Barak Ravid - Israel joins UN list of states limiting human rights organizations

A senior UN official in Geneva last week listed Israel among the countries that she says are restricting the activities of human rights groups.

The statement, issued on Wednesday by UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay, lists Israel along with countries such as Belarus, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Ethiopia and Venezuela.

Israel was named due to the bill approved by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation six months ago to restrict funding by foreign governments to nonprofit organizations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported the bill throughout most of its formulation. However, he ordered it frozen after Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein said such a law would be struck down by the High Court of Justice.

Although the law never reached the Knesset, Pillay said in her statement: "In Israel, the recently adopted Foreign Funding Law could have a major impact on human rights organizations, subjecting them to rigorous reporting requirements, forcing them to declare foreign financial support in all public communications, and threatening heavy penalties for non-compliance."

Israel is the only democratic country listed in Pillay's statement. The others are all dictatorships or developing countries. Among them is Ethiopia, where human rights groups have been shut down by a law prohibiting foreign funding in excess of 10 percent of a group's budget. She also lists Cambodia, where a law is being promoted that would shutter NGOs whose work is found to "harm national unity, culture, customs and traditions of the Cambodian national society." In Belarus, which is ruled by the dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a law passed in October 2011 criminalizes the acceptance of foreign grants that are outlawed by the legislature.

Read More:

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-joins-un-list-of-states-limiting-human-rights-organizations-1.427184

Ex-Israeli Spymaster: Leaders 'Messianic'

The former head of Israel's Shin Bet security agency has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak of having "messianic feelings" behind their threats to launch a pre-emptive war on Iran and they should not be trusted.

Yuval Diskin and "Messianic" Netanyahu upon Diskin completing his term as head of the Israeli spy agency Shin Bet in May, 2011. "I don't have faith in the current leadership of Israel to lead us to an event of this magnitude, of war with Iran," Yuval Diskin said at a public meeting Friday, video of which was posted on the Internet the today and quickly became the lead news item in Israel.

"I do not believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on Messianic feelings," he continued. "I have seen them up close. They are not messiahs, these two, and they are not the people that I personally trust to lead Israel into an event."

Diskin said, "Over the past 10-15 years Israel has become more and more racist. All of the studies point to this. This is racism toward Arabs and toward foreigners, and we are also becoming a more belligerent society."

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/28

Ralph Nader - The World’s Largest Open-Air Gulag

Have you heard much lately about the 1.5 million Palestinians illegally imprisoned by the Israeli government in the world’s largest open-air Gulag? Their dire living conditions, worsened by a selective Israeli siege limiting the importation of necessities of life – medical items, food, water, building materials, and fuel to list a few – has resulted in an 80 percent unemployment rate and widespread suffering from unlawful punishment, arbitrary arrests and imprisonment in Israeli jails.

The horrific conditions were a result of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in late 2008, ignited by Israel’s breaking of a truce with Gaza on November 4. Fourteen hundred people died, nearly three hundred of them children, and thousands were injured. The terror bombing of the Gazan population smashed into homes, hospitals, schools, ambulances, mosques, subsistence farms, UN facilities, and even the American International School. Israeli bombers destroyed over 30 members of one extended family in their home. That toll alone was three times the amount of Israeli fatalities, which included friendly fire.

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HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2012/04/20/THE-WORLDS-LARGEST-OPEN-AIR-GULAG/

Paul Pillar - Netanyahu’s ‘King David’ Complex

Israeli hardliners and American neocons say U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same, meaning that if Israel bombs Iran, the United States should join in. But other observers say Washington must create some distance from Israel’s messianic Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

We have a comparative lull at the moment in what has been saturation attention to Iran and its nuclear program. The lull comes after the concentrated warmongering rhetoric associated with the recent visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the AIPAC conference in Washington, and before the opening in mid-April of the only channel offering a way out of the impasse associated with the Iranian nuclear issue: direct negotiations between Iran and the powers known as the P5+1.

It is a good time to reflect on how much the handling of this issue underscores the gulf between Israeli policies and U.S. interests. The gulf exists for two reasons. One is that the Netanyahu government’s policies reflect only a rightist slice of the Israeli political spectrum, with which many Israelis disagree and which is contrary to broader and longer-term interests of Israel itself.

Read More:

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/02/netanyahus-king-david-complex/

Winslow Myers - From Israel, a Declaration of Interdependence

The fond foolishness—or was it?—of the Israeli graphic designer’s recent Youtube video declaring his love for the Iranian people and his pledge not to bomb Iran brought back the almost forgotten Christmas moment in the trenches of World War I, when soldiers on both the French and German sides put down their weapons and sang “Silent Night” together. Peace threatened to break out all up and down the lines until those pitiless realists on both sides, the generals, forced their minions to restart the interminable slaughter.

The Israeli’s video also brought back the memory of a powerful event thousands of us attended in 1984. To celebrate the achievements of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, my organization, Beyond War, had set up a live televised satellite “spacebridge” between Moscow and San Francisco. Large audiences in both places listened to the pleas of the two leaders of the IPPNW, Leonid Brezhnev’s personal physician Evgeny Chazov, and the distinguished Boston cardiologist Bernard Lown, for reconciliation between the Soviet and American nations.  Chazov played a recording of a healthily pulsating heart to underscore the reality that human hearts beat identically everywhere. The Moscow Boy’s Choir and the San Francisco Boy’s Choir sang—together.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/28-1

Lester Brown - How Much Will It Cost To Save Our Economy’s Foundation?

During the past two summers, Pakistan was hit with catastrophic floods. The record flooding in the late summer of 2010 was the most devastating natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. The media coverage reported torrential rains as the cause, but there is much more to the story. When Pakistan was created in 1947, some 30 percent of the landscape was covered by forests. Now it is 4 percent. Pakistan’s livestock herd outnumbers that of the United States. With little forest still standing and the countryside grazed bare, there was scant vegetation to retain the rainfall.

Pakistan, with 185 million people squeezed into an area only slightly larger than Texas, is an ecological basket case. If it cannot restore its forests and grazing lands, it will only suffer more “natural” disasters in the future. Pakistan’s experience demonstrates all too vividly why restoring the earth is an integral part of Earth Policy Institute’s Plan B to save civilization. Restoring the earth will take an enormous international effort, one far more demanding than the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe and Japan after World War II. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed before environmental deterioration translates into economic decline, just as it did for the Sumerians, the Mayans, and many other early civilizations whose archeological sites we study today.

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http://countercurrents.org/brown240312.htm

PRESS RELEASE: EHT Calls for U.S. to put warning labels on cell phones

The Environmental Health Trust (EHT) lauds Israeli Knesset overwhelming passage of a proposed law requiring health-hazard warning labels on cell phones and calls on the U.S. to follow suit. 

The Israeli labels will read, “Warning - the Health Ministry cautions that heavy use and carrying the device next to the body may increase the risk of cancer, especially among children.” Passed on February 29, the proposal will undergo further legislative review and makes it a criminal offense to advertise cell phones for children. A similar rule was issued in Turkey, following the EHT conference in Istanbul in May 2011.

Israeli Member of Parliament Dov Khenin said, "The bill that passed today is a breakthrough in expanding public awareness of the possible risks in using cellular phones."

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http://environmentalhealthtrust.org/content/press-release-eht-calls-us-put-warning-labels-cell-phones

Israeli Settlers Stealing Essential Water from Palestinians, UN Reports

The UN's Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has released a report showing that Israeli settlers in the West bank have taken over dozens of natural springs from Palestinians there, preventing access to essential water sources

The report shows that Palestinians are kept from accessing the springs by acts of "intimidation, threats and violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers".

Settlers Taking Over Palestinian Springs: UN report (Agence France-Presse):

The report said an OCHA survey carried out in 2011 identified a total of 56 springs that were under total or partial control of Israeli settlers, most in the part of the West Bank known as Area C, which is under full Israeli civil and military control.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/19-6

Bill Mullen - Eyewitness To Israel's Ethnic Cleansing

AT 4:45 a.m. on the morning of August 2, 2009, the family of Miraym Al-Ghawi was awakened by pounding on the door of their home in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. A small bomb was detonated, throwing open the door. Through it walked masked and armed Israeli commandoes, who dragged the Al-Ghawis, including the six Al-Ghawi children, into the night.

They collected the family's belongings in trucks and dumped them outside the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, where they were ransacked. The Al-Ghawi's youngest child, age 4, stood and watched as commandoes set fire to her bed and her playthings. The daughter still cannot sleep without her mother. Medical experts have diagnosed her ailment as "settler trauma."

Miraym Al-Ghawi told us this story as we visited Palestine as part of a delegation sponsored by the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). Five U.S. professors from the delegation, myself included, talked with the Al-Ghawis in Sheikh Jarrah, once one of the liveliest Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

Read More:

http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/24/israels-ethnic-cleansing

Israel’s High Court exposes Israeli apartheid regime

The following is a Jan. 12  press release from the Badil Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights on an Israeli High Court decision the previous day upholding one of the most blatant examples of Israel’s racist apartheid system. The High Court is the equivalent of the Supreme Court in the U.S. system.

On 11th January 2012, Israel’s High Court rejected a legal challenge, brought by Adalah, ACRI and other Israeli human rights organizations, to one of the most obvious pieces of Israeli apartheid legislation: the 2003 Temporary Amendment to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. This law suspends the possibility of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jerusalem ID-holders gaining permission, through family reunification, to legally live in Israel or occupied East Jerusalem with their spouses from the occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) or from purported “enemy states.” This decision confirms the Court’s earlier ruling on the issue, in May 2006, and entrenches this discriminatory law within the apartheid legislation of Israel, whose public institutions uphold the regime.

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http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/israels-high-court-exposes-1.html