Obama governo dá um visto a ex-espião, o conselheiro de Netanhayu

fonte:EI

Obama gov't restores visa to former spy, Netanhayu adviser
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 20 May 2009

Uzi Arad (Herzliya Conference)

As might be expected of a former senior official with Israel's spy agency Mossad, Uzi Arad -- the most trusted political adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister -- has become used to being in the shadows as he exerts influence.

But that is fast changing. Arad was prominent in preparing Netanyahu's tough positions as he headed for Washington this week to meet Barack Obama, the US president, who is seeking to advance a Middle East peace plan.

Arad, recently appointed the head of Israel's revamped National Security Council, will oversee an organization that Netanyahu regards as the linchpin of the new government's security and foreign policy.

One military analyst, Amir Oren, has noted that, given Netanyahu's unstable coalition, Arad "is likely to emerge as a strong adviser to a weak government."

Arad has been outspoken both in rejecting Palestinian statehood and in promoting the military option against Iran, positions believed to be shared by the Israeli prime minister and that will be at the root of a possible confrontation in the coming months with the Obama administration.

Arad is also one of only a handful of senior figures on Netanyahu's Iran Task Force, charged with devising a strategy for dealing with Tehran and its supposed ambitions to attain nuclear weapons.

That will make some in Israel uneasy. The hawkish views that have made Arad indispensable to Netanyahu have also earned him several high-profile opponents.

Arik Carmon, founder of the Israel Democracy Institute, has described Arad's proposal to arrange "territorial exchanges" to strip some of Israel's Palestinian minority of their citizenship as "racist."

Alon Liel, a former director-general of Israel's foreign ministry, has called Arad's efforts to derail recent talks with Syria by demanding the continuing occupation of the Golan "ridiculous and nasty."

In 2007, before his rise to public prominence, Arad also fueled worried speculation about Israel's plans for a military strike on Tehran, after he described it as "easier than you think." A wide range of non-military Iranian targets were legitimate, he added.

But despite Arad's espousal of opinions that in many respects accord with those of Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu Party and Netanyahu's foreign minister, few doubt the prime minister's fierce loyalty to him.

In a sign of that commitment, Netanyahu pushed through Arad's appointment as national security adviser, a post in which he will need to be in almost continual consultation with the US, at the risk of provoking a diplomatic crisis with the Obama White House.

He had been barred from entering the US by the Bush administration after implication in a spying scandal. A Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, jailed in 2006 for passing secrets about Iran to the Israel lobby group AIPAC, was reported to have met Arad frequently.

When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, arrived in Jerusalem in April for meetings with Netanyahu, then prime minister-designate, her staff quietly suggested he remove an official -- a hint that Arad's presence was not welcome. Netanyahu instead sent out Sallai Meridor, the ambassador to the US, who resigned soon afterwards.

The Obama administration has since restored Arad's visa and agreed to his political rehabilitation, not least so that he will be able regularly to meet his US opposite number, Gen. James Jones.

Arad spent more than 20 years in Mossad, much of it working in the intelligence section, before being appointed as Netanyahu's foreign policy adviser in his first government in the late 1990s.

He was also closely associated with a leading neoconservative think-tank in New York, the Hudson Institute, in the 1970s.

But paradoxically, his influence on Israeli thinking -- both among policy-makers and the public -- may have actually increased during his years in political opposition, after the fall of the first Netanyahu government in 1999.

It was then that he established an influential think-tank, the Institute for Policy and Strategy, at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.

The institute stages an annual conference, dedicated to the "balance of Israel's national security," that has become the most important event in the Israeli calendar for politicians, generals and diplomats, as well as attracting high-profile US guests.

Since the first meeting in 2000, the conferences have defined the major security issues supposedly facing Israel, closely mirroring Arad's own key obsessions.

Chief among these have been fears about the demographic threat to Israel's Jewishness from Palestinian birth rates both in the occupied territories and among Israel's own Palestinian citizens, and the danger posed to Israeli hegemony in the region from Iran's acquisition of a nuclear bomb.

In an indication of his implacable opposition to a Palestinian state, Arad recently told an interviewer: "We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of Palestinian populations, not the territories."

He has suggested that the Palestinians be required to become economically self-reliant, in the hope that their leaders will be forced to promote family planning methods to reduce the population. His motto is that the Palestinians need "one man, one job" before they need "one man, one vote."

He has also promoted a complex territorial exchange involving Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt that would see many Palestinians relocated to the Sinai so that Israel could take control of chunks of the West Bank.

But his greatest vehemence is reserved for Iran -- an antipathy apparently shared by the Israeli prime minister. In the past he has called for "maximum deterrence," including threats to strike "anything and everything of value" in Iran, including its "holiest sites."

As Netanyahu's plane touched down in Washington on Sunday, Arad briefed reporters that Tehran posed an "existential" threat to Israel and that "all options are indeed on the table."

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Edinburgh film festival retorna financiamento israelita

fonte:EI




Edinburgh film fest returns Israeli funding
Press release, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 18 May 2009

The 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) organizers announced on Friday they were returning money donated by the Israeli embassy. The return of the money was accompanied by an admission that it had been "a mistake to accept the 300 [British pounds] from the Israeli embassy" and followed a torrent of angry letters expressing incomprehension, fury or sadness at the EIFF being associated with the Israeli state. Many pledged to support Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) pickets of screenings throughout the 2009 Festival, and an initial public protest planned for the following day.

Many were shocked at such a public association with the pariah state so soon after the massacres in Gaza, given Israel's continuing siege and its ongoing ethnic cleansing and illegal settlement in the West Bank. The EIFF was also pressured into returning money to the Israeli embassy in the wake of the Israeli massacres (during their defeat) in Lebanon in 2006.

Filmmakers and artists pointed out that the EIFF's claim to separate culture and politics is absurd, while Israel harshly suppresses Palestinian efforts to hold cultural events, most recently in March in Jerusalem and Nazareth. Ken Loach, one of the UK's most prominent filmmakers, joined in the effort, and issued a statement through the SPSC:

"I'm sure many filmmakers will be as horrified as I am to learn that the Edinburgh International Film Festival is accepting money from Israel. The massacres and state terrorism in Gaza make this money unacceptable. With regret, I must urge all who might consider visiting the festival to show their support for the Palestinian nation, and stay away."

We welcome the outcome whereby the festival organizers have returned Israel's tainted money, thus aligning the Edinburgh International Film Festival with the growing Scottish and world-wide campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the apartheid state. In a short period, anger at Israel's savagery in Palestine has already led, for example, to:

• The Scottish TUC (Trades Union Congress) joining with its South African and Irish counterparts in committing to BDS and a re-examination of its relations with the Israeli racist pseudo-trade union, the Histadrut.


• Groups of students staging occupations across many British universities to win scholarships for Gazan students and to drive Israeli companies off their campuses.


• An Israeli security company, 360 Defense, going "underground" -- it had earlier boasted of the skills its personnel acquire in fighting the Palestinian freedom struggle, and its delivery of "anti-terrorism" (sic) courses to Scottish police forces.


• Israeli company Eden Springs suffering a continuous hemorrhage of lost contracts, forcing the closure of its East of Scotland depot in Loanhead -- they have recently hired a public relations company to counter the growing boycott.

These unambiguous trends in civil society contrast with the unflinching support of the British government and the EU for Israel's occupation of the West Bank, for its brutal siege of Gaza and intensifying repression of Palestinian citizens inside Israel. While supporting Israeli brutality abroad, British legal authorities are taking steps to criminalize aspects of solidarity with Palestine here in the UK. With official government endorsement of such efforts, five members of the SPSC have been charged with "racially motivated conduct" and go on trial shortly. This follows a performance in Edinburgh by an Israeli ensemble, the Jerusalem Quartet, of whom it was said approvingly by admirers that "carrying a rifle in one hand and a violin in the other was the ultimate Zionist statement." SPSC carried the protest against these official "cultural ambassadors of Israel" into the concert hall and we urge others to do likewise, wherever they exchange their rifles to make "the ultimate Zionist statement" with their violins.

The upwelling of anger at Israel's crimes and natural sympathy with the Palestinian people, can now be converted everywhere into active solidarity with their struggle for freedom. BDS is the only strategy that allows people around the world to participate as auxiliaries in this struggle, and to reduce and possibly neutralize the shameful support of our governments for Israel. It won't happen automatically, but a determined campaign can succeed in mobilizing the widespread anger at Israeli racism and violence. Opinion polls everywhere show that Israel's violent ethnic cleansing is being seen for what it is, and that Palestinian resistance, however costly, has not been in vain. Israeli is, clearly and irreversibly, a polecat state, able to kill Palestinians in huge numbers but extremely vulnerable to a world-wide campaign of boycott.

We must keep our eyes on the prize: freedom for the people in Israel's vast gulag. Our contribution to that will be a mass campaign of BDS. We in SPSC have already chosen our next targets and we have not the slightest doubt that popular opinion will support us. Our opponents know this.

a escolha de Israel, o desafio de Obama

fonte:EI


Israel's choice, Obama's challenge
Mustafa Barghouthi, The Electronic Intifada, 20 May 2009

President Barack Obama talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after their meeting at the White House on Monday, 18 May 2009. (Lawrence Jackson/White House Photo)

I cannot recall a more important meeting between an American president and an Israeli prime minister than today's meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Will the Obama administration have the courage to challenge Netanyahu, or will all the talk of change dissolve in the face of a concerted one-two punch from Netanyahu and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee?

I am increasingly convinced that if Obama fails to speak out now, it will doom the two-state solution forever. Further fiddling in Washington -- after eight years of it -- will consign Jerusalem, the West Bank and the two-state solution to an Israeli expansionism that will overwhelm the ability of cartographers to concoct a viable Palestinian state.

It's now or almost certainly never. If Obama lacks the political will to stand up to Netanyahu now, he will lack the capacity later. And by the time Obama leaves office, it will be too late to salvage anything more than an archipelago of Palestinian Bantustans. We Palestinians seek freedom, not apartheid, and not the sort of Potemkin villages on the West Bank that Netanyahu is trying to package to the West as visionary economic boomtowns for desperate Palestinians. Yes, we want economic improvement, but the best way to achieve that is through control over our own lives, borders and resources.

Israel's new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, claimed in an April interview that "America accepts all our decisions." I was in Washington in February and did not find that to be the case. The Obama administration, I was pleased to hear, planned to be in neither the Israelis' nor the Palestinians' pocket. That is all we Palestinians have ever asked.

Yet, just as in the '90s, Netanyahu believes that he is the world's driving force and that a Democratic president should be following his lead. In his memoir, former lead American negotiator Dennis Ross quoted an exasperated President Clinton as complaining that Netanyahu comported himself as though he thought Israel, and not the United States, was the superpower. That doesn't appear to have changed. How else to explain the recent assertion by Israeli officials that before Israel will address core Palestinian-Israeli negotiating issues, the United States must deal -- apparently to Israel's satisfaction -- with Iran's nuclear program?

The false Iran-Palestine linkage troubles me because its Israeli boosters think that Iran is an immediate concern, and Palestinian freedom can once again be kicked down the road. Danny Ayalon, Israel's deputy foreign minister and a representative of Lieberman's extremist Yisrael Beiteinu party, said in April that "the Iranian clock should be measured in months," but the Palestinian timetable "is open-ended."

What Ayalon, Lieberman and Netanyahu fail to grasp is the world's increasing recognition that they are attempting to dictate the timetable for another people's freedom. This is unacceptable in the 21st century.

Yet Netanyahu wants either an impossibly long timetable or no Palestinian state at all. In May 2002, when the central committee of the Likud Party voted on a resolution declaring that "no Palestinian state will be established west of the Jordan River," Netanyahu urged party members to support the resolution. To this day, he has failed to embrace the idea of a Palestinian state, even though the two-state solution has been Israel's avowed policy for years. He hopes to destroy the idea, de facto, through delays that allow time for further settlement activity.

More recently, Netanyahu has added a new demand: that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This is intended only to confuse and delay peace talks. And it's wrong. Palestinians in the occupied territories have no standing to sign away the rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel in order to get Israel to the negotiating table. To tell the truth, we don't believe that Israel can be a true democracy and an exclusivist Jewish state at the same time. Yet Israeli leaders seem oblivious -- or pretend to be oblivious -- to why Palestinians would decline to acknowledge Israel's status as a Jewish state.

Increasingly, Israel is out of step with a world hurtling into the 21st century with Obama. This is no longer the segregated world of President Truman and David Ben-Gurion at Israel's founding. Yet Netanyahu's selection of Lieberman, who once stated that "minorities are the biggest problem in the world," exemplifies Israel's tone-deafness in a changed world.

The choice is Israel's: two states, or increasing isolation by a world that will not accept apartheid dressed up as an economic development plan. Tragically, the consequences of further delay and oppression will be endured by Palestinians -- both in the occupied territories and in an increasingly exclusivist Jewish state whose self-definition comes at the expense of Palestinian citizens.

Mustafa Barghouthi, a doctor and a member of the Palestinian parliament, was a candidate for president in 2005. He is secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, a political party. This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times and is republished with the author's permission.

dor da consciencia

fonte:Alternate Focus

a unidade Palestina e Israel: lutas no Titanic

fonte:Palestine Chronicle



Israel and Palestinian Unity: Quarrel on the Titanic


Israel makes every effort to present Abbas' PA as a Palestinian Vichy regime.

By Uri Avnery – Israel

One of the happiest moments in my life occurred in a restaurant. It happened before the second Intifada. I had invited Rachel to celebrate her birthday with dinner at a famous restaurant in Ramallah.

We were sitting in the garden under strings of colorful lights, the air was fragrant with the perfume of flowers and the waiters were hurrying back and forth with laden trays. We ate Mussakhan, the Palestinian national dish (chicken with tahini baked on pita bread), and I drank arak. Our waiter, who had overheard us talking, took our order in Hebrew. We were the only Israelis there. At the nearby tables, Arab families with the children in their best clothes, as well as a bride and groom with their wedding guests. Bursts of laughter punctuated the murmur of Arabic conversations, and spirits were high.

I was happy, and a sigh escaped me: “How wonderful this country could be, if only we had peace!”

I think of that moment every time I hear sad news from Ramallah. The news is depressing, but the memory helps me to keep alive my hope that things could be different.

The most depressing news concerns the split between the Palestinians themselves. This split is a disaster for them, and, I believe, also for Israel and the world at large. That’s why I dare to comment on a matter that seemingly does not concern us Israelis. It does.

It is easy to blame Israel. Easy and also justified. In their struggle against the national aspirations of the Palestinians, successive Israeli governments have applied the old Roman maxim divide et impera, divide and rule.

Since the Oslo agreement, the central component of this policy has been the physical separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Article IV of the Oslo Agreement of September 1993 says: “The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved”.

Article X of Annex 1 of the Interim Agreement of September 1995 says: “There shall be a safe passage connecting the West Bank with the Gaza Strip for movement of persons, vehicles and goods…Israel will ensure safe passage for persons and transportation during daylight hours…in any event not less than 10 hours a day.”

In practice, the safe passage was never opened. Among all the blatant violations of the Oslo agreements, this was the most severe. Its consequences have been disastrous for both sides.

True, there was a lot of talking about the passage. Ehud Barak once fantasized about constructing a giant bridge between the West Bank and the Strip, after seeing such a 40 km long bridge somewhere abroad. Others spoke about a tunnel underneath Israeli territory. Yet others proposed an extraterritorial highway or railway. None of these ideas was ever implemented. On the contrary, while before Oslo there had been free movement for all, including the inhabitants of the occupied territories, after Oslo this freedom was abolished.

The pretext was – as always – security: convoys of murderers and terrorists would pack the safe passage, trucks loaded with Palestinian rockets would drive to and fro. But the consequences disclose the true aim: what remained of Palestine was cut into two disconnected parts.

One cannot rule a territory without physical contact with it. That was proven in Pakistan, which was founded as a state with two disconnected parts separated by Indian territory. Soon enough, war between the two broke out and the Eastern part became the independent state of Bangladesh.

According to the latest Palestinian statistics, which seem reliable, there are now 2.42 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and 1.46 million in the Gaza Strip; in addition to 379 thousand in East Jerusalem. From Yasser Arafat I once heard that more than half of the Palestinian Authority’s resources were being devoted to the Gaza Strip, in spite of the fact that the Strip amounted to only 6% (one sixteenth) of the Palestinian territories.

Now there exist in practice two Palestinian entities: the West Bank, whose actual capital is now Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip, with its capital Gaza city. From the political, economic and ideological points of view, the distance between them is growing.

And from the point of view of the Israeli occupation policy, that is a great victory.

The Israeli government conducts different strategies against the two Palestinian entities.

Against Gaza, the policy is simple and brutal: to overthrow the Hamas government by turning the life of those 1,460,000 men and woman, old people and children, into hell. They are allowed to bring in only the most basic foodstuffs. There was an international outcry when Senator John Kerry discovered the import of noodles is prohibited, because pasta is apparently a luxury. “We shall not give them chocolate when Gilad Shalit is not getting chocolate,” an army officer declared this week. It would be interesting to know how much chocolate the 11 thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are getting.

The war against Gaza (“Molten Lead”) was intended to wreak death and destruction upon the civilians, so that they would rise up and overthrow their elected government. The dead are already buried, but the piles of rubble remain. The Israeli government does not allow building materials to be brought in, and the inhabitants have started to build homes of mud, as their ancestors did centuries ago. (To make the whole thing even more depressing, it is forbidden to bring in toys, books and musical instruments.)

The Egyptian government cooperates with the Israeli army in enforcing the blockade on the inhabitants of Gaza. Lately it has intensified its efforts to choke the essential supply line through the Rafah tunnels (“smuggling” in Israeli and Egyptian parlance). The campaign recently started by the Egyptian authorities against Hizbullah agents in Sinai has the aim, among others, of cutting this pipeline.

The Gaza people have not toppled the Hamas government. On the contrary, their opposition to the Ramallah government seems to be growing, and some say that it is turning into pure hatred.

Against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the occupation authorities employ a different, but no less destructive, strategy. They make every effort to present it as a kind of Palestinian Vichy regime, in order to prevent the healing of the Palestinian rift.

The Israeli government declares this openly and loudly. This week, the Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, wondered publicly how the Palestinian Minister of Justice could sue Israel before the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Gaza.

How come, Ashkenazi complained, when throughout the Gaza War there was such close cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority?

In other words, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army declares publicly before the Palestinian people and the entire world that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah cooperated with the Israeli government in the war against their Palestinian brothers in Gaza, in which - according to the Ramallah Minister of Justice - systematic war crimes were committed. A more damaging blow to the standing of Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be imagined.

Other Israeli officers do not spare their praise for the Palestinian security forces, which – they allege - cooperate with the Israeli army in eliminating Hamas sympathizers in the West Bank. It is hard to imagine that such statements by the occupation officers will do anything to elevate the standing of Abbas in the eyes of the Palestinians, who see with their own eyes how the settlements on their land grow daily.

This week, a friend told me about a conversation he had with a Palestinian official from Ramallah. If Israel attacks Iran, he said with great enthusiasm, the Hamas regime in Gaza will collapse.

For an outsider looking in, this is incomprehensible. When the entire Palestinian people is facing a danger to their very existence, when the Israeli government is working tirelessly to make it impossible for a Palestinian state to come into being and there is a real threat that the Palestinian people will be eventually driven out of Palestine altogether, the split resembles a quarrel on the bridge of the Titanic.

There is an old Jewish saying that “the destruction of the temple (in the year 70 A.D.) was caused by mutual hatred.” When the Romans were already besieging Jerusalem, the various Zealot factions in the beleaguered city burned each other’s stocks of food. Among the Palestinians, such things are happening right now.

Disunity has always been a curse. In 1948, when they were fighting for their survival, they were unable to form a unified leadership and a unified military force. In practice, every village fought alone, without coming to the aid of its neighbors. Otherwise, perhaps, the Naqba would not have happened, and the untold suffering that continues to this very day would have been prevented.

The main result of the disunity 61 years ago was that the Palestinians were unable to establish the State of Palestine next to the State of Israel, and the territory allotted for it by the UN was divided between Israel, Jordan and Egypt.

Yasser Arafat understood this well. He made a huge effort to maintain the unity of his people at almost any cost. As long as he was alive, this unity was maintained. The secret services that planned his murder obviously wanted to sabotage this unity, much as Yitzhak Rabin’s murderers wanted to destroy the peace process. The two murders complemented each other, and not by accident.

Anyone who believes that peace is essential for the two peoples and for the entire world must fervently hope for the establishment of a Palestinian unity government.

I believe that this is still possible.

It seems that in this matter, too, Barack Obama must play a leading role. He must put an end to the stupid and disastrous policy of boycotting Hamas and employ his full power to bring about the creation of a Palestinian unity government. Perhaps it will have to be, in the beginning, a kind of super-government under which both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip keep some kind of autonomy.

Peace among the Palestinians themselves is a necessary precondition for peace between Israel and Palestine. Only Israeli-Palestinian peace can also bring about reconciliation between the two peoples and perhaps restore the atmosphere of that magic evening in the Ramallah restaurant – so that it will not remain just a sweet memory.

- Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.