Ehud Olmert could face war crimes arrest if he visits UK
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- Written by Ian Black, Middle East editor Ian Black, Middle East editor
- Published: 27 October 2009 27 October 2009
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• Prosecution of Israelis likely, says solicitor
• Lawyers working on use of universal jurisdiction
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert makes a speech
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/ AP
Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister during the Gaza war, would probably face arrest on war crimes charges if he visited Britain, according to a UK lawyer who is working to expand the application of "universal jurisdiction" for offences involving serious human rights abuses committed anywhere in the world.
Neither Olmert nor Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister during the Cast Lead offensive, and a member of Israel's war cabinet, would enjoy immunity from prosecution for alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions, predicted Daniel Machover, who is involved in intensifying legal work after the controversial Goldstone report on the three-week conflict. Neither are ministers any longer.
Prosecutions of Israeli political and military figures remain likely despite the failure to obtain an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, the defence minister, when he visited the UK earlier this month, he said. In the Barak case a magistrate accepted advice from the Foreign Office that the minister enjoyed state immunity and rejected an application made on behalf of several residents of the Gaza Strip.
"This needs to be tested at the right time and in the right place," Machover said. "One day one of these people will make a mistake and go to the wrong country and face a criminal process — and then it'll be a matter for the courts of that country to give them a fair trial: that's what the Palestinian victims want."
The death toll for the war was some 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Israel insists it acted in legitimate self-defence in response to rocket attacks by Hamas.
Police sources denied a claim that police maintain a "watch list" of Israeli officers who would face arrest if they try to enter the country.
In 2005 General Doron Almog was tipped off that he was about to be arrested before leaving a plane at Heathrow airport. Last month a former chief of staff, General Moshe Ya'alon, cancelled a visit to Britain, apparently for fear of arrest. Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet security service, faced an arrest warrant in the Netherlands following a complaint by a Palestinian who said he had been tortured.
The development of universal jurisdiction has been boosted by the Goldstone report, which urged Israel to conduct an independent inquiry into alleged war crimes. Failing that, other governments were advised to try suspects using universal jurisdiction. Another option was for the UN security council to refer allegations to the international criminal court. Israel refused to co-operate with the report, which also accused Hamas of war crimes.
But the law is complex and developing unevenly. Lawyers in Germany were this week unable to obtain an arrest warrant for the current Israeli army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, because German law grants immunity to guests invited on state visits. Spain is considered legally "dangerous" by the Israelis.
Machover confirmed that he was working with other lawyers in the EU and elsewhere "in an increasingly organised fashion in different jurisdictions. It's not just about Palestine. It might be about Rwanda or Afghanistan," he said.
Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reported today that officers of the Israel Defence Forces who took part in the Gaza operation have been asked to consult legal experts at the foreign ministry, where they are instructed how to behave abroad and in some cases advised not to visit certain countries.
The ministry said it was "aware of efforts undertaken by Palestinian groups and their supporters to harm IDF officers through legal and public relations means, and is working to prevent such efforts."
Amnesty says Israel curbing water to Palestinians
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- Written by Writing by Ari Rabinovitch, editing by Andrew Dobbie, Reuters Writing by Ari Rabinovitch, editing by Andrew Dobbie, Reuters
- Published: 27 October 2009 27 October 2009
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Mon Oct 26, 2009 8:40pm EDT
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Human rights group Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday that Israeli restrictions prevented Palestinians from receiving enough water in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The report said Israel's daily water consumption per capita was four times higher than that in the Palestinian territories.
"Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford," said Amnesty's Donatella Rovera.
A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Amnesty's statement that Israel was depriving the Palestinians of water as "preposterous."
Israel says it has met its obligations under the 1993 Oslo agreement while Palestinians have failed to meet their own requirements to recycle water and were not distributing water efficiently.
"Israel supplied Palestinians 20.8 million cubic liters above and beyond what it is obliged to do under the water agreement," said Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev.
Israel, itself facing unprecedented water shortages and rising tariffs, controls much of the West Bank's supplies, pumping from an aquifer that bridges Israel and the territory.
Israel sells some water back to the Palestinians under quotas agreed in the Oslo accords that rights groups say have not been increased in line with population growth.
The report said Gaza's coastal aquifer, its sole fresh water resource, had been polluted by infiltration of seawater and raw sewage and degraded by over-extraction.
Israel maintains a blockade of the Gaza Strip, an area taken over by the Islamist Hamas movement which defeated Palestinian forces loyal to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007.
Israel's water authority called the report "biased and incorrect, at the very least" and said that while there was a water gap, it was not nearly as big as presented in Amnesty's findings.
Amnesty said water consumption in Israel was 300 liters a day per person and 70 liters a day in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel's water authority said those numbers were misleading because they took into account internal distribution and did not compare total water consumption. It said the total figures were 408 liters per day for Israelis and 287 liters for Palestinians.
The Amnesty report described how Palestinians in the West Bank relied on water from tankers that were forced to take long detours to avoid Israeli military checkpoints and roads off-limits to Palestinians.
The situation had led to steep increases in water prices, the report said.
Goldstone tells Obama: Show me flaws in Gaza report
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- Written by Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service
- Published: 22 October 2009 22 October 2009
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South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who led a damning United Nations probe into Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter, has challenged Barack Obama's administration to justify its claims that the report is one-sided and flawed.
Goldstone's report, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes in the Gaza offensive. Israel has rejected the report as biased and the U.S. has said it would support Israel's efforts to prevent a UN Security Council debate on the report.
Goldstone told Al Jazeera on Thursday that he is still waiting for the U.S. to clarify its claim that the report has a number of flaws.
"The Obama administration joined our recommendation calling for full and good-faith investigations, both in Israel and in Gaza, but said that the report was flawed," Goldstone told Al Jazeera.
The commission chair said that once Washington points out the flaws, he would be ready to respond. "I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are. I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are," he said.
The remarks follow a U.S. opposition to a UN Human Rights Council resolution on the report in Geneva last Friday.
Russia and China are also among those who voted against a discussion of the Goldstone probe in the Security Council. The report passed by 25 votes to six, 11 countries abstained, and five countries did not vote, among them Britain and France.
Meanwhile, a recent poll shows that more than two-thirds of the Israeli public opposes an Israeli inquiry panel into the events of Operation Cast Lead.
The poll, Geocartography Institute directed by Professor Avi Degani, shows that only 32 percent of those questioned supported the idea of an investigative committee on the Goldstone report.
On Wednesday night, 30 Sderot residents arrived at the UN offices in Jerusalem to personally pass on a petition opposing the Goldstone report, signed by 100 thousand people from around the world.
The Sderot residents stood outside the UN offices holding signs saying "Goldstone apologize" and "We're sick of anti-Semites".
The plight of rural Palestinians on the West Bank is as grim as ever
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- Written by AL-MUGHAYIR AL-MUGHAYIR
- Published: 22 October 2009 22 October 2009
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Not much of an olive branch
Oct 15th 2009 | AL-MUGHAYIR
From The Economist print edition
The plight of rural Palestinians on the West Bank is as grim as ever
AFP
[PHOTO: A Palestinian farmer, stumped again]
“WHAT did the trees do?” says Muhammad Abu Awad, a retired teacher of agriculture and father of 14 children, as he looks gloomily at his ravaged field. Twisted, silvery stubs are all that remain of a lush grove that once offered up a yearly abundance of fat green olives.
The vandals came at night from Adei Ad, a Jewish settlers’ outpost deemed “illegal” even by the Israeli government, near Shvut Rachel, an established West Bank settlement that is judged illegal in international but not Israeli law. Working fast, unnoticed by Palestinian landowners in the nearby Arab village of al-Mughayir, the settlers cut down nearly 200 olive trees, of which 70 belonged to Mr Abu Awad. As a result, he reckons to have lost income worth around $3,400 that he would have earned from this year’s harvest. But that is not all. “I planted these trees with my own hands 35 years ago”, he says, wistfully touching the stumps, now wrapped in sackcloth to protect them from the sun. Mr Abu Awad hopes his trees will recover and one day bear fruit again.
As usual at harvest time, tension between Palestinian farmers and Jewish settlers has risen. The olive tree deeply stirs the emotions of Palestinians. It is a symbol of their struggle and a vital part of their rural economy. According to their ministry of agriculture, nearly 500,000 olive trees have been bulldozed, burnt down or uprooted in the territories since the second intifada (uprising) began in 2000. Israel’s army has cleared swathes of groves to create open areas in the Gaza Strip and along the security barrier being built on the western side of the West Bank, often taking big bites out of Palestinian land. The Israelis have also cut down thousands of trees near the Jewish settlements. Palestinians and human-rights groups have repeatedly castigated the Israeli army for failing to stop such destruction. The settlers say terrorists hide among the trees.
In recent years the Palestinians have usually been able to pick their olives under the protection of the Israeli army and police. Charities that help the farmers say the army has been taking this job seriously, letting the Palestinians harvest without being harassed by the settlers. But they criticise the soldiers for hectoring the farmers into rushing the picking and say the soldiers could do more to protect the trees before the harvest begins, especially in hot spots near ideologically extreme settlements.
Many of the settlers pursue a “price-tag policy”, deliberately instigating violence and mayhem so that the Israeli military and political establishment is loth to take action, such as evacuating the 100-plus “illegal” settlements, for fear of further violence. As international criticism has mounted, even in America, several Israeli governments have promised to dismantle the outposts but so far little has been done. The settlers are generally against the peace process, because it could mean their expulsion. So whenever there are signs of negotiation, they increase their attacks—among other things, on olive trees. They want to show who controls the land.
Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Israeli government has plainly emboldened the settlers. “Now they fear no one,” says a Palestinian villager in al-Mughayir. When the ruling politicians seem to back the settlers, the Israeli soldiers feel less obliged to protect the Palestinian farmers.
Mr Abu Awad says he is determined to fight to keep his land. “I’ll sleep on my land to protect it,” he says. “I tell my children: if I die, they should bury me where my blood was spilled. I’m in love with my land.”
Netanyahu seeks to change rules of war
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- Written by JTA JTA
- Published: 21 October 2009 21 October 2009
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JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Benjamin Netanyahu ordered several government ministries to look into floating an international initiative to change the rules of war in light of global terrorism.
The Israeli prime minister at a meeting Tuesday of the Ministerial Committee on National Security also ordered the justice minister to form a committee to deal with international legal proceedings against Israel and Israeli officials in the wake of the Goldstone report.
Also, the committee declared 500 organizations to be terrorist organizations. Most of the organizations direct their activities toward various targets in the West and not necessarily against Israel, and nearly all are connected to al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden or the Taliban.
“Our challenge is to delegitimize the continuous attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel," Netanyahu said at the meeting, according to a statement released by the Government Press Office. "The most important arena where we need to act in this context is in the arena of public opinion, which is crucial in the democratic world. We must continue to debunk this lie that is spreading with the help of the Goldstone report.”
He added: “In Lebanon, in Gaza and in other places, weapons are being piled up around us with the sole aim of firing them at the citizens of the State of Israel. I want to make it clear to everyone: No one will undermine our ability and right to defend our children, our citizens and our communities.”
Though the meeting had been called to discuss the implications of the Goldstone report, Defense Minister Ehud Barak refused to address the idea of forming a commission to look into its findings regarding Palestinian civilian casualties, according to reports.
The Goldstone report was adopted last week by the United Nations Human Rights Council and sent on to the U.N. Security Council.