1AM - soldiers at the door

Watch this video made possible by B'Tselem giving cameras to Palestinian families to record events in their lives. In this case, Israeli soldiers arrive in the wee hours of the morning to roust a Palestinian family out of bed so that pictures can be taken of the male children. This is proof once again that Palestinians have no rights, even to the privacy of their own homes. Note that the Israeli soldiers are hardly more than teenagers.

We came to inherit the land

Amnon Neumann, a former soldier in the Palmach, the army that expelled the Arabs from areas that the future state of Israel would hold as its own, recounts some of his experiences (but not all, some being unmentionable).

Concerning the erasing of what is called by the Palestinians the catastrophe (Nakba), he says on reflection, "my whole world view of what happened in the war changed completely. I saw that this was a deliberate deception of the Zionist movement. And they did it successfully, a major success"



This video was produced by Zochrot, which means remembering in Hebrew. From the website:

Zochrot seeks to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel, who bear a special responsibility to remember and amend the legacy of 1948. The principal victims of the Nakba were the Palestinians, especially the refugees, who lost their entire world. But Jews in Israel also pay a price for their conquest of the land in 1948, living in constant fear and without hope.

The Nakba destroyed the fabric of relations that existed between Jews and Palestinians before 1948. In recognizing and materializing the right of return lies the possibility for Jews and Palestinians to live in this country together.

Israel's school textbook propaganda

Israeli Nurit Peled-Elhanan doesn't mince words when she asks

How do Israeli boys and girls educated on supposedly enlightened humanistic values and end up being such horrible monsters in the army?

She decided to take a look at the textbooks used in Israeli schools to see if a clue might be found there. She has examined such books for many years. In this video, she tells of what she found in maps, the handling of death, excuses and rationalizations for Israeli military actions, blame placing, glorification of the military and more.

America, what has happened to you?

What has tripped up the U.S. repeatedly is the anxiety factor of our leadership. How can a democratic political system that has shown it’s inherent strength now for over 200 years be continually headed by people who think it is about to be undermined by every wind that blows?

While the world admires the personal freedoms we enjoy and most would love to share it in their own part of the world, our leadership counteracts that very positive image with the endless fear they show by an obsession with domination everywhere. From the frenzy over Communist power (a system whose collapse was welcomed by the very people who were supposed to be under its sway) to the current Islamophobia, America must be forever planting military bases and issuing warnings; setting up trip-wires for intervention and laying down markers not to be crossed.

How ironic that freedom and liberty, so attractive to the great majority of mankind, cannot be allowed to do their good work of setting an example for others to try their best to emulate. Instead we must have a ponderous and heavy-handed policy backed with unlimited weapons that disfigures the U.S. image all over the world. Top it off by calling it “national security”.

Now after 19 people pulled off an attack with airliners of all things, we have heavy-handed law enforcement right here in the U.S. to oppress us as well with the FBI running after people who simply visited the occupied territories. If anything, it appears this monster of coercion and force is relentlessly putting liberty and justice for all in the shade everywhere, crushing the very way of life that it is promoted as protecting!

Israel and the U.S. are alike in one way – they are hard at work on their own undoing, completely blinded by an obsession with hard (as opposed to soft or diplomatic) power.

innocent? plea bargain regardless

UPDATE: Nearly 100% of all military court cases in West Bank end in conviction.

B'Tselem has released a publication called No Minor Matter concerning the injustice of military law as applied to Palestinian teens in the West Bank.

Setting aside the basic injustice that Palestinians are considered adults by the IDF when they reach 12 years of age though Israeli children must become 18 before they may be tried as adults under Israel's civil law, I want you to know of the application of plea bargaining this reports brings to light.

Normally, a plea bargain is the path that a defendant might take if the penalty for a crime is less onerous than the process required to go through a trial that might end up producing a guilty verdict anyway. If the plea bargain is used frequently, it makes it appear that the authorities and the court system are efficiently doing their jobs of going after criminals when, in fact, the rights of those accused are being abused. I recommend the excellent book Courtroom 302 for anyone interested in how this works in the overloaded judicial system of Cook County, Illinois.

In Chicago and in the West Bank the goal is the same - to pass through as many accused as possible just as one would create sausages in a factory - while letting the matter of innocence or guilt in the alleged crime fall by the way.

Because they can far more easily convict people, military courts have become the choice of those wishing to quickly put away those they assume to be guilty, for example everyone at Guantanamo.

If you want people to plea bargain, the best way to do it is to make the trial process a long drawn out affair and allow no bail so that the accused must sit in jail for the entire time. Add to that the very good chance of conviction that comes with any trial under military law and it will be very unlikely for anyone, innocent or not, to pass up the chance to plead guilty, pay a fine and be gone.

As Americans should know, we are guaranteed the right to a speedy trial by our Constitution (though it rarely works out in practice). But military courts do not operate under the civil law. According to B'Tselem, in Israel's military courts each step in the trial process requires a separate hearing. To indict someone is a hearing, then calling witnesses is another. Anyone who has followed the Rachel Corrie case brought by her parents against Israel will know the frustrating delays that are involved; the hearings can be months apart. When an accused is in custody the whole time, it means the accused is serving time even before guilt is established.

Here is the strange logic of the process as explained by Israeli military court appellate judge Col. Eli Wilf:

...a period of five months from the time of arrest to the filing of the indictment and setting of a time for hearing the matter cannot be deemed such a long period as to justify release from detention. This length of time is acceptable; it is neither unusual nor unreasonable. To hold that this period of time justifies a detention alternative would lead to the conclusion that, in almost all cases, we would have to consider release, which is an unacceptable result.

One can tell from this statement the regard with which any rights of a defendant are held! The military court system must operate efficiently before any rights for the accused are considered, if ever.

Of the 642 cases involving minors that B'Tselem reviewed, only 5 involved a trial. In 13 the defendant pleaded guilty without a plea bargain and the remaining 97% of the cases were plea bargains. And remember, all these cases involve teens that Israel has decided to label adults.

Read the full report for an account of all the other travesties of justice that occur to Palestinian minors netted by the IDF.

Cartoon characters share their wisdom

protesting together for almost 40 years

For the third time in nearly four decades, Ghada Karmi (at left) and Ellen Siegel have stood outside an Israel embassy—in London in 1973 and 1992, and in Washington, DC on Oct. 25, 2011—holding identical signs telling the world of their respective dispossession and privilege. The longtime friends and activists were prohibited from having this year’s photograph taken in front of Israel’s Washington embassy, as they had in London, so went to the back of the building instead. Other than that, their situations have not changed—as Karmi’s “still” notes. Photo credit: FRANCIS KHOO (London photos) and JEAN-PASCAL DEILLON

Thanks to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs for this.