It is believed that Hezbollah would like to deploy SA-8 batteries in Lebanon. Such weapons could pose a threat to Israel Air Force jets flying over the country. (more…)

So, let me get this straight. Israel continues to defy the international community by entering Lebanese airspace on routine basis — but they are now concerned that these flights may face a threat from Hizbollah. I have the solution: get out of Lebanon now.

“This whole operation was a foolish waste of time and money,” claimed Terence Kindlon, a defence lawyer who represented the last terror suspect to be tried in New York state. “It is almost as if the FBI cooked up the plot and found four idiots to install as defendants.” (more…)

Pre-State Jewish Underground Leader Dies.

When you encounter Israeli liberals in the US or in Europe, they present a different face. They never reveal what they actually had written in their books. This is very true of Amos Oz but also true of Amos Elon. You need to read the books of those Zionist liberals to realize that when it comes to the fundamental racism at the heart of the movement that founded the usurping entity, the left-right divide is rather meaningless. Obituaries of Amos Elon now fill the US newspapers and he is being presented as a humane and compassionate writer. Here is a sample from Elon’s book Herzl: “There was no symmetry between Arab and Jewish grievances. The Jews were always ready for a compromise; the Arabs have not yet contemplated the possibility of accomodation. The Palestinian dispersion was largely self-inflicted; unlike the Jews, they could live full Arab lives in any of a dozen other Arab countries.” (p. 407) So Elon had a long career of outright lies and fabrication. Read his biography of Herzl and you know what I mean. (more…)

That leaves Gaza suspended in a state of misery that defies easy categorization. It is, of course, crowded and poor, but it is better off than nearly all of Africa as well as parts of Asia. (more…)

“During April four Palestinians, including two boys, were killed by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and another 145 were injured by Israeli soldiers and settlers. The number of Palestinians injured rose by 40 percent compared with the 2008 monthly average,” the report says. “We have noticed a significant increase in the incidents of both settler and soldier violence against Palestinian civilians since the new Israeli government took power at the beginning of the year,” says Ronen Shimoni from B’Tselem. “This is probably related to an increase in settlement activity in the West Bank as the rightist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to establish facts on the ground,” Shimoni told IPS. (more…)

Obama has told Netanyahu firmly that Israel must stop building settlements on expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, but such words have been uttered by the president’s predecessors. Unless these statements are followed by decisive action–perhaps to limit American subsidies to Israel–there’s no reason to believe the lip service that failed in the past will suddenly be more effective. (more…)

Dozens protest Nakba bill

“An Afghan who has spent over six years at the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay prison was only around 12-years-old when he was detained, not 16 or 17 as his official record says, an Afghan rights group said on Tuesday.” (more…)

“The Carmel Academic Center in Haifa shut down the concentration in accounting within its Department of Business Administration because a majority of the students applying were Palestinian citizens of Israel. This was revealed in a news item reported on Israeli news Channel 10 on 24 May (in Hebrew only).” (more…)

Two founding members of what was once the largest U.S. Muslim charity were each sentenced to 65 years in prison Wednesday for funneling millions of dollars to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (more…)

The Knesset on Wednesday morning approved in a preliminary reading a bill introducing one year in prison for anyone speaking against Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, should the call contain a reasonable possibility “that it may lead to acts of hatred, scorn or lack of loyalty to the State or its government authorities or law systems which have been established legally.” (more…)

The so-called Israel’s Land Authority uprooted on Monday nearly 250 olive trees and several fig trees and grapevines south of Shqeib Al Salaam Arab village in the Negev. (more…)

Suliman is one of 150 animal cart owners currently collecting garbage for the Gaza City municipality. Two years of economic blockade and Israel’s recent assault on the territory have crippled the ability of municipalities to get rid of solid waste. (more…)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, we always raise democracy and human rights. It is a core pillar of American foreign policy. And I think that there is a great awareness on the part of the Egyptian Government that with young people like this and with enhanced communications, it is in Egypt’s interest to move more toward democracy and to exhibit more respect for human rights. And so we’re going to continue to engage in that dialogue. (more…)

Khan: Leading governments have been distracted by the recession. Humanitarian crises, like in Darfur and Palestine, do not get the attention they deserve. The poorest are hardest hit by the economic crisis, but all the thought and investment goes to shore up the economy and the banking system in the West. Human rights are put on a backburner. (more…)

Evidence is emerging that medical personnel monitored the medical effects of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports, subjected to the near-drowning at least 83 times in August 2002. (more…)

The Pentagon is prepared to leave fighting forces in Iraq for as long as a decade despite an agreement between the United States and Iraq that would bring all American troops home by 2012, the top U.S. Army officer said Tuesday. (more…)

The settlers were unmoved by the evacuation, saying that the situation would be reversed in no time. “We’ll return to Mitzpe Avihai today,” a youth from Kiryat Arba promised. (more…)

Ministers Meridor, Begin, Eitan ask government secretariat to quash motion calling to ban marking of Nakba Day by law, say it goes against Israel’s democratic values (more…)

Israelis use 240 cubic metres of water a person each year, against 75 cubic metres for West Bank Palestinians and 125 for Gazans, the bank said. Increasingly, West Bank Palestinians must rely on water bought from the Israeli national water company, Mekoro. (more…)

The bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi) would prescribe up to one year in jail for anybody who published calls to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, or words “that will bring about an act of hate, degradation or lack of loyalty to the state or to government authorities or to its laws that were justly established. (more…)

To visit their hundreds of relatives and friends living just a few hundred meters away in Hizma, located on the northern outskirts of the capital, members of the Khatib family must pass through a nearby checkpoint, thus crossing from area C (under full Israeli control) to the Palestinian Authority. However, family members are forbidden from moving freely within Pisgat Ze’ev, and are in essence “prisoners inside their own home.” According to them, any family member found outside the family compound will be sent to jail by Israeli authorities. (more…)

An Israeli tourism poster is being pulled from the London subway after the Syrian Embassy complained that the map on it appeared to show the Golan Heights and Palestinian territories within Israel’s boundaries, officials said Friday. (more…)

Inside Gaza it is a different story. The modern “terminal” of blast-proof glass and hi-tech detectors, manned by efficient clerks, is a kind of brutal joke. It funnels the few permitted to cross into Gaza out of its polished hall and into a tunnel that has lost its roof, then spits them out into an area of ruins, overlooked by a blank concrete wall capped with watchtowers. (more…)

Yesterday afternoon, the matter spilled into the White House briefing room. “Are you familiar with Newt Gingrich’s blog?” asked CBS News’s Chip Reid. (more…)

However, a power struggle between Fatah and Hamas over the issuance of exit permits for patients, and Israel’s reluctance to issue visas for Gazans on the basis of alleged security, means Mohammed has to now wait for a new permit to return to the Israeli hospital. (more…)

“Anyone who was expecting a major rift in the U.S.-Israeli relationship is going to be disappointed.” (more…)

“The Obama administration is giving up the decades-old intimacy the White House had with the State of Israel.” (more…)

The Supreme Court ruled today that former attorney general John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller may not be sued by Arab Muslims who were seized in this country after the 2001 terrorist attacks and allege harsh treatment because of their religion and ethnicity. The court ruled 5 to 4 that the top officials are not liable for the actions of their subordinates absent evidence that they ordered the allegedly discriminatory activity. The decision followed the court’s ideological split between conservatives and liberals, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy siding with the conservatives and writing the opinion. (more…)

The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantánamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law — a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration’s “black sites,” or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.

More important, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the “infant empire” — as George Washington called the new republic — extended to the Philippines, Haiti and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers. (more…)

Carrying a white flag, Rawhiyya led a group of women and children out of the compound and into the village in the early hours of 13 January, according to residents and human rights groups.

She was shot in the head with a single bullet, independent testimonies confirm, and took 12 hours to die after a medic who tried to reach her also came under fire from Israeli forces. (more…)

They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner. (more…)

US President Barack Obama had thought he could clean up the Bush administration’s questionable human rights legacy on his own terms. Recent decisions regarding Abu Ghraib pictures and military tribunals show that he was mistaken. His message of “change” is at risk. (more…)

The Palestinian farmers said that after repeated requests filed with the Civil Administration and the IDF’s Coordination and Liaison Office, they were finally given authorization to cultivate their lands. However, they said, when they arrived at the fields Tuesday morning they were stormed by the settlers, who appeared to be unfazed by the army’s presence in the area. (more…)

The US Senate has said it will reject a White House call for funding to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. (more…)

Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who served as ambassador to Afghanistan in the Bush administration, has been holding discussions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about becoming a senior adviser to his government, U.S. officials said. (more…)

“The punks thought they could roll over us,” Vice mutters. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” (more…)

There is ample reason for skepticism about whether Obama will really dare to stand up to Netanyahu. American politicians have about as much appetite for confrontation with Israel as they do for supporting world communism. (more…)

“An old man sat with his back to the village — he could not bear to watch it burn,” said Yisrael Cohen, a Jewish militia officer, recalling the conquest of an Arab village. “From a burning courtyard a young boy came running to me laughing; he wanted to play. He came up and I took him into my arms and he hugged me. What will I do with him, I thought. It was such a contradiction to what was going on around us.” (more…)

The New York Times is such a master at disguising Israeli crimes in a cloak of romanticism and feel-good nostalgia. You really have to give them credit. I mean, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began months before the Arab armies invaded — entire families were killed, women raped, villages razed, hundreds of thousands forcibly expelled (not “evacuated” as the article claims) from their homes. But all this is irrelevant to the NYT… We are meant to empathize with this poor man who struggles with the difficult task of ethnic cleansing.

The 13 people who made torture possible

Israel allows only food, medicine and detergent into the Gaza Strip. Thousands of items, including vital products for everyday activity, are forbidden. Altogether only 30 to 40 select commercial items are now allowed into the Gaza Strip, compared to 4,000 that had been approved before the closure Israel imposed on Gaza following the abduction of Gilad Shalit, according to merchants and human rights activists. The number of items changes according to what is determined by The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. COGAT has refused the PA representative’s request for an updated list of the items permitted into Gaza in writing, and passes the information only via the telephone. Gaza merchants are forbidden to import canned goods, plastic sheeting, toys and books, although the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and other aid organizations are permitted to bring them into the strip. (more…)

President Obama’s decisions this week to retain important elements of the Bush-era system for trying terrorism suspects and to block the release of pictures showing abuse of American-held prisoners abroad are the most graphic examples yet of how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office. (more…)

Top secret military intelligence briefings prepared by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and often hand-delivered to George W. Bush featured Crusades-like Bible quotes above triumphant photos of the U.S. military effort in Iraq. (more…)

GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) circulated a letter to colleagues this week urging President Obama to support Israel when moving forward with any Israeli peace process. Trouble is, they forgot to delete the name of the lobbying group involved in the letter from the document. Attached to the email message they circulated when seeking signatures from other members of Congress was the document, titled, “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf. (more…)

Hatim Abdul-Qader, Jerusalem Affairs advisor to the Palestinian Prime Minister, stated that the Ateret Cohanim Zionist group is planning, in collaboration with the Jerusalem Municipality, to build homes for Jewish settlers on top of Palestinians homes demolished by the municipality. (more…)

Motorola, Caterpillar, Veolia, the Tesco supermarket chain, and other companies across the world that do business with Israel are suffering losses due to a global boycott in support of Palestinian rights. (more…)

The expulsion from Be’er Sheva in 1948 was enough for her. Now she lives by herself in what used to be the family goat pen (the goats fled or were killed: One hen survived and is still alive and pecking in the soil of the goat pen). She stores some of her possessions in a rusty bus that they dragged to the site a long time ago. She heats up tea on a bonfire. “You can see the ruins of the house, you can’t see the ruins in our soul,” says Hussein al Aaidy, a man in his 50s. He was a Fatah activist, a prisoner in Israel from the 1970s who was freed during the prisoner exchange deal in 1985. After his release, he worked at several jobs, so as to be able to build a house for his family. (more…)

Wrong. Instead, they went with a poetic Getty image: little children peaking over a little wall. How enchanting! (more…)

Israel has found a cheap and easy way to get rid of its waste, much of it hazardous: dump it into the West Bank. A few Palestinians can be bought, the rest are in no position to complain. “Israel has been dumping waste, including hazardous and toxic waste, into the West Bank for years as a cheaper and easier alternative to processing it properly in Israel at appropriate hazardous waste management sites,” Palestinian Environmental Authority (PEA) deputy director Jamil Mtoor told IPS. (more…)

During a Paris conference on gender and sexuality Friday Horowitz said, “I call on the Palestinian Authority from this conference to stop persecuting homosexuals. This situation is intolerable.” (more…)

He then added, “But Israel’s four-decades of brutality in the occupied territories is delightfully tolerable… Oh and there is also no such thing as homophobia in Israeli society. Thank you.”

Don’t you just love how the Israeli “left” never mentions the IDF’s practice of blackmailing Palestinian homosexuals with exposure if they refuse to collaborate?

During their examination of Israel, the 10 experts presented allegations that Israel was running a “Facility 1391″ in an “undetermined location within Israel which is not accessible to the International Committee of the Red Cross or detainees’ lawyers or relatives.” (more…)

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals. (more…)

“Eugenics was a part of the national philosophy of most of [the local] psychiatrists,” says Zalashik. “The theory was that a healthy nation was needed in order to fulfill the Zionist vision in Israel. There was a powerful economic aspect to this view of things – the idea being to prevent people who were perceived as a burden on society from bringing children into the world. And homosexuals and frigid women also fell into this category.” Psychiatrist Kochinsky, for one, argued in 1938 in the journal Harefuah that the findings of a census of the mentally ill in Palestine should serve primarily as “a basis for methods to improve the race.” (more…)

“It is an embarrassment,” said Ross K. Baker, an expert on Congress at Rutgers University, “and clearly nobody wants to be embarrassed, particularly a speaker of the House. But other than that, there is nothing here that threatens her job.” (more…)

But then an email, written in February 2008 from Katz to a colleague, came to light. “Shh! Our suicide prevention co-ordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” Katz wrote. (more…)

Umm Abdullah cannot remember the last time she was able to feed meat to her eight children. She does know that for the past week the single meal she cooked for them each day consisted only of lentils. And that on one day, she had received aid coupons from the United Nations, which she subsequently sold to buy tomatoes and eggplant at the local market. (more…)

Barack Obama will revive the heavily criticised George Bush-era military tribunals for detainees at Guantánamo Bay but will make them fairer, according to US officials. (more…)

Today marks the 61st anniversary of the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel and which expedited the Yishuv’s plans for population “transfer”: a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from region. By the end of the war, approximately 750,000 Palestinian had either been forcibly expelled from their homes or fled the fighting. Today, the 1948 refugees remain stateless — scattered across the region from the squalid camps of South Lebanon to the ruins of Baghdad — and their descendants have expanded the number of registered Palestinian refugees into the millions.

Statelessness is violent. Stateless people have no rights that are actively enforced or protected. They have no embassy looking out for their welfare and are subject to any number of restrictions imposed by the host governments in the countries where they reside. That Israel has never considered the possibility of addressing the Palestinian refugee problem in any meaningful way has perpetuated the refugees’ plight and deepened their suffering. It is one of history’s great injustices and a lingering trauma that has defined the political identity of generations of Palestinians.

I believe that anyone who celebrates the creation and establishment of their own country simultaneously celebrates the injustices committed in order to make their state possible. When Americans celebrate July 4th, they tacitly support Manifest Destiny and the genocide of the Native Americans. Likewise, when Israelis celebrate their independence, they tacitly support the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

61 years of exile; 61 years without justice.

The Palestine Liberation Organization and its governmental entity cannot overturn a court judgment forcing them to pay more than $116 million for a Hamas terror attack that killed a U.S. citizen and his wife, a federal judge has ruled.

The case is among a handful in the country filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991, which seeks to hold terrorist organizations responsible for the killings of American citizens. (more…)

How much does the U.S. pays out in compensation for the hundreds of thousands of civilians they’ve killed…? Mostly nothing, but in a handful of cases between $500 – $7,500 has been paid. But that’s the market-value of a non-American.

Few people know how to avoid, evade, beat around the bush, beg the question, bypass, circumvent, fudge, sidestep, prevaricate, equivocate, dodge, duck, avoid and ignore as well as Federal Judge Jay S. Bybee, the author of a torture memorandum given to the Central Intelligence Agency. Few people know how to be as skillfully dishonest while appearing to skirt dishonesty. (more…)

Okinawa is currently home to approximately 25,000 U.S. service members and their dependents. These soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are a key component of the United States’ and Japan’s defense strategy. We greatly appreciate the generosity of the people of Okinawa and their role as host to U.S. forces in Japan. (more…)

What he fails to mention is the massive local opposition to the presence 25,000 American soldiers on Okinawa — an island with a population of 1.2 million people — which gained huge momentum after the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three U.S. servicemen in the mid-1990s.

Video has emerged showing two protesters confronting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night. As Rumsfeld entered the building, Desiree Fairooz and Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK were there to greet him.

Desiree Fairooz: “War criminal! War criminal! War criminal! Arrest this man! Arrest the war criminal! I wish I had some handcuffs right now to arrest this man! He is responsible for the death of millions of people! (more…)

“That SOB doesn’t want a deal,” growled Mr Clinton at a particularly frustrating juncture in diplomacy. It remains to be seen whether—or how fast—Mr Obama may come to the same conclusion. (more…)

Throughout my career, I have been proud to have worked on human rights and against torture around the world. (more…)

“This tragic, misguided, and unprincipled reversal seems to be consistent with the fact that instead of getting a real ‘change’ on policies under the Obama administration, the American people are experiencing continuity across the board with those of the discredited and criminal Bush administration when it comes to international law, human rights, and U.S. constitutional law related thereto.” (more…)

War Crimes Against Children: new report on the 313 children killed during Gaza offensive

The torture practices used in interrogations of al-Qaida prisoners were not developed by government officials in Washington, but by private security experts. In return for a daily consulting fee, they personally supervised the program at the CIA’s secret prisons from the very beginning. (more…)

Human rights advocates and legal scholars fear that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama may resurrect the military commissions designed by his predecessor to try Guantanamo detainees after Obama’s 120-day moratorium on proceedings expires on May 20. That possibility appeared to move a step closer to reality when Guantanamo’s chief judge refused to delay a May 27 pretrial hearing for Ahmed Al-Darbi, 34, a Saudi Arabian accused of providing material support for terrorism and participating in a conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes. (more…)

Such investigations, the summary states, should be carried out by an “impartial inquiry mandated, and adequately resourced, to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza and southern Israel by the [Israeli army] and by Hamas and other Palestinian militants.”

The board of inquiry corroborated the already existing masses of evidence collected by local and international human rights organizations, eyewitness accounts from UN and other humanitarian personnel, and the legal examination by the distinguished (but vilified by Israel and the US) UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk.

And yet none of this death and destruction, not the use of white phosphorus in flagrant violation of international law, not even against the UN (if that is all the secretary-general cares about) merited any further examination. (more…)

Israel’s achievements over the past sixty-one years are undeniable, and the officials responsible for the rebranding campaign won’t have any trouble finding artists, athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs to write feel-good stories about. But the dark side of the story won’t go away — 40-plus years of an increasingly brutal occupation, the construction of the apartheid wall (or if you prefer,”separation fence”), much of outside the 1967 borders, thousands of dead Palestinian civilians, a series of failed wars since 1982, and the repeated squandering of genuine opportunities to make peace. (more…)

The president is seeking to overturn a deal made last month between the Pentagon and the American Civil Liberties Union to make public the pictures from Abu Ghraib and other prisons after a court ruled they should be released. Obama instructed the White House legal office to argue in court against the immediate release of the photographs after several senior military officers, including the former US commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the present commander in Baghdad, General Ray Odierno, said their publication would endanger US troops. (more…)

Poll: 58% of Israeli Jews back two-state solution (more…)

Oh yeah… and 82% of Israelis think Israel should have killed more Palestinians in Gaza during the slaughter there earlier this year.

The Israeli government is quietly implementing a development plan that aims at transforming the area known as the “Holy Basin” – land both inside and just outside the walled Old City – into a major “Biblical Kingdom”, the aim of which is to strengthen Israel’s hold over the whole of the city. (more…)

An investigation appointed by President Hamid Karzai concluded on Monday that 140 civilians, including children, were killed in the US air strikes in Afghanistan last week, a police chief said. (more…)

To be frank, I couldn’t care less what this lousy Pope does or does not say during his little tour of the Middle-East. I’m strongly opposed to the unfounded respect instinctively granted to religious leaders. Why should anyone care what this man says? Because he wears a silly hat and prays to a mythological man in the sky? Come on. I wouldn’t mind so much if this Pope had actually done something worthwhile or noble with his life (think Desmond Tutu) — but we’re talking about a former Hitler Youth member who has expressed bigoted views against both Jews and Muslims. So he can keep his silly hat and his lousy statements to himself.

According to Oren, “if this trend continues, [Israeli founding father David] Ben Gurion’s nightmare will materialize and Israel will be rendered soulless, a country in which a great many Jews may not want to live or for which they may not be willing to give their lives.” (more…)

“In Israel there is no death penalty except for one law regarding Nazi criminals — and Nazi criminals only.” (more…)

Sure, there’s no death penalty if we are talking strictly about judicial sentencing… But Israel extra-judicially assassinates hundreds of Palestinians each year. These people are hunted down by Israel and killed based on actions deemed criminal by the local Israeli military commander. There are no trials, no charges and no oversight. To borrow Angry Arab’s favorite reference) No death penalty my potato!

From the detailed description provided by Dayton, it’s clear that the Palestinian forces he’s enabling could certainly be accused of carrying out the self-policing of the West Bank for the Israelis. Because the West Bank is, after all, occupied by Israel and riddled with illegal settlements besides — plus beset by a surrounding wall, 600-plus intrusive checkpoints, and a network of Jews-only highways — the Palestinian troops are utterly at the mercy of the Israelis. Each recruit is vetted by US security forces (i.e, the CIA), then vetted by Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence arm of Israel, and then by Jordan’s super-efficient intelligence service, before they begin their training in Jordan. Dayton made it quite clear that the Palestinian units thus trained are primarily deployed against two targets in the West Bank: against criminal gangs, and against Hamas. So far, they’ve received $161 million is US funding. (more…)

One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young Israeli talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. “In the next war,” he said, “we’ve got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good.”…Now, suddenly, I found myself meeting Israelis committed to the creation of a greater Israel embracing the West Bank, who were utterly heedless of the fate of its inhabitants. The Palestinians were perceived as losers, a mere incidental impediment to the fulfilment of Israel’s historic territorial destiny. By a curious quirk, that young Israeli whom I heard enthuse about emptying the West Bank of Arabs was Binyamin Netanyahu, today his country’s prime minister. (more…)