, a propaganda group well-known for its anti-Palestinian advocacy.

Since leaving the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) Wilf has focused on Israeli propaganda efforts overseas. While she was still an MK she told The Jerusalem Post that she saw such efforts as a “battle”:

the arena is no longer the Sinai Desert or international terrorism, but has moved to international forums: courts and the new media … we have not gone sufficiently on the offense in terms of agenda … we don’t come up with our own initiatives.

Was this accusation Wilf’s idea of such a PR “initiative”?

She backed up her Facebook accusation against Straw on her website and in comments to Ynetnews.com yesterday. In the same article, she also made an anti-Palestinian comment:

We’re used to hearing groundless accusations from Palestinian envoys but I thought British diplomats, including former ones, were still capable of a measure of rational thought.

Out of the Haartez, Ynet, The Times of Israel and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (whoseinitial report some of the others drew on), none appear to have bothered to approach Straw for comment.

Jack Straw.

(Wikipedia)

Weak EU

Straw’s fairly timid comments against Israeli settlements fits a growing pattern of European Union political figures making incredibly mild comments against limited aspects of Israel’s occupation policies and still being jumped on by Israeli propagandists like Wilf.

It is no surprise that Wilf does not like it when the the very real influence of AIPAC is raised in public fora. According to Haaretz, Wilf has worked very closely with AIPAC in the past, specifically as part of her campaign against the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

Jack Straw was the UK’s foreign secretary under former prime minister and suspected war criminal Tony Blair, including during the infamous illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. That claimed the lives of over a million people in the invasion and associated civil war.

The consequences of that war are still being felt by Iraqis on an almost daily basis. A new deadly wave of sectarian bombings killed 55 Iraqis this weekend.

After a long and successful career in the Labor party, Straw recently announced that he would step down as a member of Parliament at the next election.

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| Al Quds: Livni slams draft law on Jerusalem’s future!

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Livni slams draft law on Jerusalem’s future ~ Al Jazeera.

Israel‘s chief negotiator in Palestinian talks appeals against a bill which curbs decisions on future of Jerusalem.

The future status of Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive issues of the conflict [EPA]
Israel’s chief peace negotiator Tzipi Livni is appealling against a bill approved by ministers which aims to curb peace talks on the future of Jerusalem.The draft law, a copy of which was seen by AFP, seeks to prevent any negotiations on the future of the Holy City without first obtaining a two-thirds majority of 80 of the 120 members of the Israeli parliament.

It was approved late on Sunday by a 5-4 majority within the nine-member ministerial committee responsible for preparing draft legislation to put to parliament.

“Since there have been occasions in the past when talks have begun on handing over parts of the city, we must legislate to ensure that this possibility does not arise” without a two-thirds majority, which “cannot be achieved easily”, the text reads.

Livni, who serves as justice minister and heads the centrist HaTnuah, voted against the bill along with three other ministers, one from her party and two from the centrist Yesh Atid.

Were the bill to be passed, it would mean negotiators could not even begin discussing Jerusalem without first obtaining a mandate from two-thirds of MPs.

“She is going to file an appeal today,” her spokeswoman Maya Bengel told AFP, without giving further details.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reportedly opposes the bill.

Livni’s appeal means the bill will now be put to the full 22-member cabinet, in a move that will significantly reduce its chances of going forward as the final decision on whether to put it to a vote will be in Netanyahu’s hands, the Maariv newspaper reported.

The two sides resumed direct talks for the first time in nearly three years in Washington at the end of July, following intense US pressure.

The future status of Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel captured East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.

Israel regards the whole city as its “eternal, indivisible” capital, but the Palestinians want the currently-occupied eastern sector as capital of their future state.
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| Why are Israel’s worst racists welcome in European Parliament?

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Why are Israel’s worst racists welcome in European Parliament? ~ David Cronin, The Electronic Intifada.

Anyone who has examined Zionist propaganda critically will have noticed atrend of depicting Israel as a liberal paradise. Among the myths manufactured by this PR machine are that Tel Aviv is the world’s most gay-friendly city; that Israel is a global leader in protecting the environment; and that Palestinians have never had it so good.

The memo telling Israel’s diplomats and their allies to “accentuate the positive” has been mislaid in Brussels, judging by an event held earlier this month. During the event, a few members of the European Parliament(MEPs) teamed up with some of Israel’s most reactionary politicians.

David Rotem, a representative of the Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) party, was guest of “honor” at a conference in the Parliament’s headquarters. He was a curious choice for a discussion about those controversial EU guidelines on ending aid to firms and institutions active in the settlements Israel has built in the occupied West Bank in defiance of international law.

David Rotem has sponsored laws aimed at making Israeli apartheid more extreme.

 (Wikimedia Commons)

Far from being a slick spin-doctor, Rotem is overtly racist in his pronouncements. While two MEPs have landed themselves in hot water this year for applying the term “bongo bongo” to Africans, Rotem is able to make vile statements about Palestinians without fear of censure.

“Every Jewish community needs at least one Arab,” he has said. “Otherwise, who will repair my fridge when it breaks down on the Sabbath?”

Making apartheid more extreme

Perhaps the only commendable thing about Rotem is that he is more honest than many of his peers about the fact that Israel practices a form of apartheid. “Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, not a state of all its citizens,” he has said.

Since joining Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in 2007, Rotem has sponsored a number of bills designed to make Israeli apartheid more extreme. Among them were a bill requiring that citizens of Israel take an oath of allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic state.”

He has also tried to exclude parties comprised of Palestinians living in present-day Israel from the Knesset and to ban public funding of organizations deemed not to respect Israeli “values” (the latter move was originally known as the “Nakba law” as it targeted those who regarded the involuntary displacement of 750,000 Palestinians during Israel’s founding as a catastrophe).

Rotem has been a staunch defender, too, of Israeli government efforts to uprootPalestinian Bedouins from their villages in the Negev (Naqab). And he has argued that communities in the Galilee and the Negev should be allowed to bar residents on grounds of race and religion.

Not marginal

It’s important to note that Rotem is not a marginal figure in Israeli politics. On the contrary, he chairs the Knesset’s committee on constitution, law and justice. He has used that position to hurl insults at political opponents. Two years ago, he told a member of that committee: “Get out of here, you are not even an animal.”

Himself living in the Israeli settlement of Efrat, Rotem has put forward a bill to copper-fasten the state’s “obligation” to invest in expanding settlements.

He was not the only settler invited to the European Parliament this month. Gershon Mesika, head of the Shomron Regional Council for Israeli settlers in the West Bank, also addressed its conference.

While all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, Mesika has also registered his contempt for Israeli government decisions limiting the settlements’ growth. In 2009, heripped up papers from Ehud Barak, then Israel’s defense minister, ordering a freeze on construction in some settlements.

Sign of desperation?

The European Friends of Israel (EFI), a cross-party alliance of MEPs, was involved in the recent conference. Its embrace of hardcore racists like Rotem jars with the cuddlier image that it has been trying to project of Israel so far this year.

The EFI kicked off 2013 by celebrating Israel as a caring and open-minded place, with events dedicated to Israel’s humanitarian aid program and the protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic policies.

Is rolling out a red carpet to Rotem a sign of desperation? I’m not sure if it is. The EU’s new guidelines aren’t simply opposed by Israeli settlers.

US Secretary of State John Kerry is also demanding that the guidelines be withdrawn. You don’t need to have a doctorate in international relations to know that the EU is often servile towards America.

Kerry, of course, is more guarded and diplomatic in his choice of words than Rotem. But they are both striving to bolster a system that privileges one group of people and dehumanizes another.

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| Whether we like it or not, the settlers have won. The two-state solution is now impossible!

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Whether we like it or not, the settlers have won. The two-state solution is now impossible ~  MEHDI HASAN,  New Statesman.

Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, Israel’s the Palestinian “peace process” is dead. There’s no hope of any success for a two-state solution.

They can’t say they weren’t warned. In 1987 and 2000, after the eruption of the first and second intifadas in the occupied territories, Israeli officials could plausibly claim to have been taken by surprise. Not this time. Nitzan Alon, the Israeli general responsible for the West Bank, has warned publicly about the possibility of a third intifada by the repressed and stateless Palestinians. If the latest round of US-led diplomatic efforts fails, he told the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, a think tank, on 18 June, “I’m afraid we will see the escalation . . . strengthen.”

Alon’s comments follow similar warnings from, among others, the former Israeli intelligence chiefs Yaakov Peri and Yuval Diskin, as well as Israel’s former head of general staff, General Shaul Mofaz. “We are on the verge of a third intifada,” said Mofaz in January. “The fuel vapor may already be sensed in the air.” Four months earlier, in September 2012, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, had responded to demonstrations over political gridlock and soaring unemployment by declaring that a “Palestinian spring” had begun.

It is now a matter of when, not if, the West Bank boils over into violent protests. All eyes are on events in Damascus, Cairo and Istanbul while Israel continues to oversee the longest military occupation in the world, 46 years and counting.

Perhaps the most offensive phrase, still deployed by the laziest observers in the west, is “peace process”. There is no peace; there is no process – despite an astonishing five visits to the region in the past three months by the US secretary of state, John Kerry.

Negotiations between the two sides were “frozen”, to quote Dov Weisglass, the then chief of staff to Ariel Sharon, almost a decade ago. “[W]hat I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all,” Weisglass told the Israeli newspaper Haaretzin October 2004. “Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.” Or, as a smiling and confident Dani Dayan, the outgoing chairman of the Yesha settlers’ council, put it to me in an interview for al-Jazeera English: “The conflict right now has no solution.”

Dayan and his fanatical friends can take credit for burying the “two-state solution”. Between 1993 and 2000, as Palestinians and Israelis met for summits, conferences and “peace talks”, the number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem doubled. “It’s like you and I are negotiating over a piece of pizza,” as the Palestinian-American lawyer Michael Tarazi told an audience at Iowa State University in 2004. “How much of the pizza do I get? And how much do you get? And while we are negotiating it, you are eating it.”

Today, the relentless colonisation of occupied Palestinian land continues apace, in defiance of the Geneva Conventions, with 121 settlements and 102 unauthorised “outposts” occupying 42 per cent of the West Bank.

The settlements, therefore, have rendered a two-state solution impossible. The evidence for this? “The idea that a Palestinian state will be formed in the land of Israel has come to a dead end,” declared the former Yesha Council leader Naftali Bennett on 17 June. “Today there are 400,000 Israeli residents of Judaea and Samaria and another 250,000 in eastern Jerusalem.”

Whether we want to admit it or not, the settlers have won – they have what they call a “wet dream” government, protecting and promoting their interests. Israel’s foreign minister-in-waiting, Avigdor Lieberman, is a West Bank settler; so is his deputy. Both Uri Ariel, the housing minister, and Shai Piron, the education minister, are residents of illegal West Bank settlements. Bennett, who leads the pro-settler Jewish Home party, is also the minister for the economy.

Settlers make up 5 per cent of Israel’s population but more than 10 per cent of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Beyond the political sphere, settlers have mounted a concerted effort to dominate the Israel Defence Forces. Settlers in the government will not sanction a withdrawal from the occupied territories and settlers in the military would never enforce such a withdrawal. Thus, the “peace process” is a sham, “one of the most spectacular deceptions in modern diplomatic history”, according to the former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

On my last visit to the West Bank, I met Dr Mohammed Shtayyeh, the influential head of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, and Diana Buttu, a Stanford-educated lawyer and former Palestinian negotiator. “The two-state solution is not possible any more and we are slipping into a one-state situation . . . which is a comprehensive colonisation of all of Palestine,” Shtayyeh said.

Buttu said she no longer backed two states for two peoples, preferring a single, secular, binational state. But is that feasible? “Is it more feasible to try and get the Israelis to agree to the division of Jerusalem – or is it more feasible for us to start pushing . . . Israel to give us our rights, rather than begging for a little piece of land to be carved out [for us]?” she asked me, as we sat sipping tea in a Ramallah café.

Buttu is right. The choice on offer is stark: either a democratic, one-state solution, in which Jews, Muslims and Christians can live side by side as equals – one person, one vote – or Bennett and Dayan’s “status quo” vision, in which nearly four million Palestinians continue to live under a de facto Israeli military dictatorship, denied the right to vote and offered only a divided, bantustan statelet.

I know which I’d prefer. Either way, no matter how many visits John Kerry makes to Jerusalem, it is time to consign the two-state solution to the dustbin of history.

Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer of the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post, where this column is crossposted 

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| Blind leading blind: Livni calls Palestinian UNGA bid a “strategic terror attack!”

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Linvi: Gov’t failed in talks with PA to prevent UN bid ~  JPOST.COM STAFF

11/30/2012 10:21
The government should have had talks with the Palestinians in order to prevent the unilateral UN bid for a non-member observer state, former Kadima head Tzipi Linvi told Israel Radio on Friday.

Livni, who is running for the 19th Knesset with a new list named “The Tzipi Livni Party”, called the Palestinian UN move a “strategic terrorist attack” and said Israel will be weakened in any future negotiations with the Palestinians as a result of the move.

“The gap between the government’s threats to the Palestinians [and its actions] resulted in legitimacy for Hamas following the Gaza operation and now, also, in legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority in the UN,” Livni told Israel Radio.

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