Jimmy Carter savages US foreign policy over drone strikes

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Written by James Meikle James Meikle

Published: 25 June 2012 25 June 2012

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Former president calls on Washington to regain moral leadership in wake of drone strikes and targeted assassinations



James Meikle   
guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 June 2012 05.34 EDT   

Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter: 'America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.' Photograph: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

The former president Jimmy Carter has declared that US drone strikes and targeted assassinations abroad have seen the country violating human rights in a way that "abets our enemies and alienates our friends".

In a stinging attack on US foreign policy in the New York Times, Carter says America is "abandoning its role as a champion of human rights" and calls on Washington to "reverse course and regain moral leadership".

Revelations that top US officials are targeting people, including their own citizens, abroad are "only the most recent disturbing proof" of how far such violations have extended, he says in a furious critique of the administrations of George Bush and Barack Obama.

At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the US should be strengthening, not weakening "basic rules of law and principles of justice", Carter says in the paper on Monday. His criticisms, just months before Obama hopes to regain the White House in November's presidential election, lambast the use of drones and detention.

Attacks on human rights after the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, have been "sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public", says the Nobel peace prizewinner. "As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues."

Carter adds: "While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 with US leadership, "has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world's dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government's counter-terrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration's 30 articles, including the prohibition against 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'."

Recent US legislation has made legal the president's right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organisations or "associated forces", Carter says. "This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration."

There are "unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate."

Carter says: "Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don't know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times."

Regarding the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Carter says of the 169 prisoners held there: "About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semi-automatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defence by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of 'national security'. Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either."

Instead of making the world safer, "America's violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends", he says.

"As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years."

UN Committee Concludes Israeli System Tantamount to Apartheid in 2012 Session

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Written by Noura Erakat* and Rania Madi Noura Erakat* and Rania Madi

Published: 27 May 2012 27 May 2012

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Between mid-February and early March 2012, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (Committee) held its 80th session where it evaluated the compliance of several states with the 1966 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). Among those states was Israel who became a party to the treaty in 1979. The Committee’s concluding observations and recommendations are notable because they establish that Israel’s policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) are tantamount to Apartheid and that many of its policies within Israel itself violate the prohibition on Apartheid as enshrined in Article 3 of the Convention.

Apartheid in the ICERD and the Apartheid Convention

The ICERD is a short document, comprised of only seven substantive articles. It is a powerful document, however, as it both imposes positive duties upon a state to combat racism as well as negative duties mandating that states refrain from infringing on the equality of all persons to education, health, society, family, nationality, religion, work, and to be free from violence. Entered into force in 1969, the ICERD preceded the ratification of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (Apartheid Convention) by seven years.

Article 3 of ICERD condemns “racial segregation and apartheid” and obligates State parties to “prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature under their jurisdiction.” While Israel is not a party to the Apartheid Convention, it is a party to the ICERD. Moreover, while some commentators claim that the definition of the crime of Apartheid in the Apartheid Convention is particular to the case of South Africa, no such  disagreement over the applicability of the crime exists in the ICERD.1

Applicability of the ICERD in the oPt

Palestinian human rights organizations began bringing their claims arising out of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) before the Committee in 1998. Israel has consistently rejected the applicability of human rights treaties to the Territory it occupies. Significantly, it does not contend that another body of law is better suited for the Territory. To the contrary, it argues that even Occupation Law, established in the  Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Times of War (FGC), is applicable only as a matter of discretion and not law. Israel’s contention would render the OPT a legal black hole. Authoritative human rights bodies, however, have rejected these claims.

The Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights as well as the Human Rights Committee have held that human rights law is applicable to the OPT. In its Advisory Opinion on Legal Consequences of Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the International Court of Justice also affirmed the applicability of human rights law to the OPT. The Committee for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination has affirmed the applicability of ICERD repeatedly. Accordingly, despite Israel’s enduring protests, the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has reviewed the State’s compliance with the Convention in 1998, 2003, and 2007.2 At those Review Sessions, the Committee had made significant findings but nothing as bold or firm as its conclusions and observations in this 2012 Session.

Apartheid and Israel: Highlighting the strides between 2007 and 2012

In the Committee’s 80th session, members of the Palestinian Council of Human Rights Organizations (PCHRO), including Badil, collaborated with one another in unprecedented ways. Rather than submit separate reports and make separate oral statements and share separate written statements, during this session, these human rights organizations closely coordinated their written and oral interventions. Collectively, the organizations demonstrated how racial discrimination between Jews and non-Jews drove the ban on family reunification; the forced population transfer of indigenous Bedouins in the Negev; underpinned the lack of a constitutional right to equality; explained the dramatic spike in settler violence; the disproportionate allocation of water; the forced population transfer of Palestinians from East Jerusalem; the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes; and the unequal access to justice and accountability in Gaza. Their collaboration paid off in tangible ways as indicated by the Committee's Concluding Observations.

The Committee has come to describe the situation within the OPT as demonstrative of Apartheid. Whereas in 2007, it noted that Israel cannot legitimately distinguish between Israelis and Palestinians in the OPT on the basis of citizenship, in 2012 it states that it is extremely concerned by the de facto segregation and discrimination within the Territory between Jews and non-Jews. The distinction is of paramount importance. Whereas states can legitimately discriminate between citizens and aliens, they cannot legitimately privilege communities under their jurisdiction based on race and ethnicity. Here, the Committee is noting that Israel’s discriminatory practices do not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens but between Jews and non-Jews. In paragraph 24 it writes:

The Committee is particularly appalled at the hermetic character of the separation of two groups, who live on the same territory but do not enjoy either equal use of roads and infrastructure or equal access to basic services and water resources. Such separation is concretized by the implementation of a complex combination of movement restrictions consisting of the Wall, roadblocks, the obligation to use separate roads and a permit regime that only impacts the Palestinian population (Article 3 of the Convention).

The Committee draws the State party’s attention to its General Recommendation 19 (1995) concerning the prevention, prohibition and eradication of all policies and practices of racial segregation and apartheid, and urges the State party to take immediate measures to prohibit and eradicate any such policies or practices which severely and disproportionately affect the Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and which violate the provisions of article 3 of the Convention.

The Committee also addressed the discriminatory zoning and planning policy as a comprehensive system aimed at achieving a “demographic balance” (para. 25). Accordingly, it urges Israel to reconsider the "entire policy" in order to ensure equal access to, and enjoyment of, land and its resources among Palestinian Bedouin communities.

The Committee rejected Israel’s argument that military exigencies necessitate the differentiated treatment among the OPT’s population. To the contrary, the Committee concluded that in order to prevent racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, Israel must "ensure equal access to justice for all persons residing in territories under the State Party's effective control" (para. 27). It considers the trial of children as contravention of international norms and regards administrative detention as no less than arbitrary detention under international human rights law. Rather than accept the disparate treatment of Palestinians and Jewish settlers as resulting from the application of Occupation Law, the Committee attributes the discriminatory treatment to Israel's establishment of two sets of laws; one for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers.

Apartheid within Israel

Perhaps the most significant developments in the Committee’s Conclusions concerned its application of Article 3 violations to the treatment of  non-Jewish persons within Israel itself. In paragraph 11 it notes

… with increased concern that Israeli society maintains Jewish and non-Jewish sectors, which raises issues under article 3 of the Convention. Clarifications provided by the delegation confirmed the Committee’s concerns in relation to the existence of two systems of education, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, which except in rare circumstances remain impermeable and inaccessible to the other community, as well as separate municipalities: Jewish municipalities and the so-called “municipalities of the minorities.”

The Committee noted racial discrimination between Jews and non-Jews as facilitating unequal access to land and housing rights within Israel in ways that mirror its policies in the OPT. Consider, that whereas in 2007, the Committee took issue with the role of para-state organizations  and their role in confiscating land for exclusive Jewish use and enjoyment, in the 2012 Conclusions, the Committee places this burden upon the State itself and notes that the State party must "ensure equal access to land and property and to that end, abrogate or rescind any legislation that does not comply with the principle of non-discrimination."

The Committee was particularly concerned with Israel Land Administration Law of 2009, the 2010 Amendment to the Land (Acquisition for Public Purpose) Ordinance (1943); and the 2010 Amendment to the Negev Development Authority Law (1991). It considered the Admissions Committee Law (2011), which gives individuals and private persons the right to discriminate against persons in regards to housing, as a "clear sign" that concerns about segregation remain pressing (para. 11). This finding undermines Israel’s attempts to circumvent the holding in Ka’adan v. The Israel Lands Administration (2000), which deemed discriminatory housing and land policies illegal, by exporting the discriminatory scheme to private actors. It also emphasized that Israel should withdraw the discriminatory Law for the Regulation of the Bedouin Settlement in the Negev proposed in 2012, which the Committee found to be tantamount to "legaliz[ing] the ongoing policy of home demolitions and forced displacement of the indigenous Bedouin communities" (para. 2).

In line with this bold approach, the Committee urged Israel to rescind the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law and to facilitate the reunification of all families irrespective of their ethnic, national or other origin

By extending its application of Article 3 to Israel and by finding that it exists as a de jure policy within the OPT, the Committee did in its 2012 Concluding Observations what the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, better known as the Durban Conference, could not achieve. In fact, the Committee has urged Israel to "give effect to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.” Bearing in mind Israel’s objections to the process and the document, the Committee encouraged the State Party to reexamine its position and to adopt policies to implement Durban because of the document’s significance for "a large segment of humanity" (para. 31). This marks a significant milestone in the struggle for Palestinian human rights. Whereas, compliance with the FGC would ultimately remove the military occupation and return the situation to its status quo ante, human rights law would reverse those conditions of inequality that have developed as a result of the Occupation’s prolonged nature. Moreover, the Committee acknowledged that the discriminatory treatment between Jews and non-Jews within Israel concerning their human rights, including land and housing rights, is tantamount to Apartheid. The Committee’s developments certainly vindicate the efforts of Palestinian human rights organizations and their partners. However, its inability to enforce its recommendations heightens the significance of, and the need for, the continued work of human rights organizations, scholars, and activists.

Endnotes:
1. John Dugard, international law scholar, explains that the Apartheid Convention’s broad application has been established by its invocation and application elsewhere, such as the Additional Protocol I (1977) to the Geneva Conventions (1949) which recognize apartheid as a grave breach without geographical limitation in Article 85, paragraph 4(c). Similarly, Article 7 of the Rome Statute included the crime of apartheid as a crime against humanity.
2. The Committee scheduled to review Israel in 2006 at its 69th Session. Due to Israel’s request for a postponement, it was not reviewed until 2007 during the Committee’s 70th Session.

-------------------

* Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and Badil's US-based Legal Advocacy Consultant
* Rania Madi is a Palestinian lawyer and activist and Badil's Geneva-based Legal Advocacy Consultant

Published in Forced Population Transfer in Palestine; Thinking Practically about Return (Spring-Summer 2012)
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Noura Erakat


Noura Erakat is a former New Voices Fellow. As a fellow she worked with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation as their National Grassroots Organizer and Legal Advocate. She is presently a resident scholar at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and working as Counsel for the Oversight and Government Reform Domestic Policy Subcommittee in the House of Representatives.


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A Bird’s Eye View

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Written by Uri Avnery Uri Avnery

Published: 25 May 2012 25 May 2012

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Uri Avnery
May 26, 2012

(Based on my article “The main Effort” published in Haaretz , May 4. 2012.)

A Bird’s Eye View

ON MAY 15, the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, its Arab citizens observed a day of mourning for the victims of the Naqba (“catastrophe”) – the mass exodus of half the Palestinian people from the territory which became Israel.

Like every year, this aroused much fury. Tel Aviv University allowed Arab students to hold a meeting, which was attacked by ultra-right Jewish students. Haifa University forbade the meeting altogether. Some years ago the Knesset debated a “Naqba Law” that would have sent commemorators to prison for three years. This was later moderated to the withdrawal of government funds from institutions that mention the Naqba.

The Only Democracy in the Middle East may well be the only democracy in the world that forbids its citizens to remember a historical event. Forgetting is a national duty.

Trouble is, it’s hard to forget the history of the “Palestinian issue”, because it dominates our life. 65 years after the foundation of Israel, half the news in our media concern this one issue, directly or indirectly.

Just now, the South African government has decreed that all products of the West Bank settlements sold there must be clearly marked. This measure, already in force in Europe, was roundly condemned by our Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as “racist” (looks who’s talking!). However, it joins a boycott initiated 15 years ago by my Israeli friends and me.

The new government coalition has declared that it will renew negotiations with the Palestinians (everybody knows that this is a hollow promise). A wave of murders and rapes is being attributed to Arabs (and African asylum seekers). All presidential candidates in Egypt promise to take up the fight for the Palestinians. Senior Israeli army officers have disclosed that 3500 Syrian and Iranian missiles, as well as tens of thousands in Hizbollah’s South Lebanon, are ready to be launched against us because of Palestine. And so on, a daily list.

115 years after the foundation of the Zionist movement, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates our news.

THE FOUNDING FATHERS of Zionism adopted the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” (coined much earlier by a British Christian Zionist). They believed the Promised Land to be empty. They knew, of course, that there were some people in the country, but the Zionists were Europeans, and for Europeans at the end of the 19th century, the heyday of imperialism and colonialism, colored people – brown, black, yellow, red or whatever - did not count as people.

When Theodor Herzl put forward the idea of a Jewish State, he was not thinking about Palestine but about an area in Argentina. He intended to empty this area of all its native population – but only after they had killed all the snakes and dangerous beasts.

In his book “Der Judenstaat” there is no mention of Arabs - and not by accident. When Herzl wrote it, he was not yet thinking about this country. The country appears in the book only in a tiny chapter added at the last moment, titled “Palestine or Argentina?”

Therefore Herzl did not speak about evicting the Palestinian population. This would have been impossible anyway, since Herzl was asking the Ottoman sultan for a charter for Palestine. The Sultan was a Caliph, the spiritual head of all the world’s Muslims. Herzl was too cautious to bring this subject up.

This explains the otherwise curious fact: the Zionist movement has never given a clear answer to its most basic question: how to create a Jewish state in a country inhabited by another people. This question has remained unresolved to this very day.

But only seemingly. Hidden somewhere underneath it all, on the fringes of the collective consciousness, Zionism always had an answer. It is so self-evident, that there was no need to think about it. Only few had the courage to express it openly. It is imprinted on the “genetic code” of the Zionist movement, so to speak, and its daughter, the State of Israel.

This code says: a Jewish State in all the Land of Israel. And therefore: total opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state – at any time, anywhere in the country, at all costs.

WHEN A strategist plans a war, he first of all defines its aim. That is the Main Effort. Every other effort must be considered accordingly. If it supports the main effort, it is acceptable. If it hurts the main effort, it must be rejected.

The Main Effort of the Zionist/Israeli movement is to achieve a Jewish State in all of Eretz Israel - the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. In other words: the prevention of an Arab Palestinian state.

When one grasps this, all the events of the last 115 years make sense. All the twists and turns, all the seeming contradictions and deviations, all the curious-looking decisions make perfect sense.

In a bird’s eye view, the Zionist-Israeli policy looks like a river striving towards the sea. When it meets an obstacle, it goes around it. The path deviates to the right and to the left, sometimes even going backwards. But it perseveres with a wondrous determination towards its goal.

The guiding principle was to accept every compromise that gives us what we can get at any stage, but never let the final aim out of our sight.

This policy allows us to compromise about everything, except one: an Arab Palestinian state that would confirm the existence of an Arab Palestinian people.

All Israeli governments have fought this idea with all available means. In this respect there was no difference between David Ben-Gurion, who had a secret agreement with King Abdullah of Jordan to obstruct the setting up of the Palestinian state decreed by the UN General Assembly’s 1947 resolution, and Menachem Begin, who made a separate peace with Anwar Sadat in order to get Egypt out of the Israeli-Palestinian war. Not to mention Golda Meir’s famous dictum: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. Thousands of other decisions by successive Israeli governments have followed the same logic.

The only exception may be the Oslo agreement – which also did not mention a Palestinian state. After signing it, Yitzhak Rabin did not rush forwards to create such a state. Instead, he stopped in his tracks as if stunned by his own audacity. He hesitated, dithered, until the inevitable Zionist counter-attack gathered momentum and put an end to his effort - and his life

THE PRESENT struggle over the settlements is an integral part of this process. The main aim of the settlers is to make a Palestinian state impossible. All Israeli governments have supported them, openly or covertly. They are, of course, illegal under international law, but many of them are also illegal under Israeli law. These are variously called “illegal”, “unlawful”, “unpermitted” and so forth. Israel’s august Supreme Court has ordered the removal of several of them and seen its rulings ignored by the government.

The settlers assert that not a single settlement has been set up without secret government consent. And indeed, all the “unlawful” settlements have been connected at once to the water and electricity grids, special new roads have been built for them and the army has rushed to defend them – indeed the Israel Defense Forces have long ago become the Settlements Defense Forces. Lawyers and shysters galore have been employed to expropriate huge tracts of Palestinian land. One famous woman lawyer discovered a forgotten Ottoman law which says that if you shout from the edge of a village, all the land where the shout cannot be heard belongs to the Sultan. Since the Israeli government is the heir of the Jordanian government, which was the heir of the Sultan, this land belongs to the Israeli government, which turns it over to the settlers. (This is not a joke!)

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems in abeyance and “nothing happens”, it is really going on with full force in the only battlefield that matters: the settlement enterprise. Everything else is marginal, like the awesome prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran. As I have been saying all along: that will never happen. It is a part of the effort to divert attention from the Two-State Solution, the only peaceful solution there is.

WHERE IS the negation of the Palestinian state leading to?

Logically, it can only lead to an apartheid state in the entire country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. In the long run, that would be untenable, leading to an Arab-majority “bi-national” state, which would be totally unacceptable to almost all Israeli Jews. So what is left?
The only conceivable solution would be transfer of all the Arabs to the other side of the Jordan. In some ultra-right circles, this is openly talked about. The Jordanian monarch is deadly afraid of it.

Population transfer already happened in 1948. It is still a point of debate whether this was done deliberately. In the first part of the war, it was clearly a military necessity (and practiced by both sides). Later on, it became more deliberate. But the main point is that the refugees were not allowed back when the hostilities were over. On the contrary, some villages were emptied and destroyed even later. Everybody acted under the invisible directive of the Main Effort, a direction so deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness, that it did not need any specific order.

But 1948 is long gone. The world has changed. What was tolerated from post-Holocaust brave little Israel would not be tolerated tomorrow from mighty, arrogant Israel. Today It is a pipe-dream - like similar dreams on the other side that Israel would somehow disappear from the map.

This means that ethnic cleansing, the only alternative to the Two-State solution, is impossible. The Main Effort has run into a dead end.

IT HAS often been said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. This will dominate our lives and the lives of generations to come.

Unless we do something that looks almost impossible: to change the Main Effort, the historic direction of our state. Substitute for it a new national aim: peace and coexistence, reconciliation between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine.

African asylum seekers injured in Tel Aviv race riots

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Written by Conal Urquhart and agencies, guardian.co.uk Conal Urquhart and agencies, guardian.co.uk

Published: 24 May 2012 24 May 2012

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Violence breaks out after inflammatory speeches as protesters join politicians to demonstrate against rising Israeli immigration


Hundreds demonstrate in the impoverished Hatikva neighborhood of south Tel Aviv against the African migrant community. Photograph: Roni Schutzer/AFP/Getty Images

Dozens of African asylum seekers were injured as race riots broke out in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night.

Thousands of protesters joined politicians to protest against the arrival of an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers in Israel in recent years. But after inflammatory speeches the demonstration broke out into violence.

Witnesses reported seeing men and women being beaten and shops and properties being attacked. Police said nine people were arrested.

The protesters were addressed by politicians including Miri Regev and Danny Danon of the ruling Likud Party. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Regev described the asylum seekers as a "cancer in our body," and promised to do everything "in order to bring them back to where they belong".

Danny Danon, who heads a lobby group which seeks to deal with the issue of illegal immigration, said the only solution to the problem would be to "begin talking about expulsion".

"We must expel the infiltrators from Israel. We should not be afraid to say the words 'expulsion now'," he was reported as saying.

Thousands of asylum seekers have arrived in Israel from Eritea and South Sudan, escaping poverty but also oppressive regimes and political instability.Most are bound for Europe, but find Libya blocked to them by the government and civil war.

Often travellers are taken to Israel by Bedouin people smugglers, abused and held to ransom for months at a time before they are deposited on the border where Israel is building a new fence. Once in Israel, they are looked after by Israeli non-governmental agencies and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Some work illegally and the majority live in the poorest areas of Tel Aviv where they find themselves in competition with working class Israelis mostly from a Middle Eastern or north African background. The sparse greens and parks of south Tel Aviv are dominated by the African migrants who sleep there at night.

Anger has been growing in the city and earlier this year the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the migrants threatened the Jewish character of Israel.