[JPN Commentary: The important piece of this article is not so much the platform for Ariel Sharon's new Kadima party. That is merely reflective of familiar Sharon positions. What is of greater interest is how Kadima and Sharon are defining the "road map".

Sharon has repeatedly stated that he "supports the road map". That is, the plan George W. Bush put forth through the Quartet (the group made up of the US, UN, EU and Russian Federation) which called for mutual steps toward a two-state solution. But as Kadima has defined it, Israel has no immediate responsibilities. For Kadima, the process for creating two states is carried out in the following stages: "dismantling terror organizations, collecting firearms, implementing security reforms in the Palestinian Authority, and preventing incitement." The missing piece is obvious--the freezing of settlement construction and the removal of settlement "outposts" that have gone up since 2001. These steps are explicitly called for by the actual road map as immediate actions that Israel must take. Sharon has no intention of doing so, of course. Instead, he is following through on his plan to use the Gaza withdrawal to "put formaldehyde" into the peace process. In this case, Gaza will be the excuse to do no more on the West Bank. Sharon may, in the near future, take down a few meaningless settlements on the West Bank, but his overall ambition is to unilaterally set borders that leave Israel in effective control of movement on the West Bank, leave the major settlement blocs intact and keep Israel in control of much of the key resources, particularly water, on the West Bank.

The actual road map that Bush dreamed up was a futile document that couldn't have worked even if it had been seriously implemented. But now it has devolved into a rhetorical fiction that Sharon can use to cozy up to the Bush Administration and enhance his absurd "peacemaker" image while ensuring that livable conditions for the Palestinians are impossible to achieve. When his policies lead, as they eventually will if they are not stopped, to renewed violence, Sharon will surely follow Ehud Barak's example and shrug and say "I tried my best, the Palestinians just won't settle for anything less than our annihilation." The only question is how many people will be duped by this. One can only hope it is far fewer than were fooled by Barak. -- MP]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/651003.html

29/11/2005

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new Kadima party yesterday released the main points of its national agenda - preserving a Jewish majority in exchange for territorial concessions, keeping Jerusalem and large settlement blocs, and establishing a demilitarized Palestinian state devoid of terror.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who announced these points at the party's second faction meeting in the Knesset, presented the list she had drafted to her 17 MK colleagues.

"The Israeli nation has a national and historic right to the whole of Israel," the draft said. "However, in order to maintain a Jewish majority, we must give up part of the Land of Israel to maintain a Jewish and democratic state."

The draft also said that the national agenda will be the road map, and that the process to end the conflict and achieve two states for two nations will be carried out in stages: dismantling terror organizations, collecting firearms, implementing security reforms in the Palestinian Authority, and preventing incitement.

The Kadima platform also will propose a change in the government's system. While these changes are taking place, legislative proposals will be made to increase the MKs' commitment to enable the public's bypassing central committees and vote contractors.

Kadima MKs who had quit the Likud said this would bring an end to the tyranny of the Likud Central Committee. One possibility discussed was holding regional elections, which would end partisan wheeling and dealing.

Kadima chairman Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he did not rule out a future coalition partnership with any party or person. He denied reports that Kadima would not form a coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu if the Likud MK wins the party's leadership.

[JPN Commentary: We are all unfortunately familiar with the spectacular violence against civilians that stems directly from the Israeli Occupation and the Palestinian Intifada. Now the Israeli feminist organization Isha L'isha (Woman to Woman) reports that a sharp increase in the rate of deadly domestic violence against women within Israeli households must also be seen as an indirect result of the military conflict. Nearly half of the women killed in domestic violence in Israel during the past four years were murdered by soldiers and security guards who carried licensed weapons that they turned on family members and partners. A doubling of the rate of such murders during this period can be attributed, researchers speculate, to the increased availability of licensed guns.

But in analyzing the rising domestic murder rate, another potential factor that this report does not consider is that the prolonged violence entailed in militarily repressing the Palestinians may lead to escalating levels of social violence within Israel itself. The ongoing Occupation, from this new and disturbing perspective, is bad for everyone, but it is unexpectedly worse for some than for others.

In militarized societies, the full and equal membership and rights of women are consistently undermined and weakened. Such societies almost unfailingly construct women as vulnerable -- needing the protection of powerful, armed masculine (or masculinized) fighters, and invest a great deal of cultural labor in holding women in powerless positions. Implicitly sanctioned violence against women (tacitly upheld by the allocation of budgets and the attitudes of courts, police, media, etc.) is one of the social mechanisms perpetuating relative powerlessness. Widespread indifference to violence against women in Israel, both at the institutional and social-cultural levels, is clearly discernible in the fact that the distinct phenomenon of Israeli women's murders by Israeli security forces remains largely invisible. I accordingly view the gendered, asymmetrical results of the Occupation's within Israeli society as predictable and expected rather than unexpected. --LS and RM]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/650552.html

27/11/2005

Some 47 percent of women murdered by their partners or relatives in the past five years were killed by security guards, soldiers or police officers who carried licensed weapons, according to a report compiled by a team of Haifa University researchers studying the impact of the intifada on the lives of Jewish and Arab women.

The data compiled by researchers on behalf of "Isha le Isha," a Haifa feminist center, indicates that between October 2000 and April 2005, 38 women were murdered with the use of firearms, compared to 14 women in the four years preceding the intifada.

One of the factors the researchers ascribed to the increase in murders is the significant rise in the number of weapons issued to security guards, reserve soldiers and others linked to security services during the course of the intifada.

Some 18 of 38 murders committed within families during the intifada were carried out by security guards and reserve or regular soldiers, who used their personal weapons.

"Paradoxically, the existence of weapons, mainly in the hands of men, aimed at increasing the public's sense of security, increases the sense of lack of security in the private sphere," the report states.

In August, an inter-ministerial panel established by former Interior Minister Ophir Pines-Paz determined that too many weapons are being held in Israel, that there are too many armed guards, that a reevaluation of establishments that necessitate armed guards should be made. The panel was established in light of the high number of violent incidents, including the murder of women, involving security guards' weapons.

The panel found that regulation stipulating that firearms be held by the guards only during work hours is not upheld. It proposed reducing to a minimum the number of permits allowing guards to take their weapons home after work. The panel called for personal interviews for all security guards requesting the permit.

[JPN Commentary: That a Senator from New York would be blind to the impact the wall is having on the Palestinians is not terribly surprising. One has to believe the comment made by Hillary Rodham Clinton referred to in the article below was not made out of sheer ignorance--few are in a better position to be better-informed than she is. But it is refreshing to see a member of Congress being taken to task by Human Rights Watch for making such comments as she did.

HRW also takes this opportunity to give us a concise, but very full, rundown of the realities of the wall. It is a useful document to give to others who may be wondering why Israel is being criticized for what they understand to be a reasonable security measure. One hopes that HRW, Amnesty International and other major human rights groups will continue to press politicians who help weave a tissue of lies about the real purpose of the wall. As HRW points out herein: "Israel certainly claims that its construction of the wall is designed to counter terrorist attacks by building a barrier between Israelis and Palestinians, but that could have been accomplished by building it along the Green Line." But 80% of the wall goes well beyond the Green Line and into Palestinian territory on the West Bank. -- MP]

November 23, 2005

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/23/isrlpa12086_txt.htm

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
United States Senate
476 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510


Dear Senator Clinton,

We write in response to comments attributed to you in Ha’aretz (November 15, 2005) during your recent trip to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) regarding the construction there of a metal and concrete barrier (hereinafter referred to as a “wall”, in accordance with the terminology used by the International Court of Justice). The media has quoted you as expressing support for the wall because it “is against terrorists” and “not against the Palestinian people.” In light of your general standing as a supporter of international law and human rights, we find these comments disturbing and disappointing.

Israel certainly claims that its construction of the wall is designed to counter terrorist attacks by building a barrier between Israelis and Palestinians, but that could have been accomplished by building it along the Green Line. Instead, Israel has built the bulk of the wall (benignly referred to as a “security fence” by the Israeli government) well inside the OPT for the purpose of capturing Israeli settlements, and the Palestinian land and resources they control, on the “Israel side” of the wall.

Under the current route, only twenty percent of the wall’s route is inside Israel or along the Green Line, while 80 percent deviates from it, encompassing fifty-five Israeli settlements and other land in the OPT. These settlements contain the vast majority of more than 400,000 settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The wall succeeds in providing contiguity among the illegal settlements, their access roads, and Israel, while severing Palestinian cities, towns and villages from each other and from their land. This deep intrusion suggests that the function of the wall is less for security than for facilitating the eventual annexation of territory. B’Tselem, a leading human rights organization in Israel, unequivocally concluded in its September 2005 report, “Under the Guise of Security”, that

contrary to the state's claim that the Barrier's route is based solely on security reasons, the main consideration in setting the route in some locations was to include on the “Israeli” side of the Barrier areas which are slated for settlements expansion. In some cases, the expansion amounts to the establishment of new settlements.


The location of the wall outside Israel is also illegal under international law. In 2004, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s construction of the wall within the boundaries of the OPT contravenes international humanitarian law and is tantamount to an illegal annexation of the settlements on the “Israel side” of the wall. The court wrote that Israel should cease construction of the wall on Palestinian territory, dismantle those portions already constructed there, and pay reparations for damage caused. Unfortunately, Israel has failed to follow the court’s decision and continues its construction of the wall.

The court also reiterated its finding, shared by international legal commentators and every major human rights organization in the world, that the settlements themselves violate international humanitarian law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits Israel, as the occupying power in the OPT, from transferring members of its own population into the OPT; Article 55 of the Hague Regulations, a component of customary international law, also prohibits Israel from making permanent changes to the territory, such as establishing Jewish-only settlements, that do not benefit the local inhabitants. These laws were designed in recognition of the tremendous damage that colonization of occupied territories causes to the lives of the indigenous population.

Sadly, all evidence indicates that the wall is, in fact, very much “against” the Palestinian people. The humanitarian, economic, and social impact of the wall on Palestinian communities has been nothing short of disastrous, as extensively documented by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, relief organizations, and human rights groups, among others. In the case of many Palestinian villages, the wall separates students from their schools, families from their relatives and friends, workers from their jobs, and farmers from their agricultural land, greenhouses, olive and citrus trees, and even water. The wall has severely circumscribed the already limited access of a number of Palestinian cities and villages to their local hospitals, schools and social service facilities. Worst off are the Palestinians trapped on the “Israel side” of the wall, who must now obtain special permits from the Israeli government to reside in their own homes. By making movement and in some cases residence so difficult, the wall seems intended to encourage Palestinians to leave for other areas of the West Bank, or even other countries.

Even the Supreme Court of Israel has recognized that the Israeli government cannot ignore altogether these humanitarian impacts. In two recent cases, although the court continued to avoid ruling on the illegality of settlements, it ordered Israel to consider rerouting the wall or its route in certain areas where Palestinians in a number of villages demonstrated the destructive effect of the wall on their ability to earn a livelihood or have any semblance of normalcy in their lives. While these decisions may alleviate some of the damage caused to those particular villages that were able to file claims and receive a hearing, they fail to address the ongoing, overall harm caused by the wall to Palestinians in the OPT or the fundamental illegality of the wall’s construction on Palestinian territory.

In light of these considerations, we hope that you will reconsider your position in support of the wall, which ignores, and thereby undermines, the pronouncement of the world’s highest judicial authority on matters pertaining to international law. We hope you will reconsider the evidence indicating that the placement of the wall inside the OPT is designed to annex settlements to Israel, under the guise of security. And we hope that you will instead join us and other human rights organizations, both around the world and inside Israel and the OPT, in demanding that Israel respect international law and protect the human rights of the Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation.

Sincerely,

Sarah Leah Whitson
Executive Director, Middle East and North Africa Division