Palestine/Israel Apartheid News: 3/25/11: Israeli airstrikes across Gaza

Israeli warplanes carried out a series of airstrikes on targets in Gaza City late March 25, injuring one person, witnesses and medical personnel said. Drones fired four missiles at the Palestinian Authority intelligence headquarters and an Al-Qassam Brigades site. Warplanes carried out raids on an agricultural area east of Beit Hanoun and four artillery shells were fired around the Karni crossing. One young man was injured by shrapnel, medical sources said. He was taken to Ash-Shifa Hospital for treatment of light wounds. An Israeli military spokeswoman said the airstrikes targeted a “terror activity site” in northern Gaza. The attack came in response to the barrage of projectiles fired at Israel in the past week, she added. (Middle East Online, March 23)

Jordanian Intelligence Services Implicated in Abusisi Kidnapping

from Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place by Richard Silverstein

Yousef Abusisi, Dirar’s brother, tells me that after the latter left Gaza he traveled to Egypt, and then boarded a Jordanian flight to Kiev that had a 5 hour Amman stopover. During the layover, Jordanian intelligence agents took his passport and refused to allow him to board his ongoing flight to Ukraine. They held him overnight at the airport and then told him they’d lost the passport. He stayed at his father’s home in Amman for another six days until they “found” it. Before they did, he was required to check in at a Jordanian intelligence office every day. On one day, he was forced to remain there for ten hours. After “finding” his passport, he boarded another flight taking him to Ukraine.

On that flight he was accompanied by not one, not two, but FIVE Jordanian intelligence agents who seemed to want to be sure they delivered their “package” to Ukraine intact.

I think we can reasonably speculate on what happened while he was detained in Jordan and why. The Mossad contacted Jordanian security at some point after he left Gaza and informed them that Abusisi was either a Hamas terrorist on a mission or that he was at the least a high-security risk. Mossad asked Jordan to detain him. What we don’t know is what happened between the two security services while Dirar was in Jordan. Either they were trying to agree what to do with him (possibly detain him and ship him directly to Israel from Jordan); or planning his kidnapping once he arrived in Ukraine.

I’m guessing that given the strength of the Jordanian opposition and Muslim Brotherhood, that Jordan couldn’t afford to directly render Abisisi to the Mossad from Jordan. It would simply be too embarrassing and arouse too much anger for the intelligence services to be collaborating so closely with the Israelis. But that seven-day interval would allow Israeli agents in Ukraine to set up their safe house, arrange for the plane that would spirit him to Israel, and negotiate with Ukrainian authorities about what would happen to Dirar while there.

All of which means that now we have not one, but two foreign countries deeply implicated in the Abusisi extraordinary rendition. And one of the countries is Arab, which throws an entirely new wrinkle on the project. Before, somehow having just Israel and Ukraine implicated it was a bit more distant. But now, a Palestinian was betrayed by a fellow Arab nation. It gets a lot more complicated both for the Jordanians themselves and for their relations with Palestinians both inside and outside the Kingdom.

It indicates a high level of “cooperation” (aka “collusion”) between Mossad and Jordanian intelligence that certainly would be disturbing to many of the 70% of the Jordanian population of Palestinian origin. It also opens Jordan up to charges that it too, like Ukraine, violated international law by participating in the plot to kidnap him, even if they may not have known specifically what would happen to Dirar once he arrived there.

Yousef also told me that after Dirar left Jordan the latter was haunted and had a strong suspicion that something was being planned, though he didn’t know what.

Yousef also believes that the Palestinian embassy in Ukraine was at least partially implicated in the plot, after the fact. After Dirar disappeared, Veronika and Yousef went to the embassy seeking help. Instead of actively doing so, the embassy took the line of Ukrainian officials who’d told them to remain silent and not publicize the then-disappearance. The Palestinian embassy officials promised they would do everything in their power to find Dirar, but did nothing. This was the result of the Ukrainian effort as well. This Voice of America article in Russian indicates that both the Ukrainians and Palestinian officials there continued to maintain their studied indifference as both refused to comment to VOA after a press conference Veronika held today.

So now you actually have an official Palestinian government entity that at least tacitly collaborated with the kidnapping as well. It just gets seamier and seamier.

It seems to me the Jordanian intelligence services have a lot to answer for. For those who read Arabic, there is a report in the Jordanian opposition newspaper Assabeel about Dirar’s experience in Jordan. It isn’t fully accurate, but mostly so in the broad outline of events.

But one thing is important, no matter how many countries were involved and no matter how sleazy their involvement, this factor must not be used by Israel to lessen the scrutiny and opprobrium that accords to Israel’s secret police for their role as authors of this nasty business. Israel would love to point to all the other countries involved to say that they too agreed with their assessment that Abusisi was a terrorist or whatever the claim might be. That would somehow lessen the blame on Israel. But we mustn’t let the intelligence apparatus get away with laying blame elsewhere. Blame lies fully on Israel for this despicable act.

The other parties mentioned above behaved reprehensibly and violated their commitments under international law. But they are co-conspirators, not the authors of the crime. Israel takes sole credit for that.

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Israel’s Attorney General Signals Dissatisfaction With Shabak’s Abusisi Interrogation

from Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place by Richard Silverstein

Yossi Melman writes in today’s Haaretz that Attorney General Yehudah Weinstein appears dissatisfied with the results of the Shabak interrogation of Dirar Abusisi. The reporter notes that Weinstein has told the security services to procure further evidence on eight subjects. Given my experience following such security matters, something smells a little off about the government’s case. It’s unusual in the Israeli legal system for a security suspect to be held longer than 30 days without filing charges. They’ve had Abusisis for 34 days. After that amount of time they still have eight areas in which the top government lawyer says he needs better evidence to prosecute. What’s wrong with this picture? The attorney general has also told Shabak that there is a wide gap between the claims levelled against the kidnapped Gaza engineer and the evidence he’s seen. This does not sound like a happy prosecutor.

We’re talking about some of the best goons in the business here, in the Shabak. They might be able to extract blood from a turnip or an Arab. Yet either Dirar isn’t breaking as they anticipated or they simply have nothing against him and can’t build a credible case with what they’ve got.

To indicate just how sensitive the Shabak is to the publicity surrounding this case (and how important it is for us to do what we’re doing), Melman indicates Abusisi was introduced to the courtroom via a side entrance so the scores of journalists and photographers mingling about could not photograph him.

The Haaretz reporter also notes that for the first time the Ukrainian intelligence services have invited Veronika Abusisi to speak with them about her husband’s kidnapping. Until now, they’ve been extremely reluctant to offer her any help whatsoever. This would indicate that Ukraine is feeling a certain amount of pressure over the incident.

I note that Ukraine is a member of the Council of Europe and as such is bound by the following resolution which attacked the underlying premises of the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program. If you change “United States of America” to “Israel” and “some Council of Europe member states” to “Ukraine,” then Abusisi’s predicament is just as relevant to this document:

The Assembly condemns the systematic exclusion of all forms of judicial protection and regrets that, by depriving hundreds of suspects of their basic rights, including the right to a fair trial, the United States has done a disservice to the cause of justice and has tarnished its own hard-won reputation as a beacon of the defence of civil liberties and human rights.

Some Council of Europe member states have knowingly colluded with the United States to carry out such unlawful operations; others have tolerated them or simply turned a blind eye. They have also gone to great lengths to ensure that such operations remained secret and protected from effective national or international scrutiny.

This collusion with the United States of America by some Council of Europe member states has taken several different forms. Having carried out a legal and factual analysis on a range of cases of alleged secret detentions and unlawful transfers, the Assembly has identified instances in which Council of Europe member states have acted in one or several of the following ways, wilfully or at least recklessly in violation of their international human rights obligations…

Secretly detaining a person on European territory for an indefinite period of time, whilst denying that person’s basic human rights and failing to ensure procedural legal guarantees such as habeas corpus;

Capturing and handing a person over to the United States whilst knowing that such a person would be unlawfully transferred into a US-administered detention facility;

Permitting the unlawful transportation of detainees on civilian aircraft carrying out rendition operations, travelling through European airspace or across European territory;

…The Assembly highlights the widespread breach of the positive obligation of all Council of Europe member states to investigate such allegations in a full and thorough manner.

The Assembly calls upon the member states of the Council of Europe to:

Ensure that unlawful inter-state transfers of detainees will not be permitted and take effective measures to prevent renditions and rendition flights through member states’ territory and airspace;

Ensure that no one is arbitrarily detained, secretly or otherwise, on a member state’s territory or any territory within the member states’ effective control;

…Ensure that all victims of rendition or secret detention have access to an effective remedy and obtain prompt and adequate reparation, including restitution, rehabilitation and fair and adequate financial compensation.

Is anyone home there, Ukraine? You expect to host the Euro Cup next year and you can’t even abide by the basic human rights provisions of the Council of Europe. As I wrote earlier, the nation is not yet ready for the prime time of European democracy. Everything appears for sale there including justice. I wonder what’s the price for a Gaza civil engineer? Maybe a free trade agreement? A few advanced Elbit weapons systems?

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Criticism of Criticism of Criticism of Criticism

from Jews sans frontieres by Gabriel

[ I have a few comments on this at https://anewworldsinbirth.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/lessons-from-the-murder-of-itamar-settlers/

]

Ok, so Dimi Reider issued a ridiculous call for all leftists to prove their “credibility” by condemning the killing in Itamar. Even though I am of course appalled by the slaughter of babies, I am not going to condemn anything here, and I am certainly not going to shed a tear for the death of Mr. and Mrs. Fogel. Not because I, pace Reider, doubt or ignore their humanity, but because they have dedicated their very human lives to destroying others who have done them no harm. My world has lost little with their passing.(*)

Nor should I have anything to prove to Reider. As he accuses, I plead guilty: I do have a double standard for which I won’t apologize. I have one standard for the systemic, meditated, clinical and profitable violence of the oppressor, and a different one for outbursts of anger and hatred coming from those who have been systematically stepped upon, let alone the very different matter of organized armed liberation, which I justify and support. For more in that vein, Max Ajl wrote a beautiful and eloquent rebuttal of Reider that ought to be required reading in schools.

Then another writer from that same 972 magazine wrote a rebuttal. Yossi Gurvitz, with whom I sparred before, among other good points, correctly argued that Reider has internalized right-wing rhetoric. He also had an unpleasant slip of the pen, describing the settlers’ rapid instrumentlization of the deaths at Itamar as “going native.” He was justly taken to task by Ahmed Moor on Mondoweiss, and this is where it is getting doubly annoying, because Moor’s criticism fast developed into little more than a gratuitous swipe at Gurvitz’ alleged Jewish worldview.

Here is Gurvitz’s offending line:

I never even considered the idea of grabbing the nearest Palestinian, burning his property, or beating him up. And most Israelis were just like me. We took the attacks on the chin, gritted our teeth, and kept ourselves from whining. The settlers, on the other hands, have gone native. It used to be Palestinians who brandished bloodied Israeli bodies; now it’s the settlers who do so.

There should be no doubt that associating behavior the author considers repulsive with “the natives” is a racist commonplace of European colonial discourse. There is doubt however about the level of the conscious thought behind the offense, as Moor graciously concedes being “confident he [Gurvitz] didn’t intend to employ the language he did in the way that he did.” That is a charitable, and I would say a fair reading. But it is downhill from here on. Here is how Moor interprets the meaning of Gurvitz’s slip:

Here, Gurvitz reveals a deeply embedded Jewish-centrism that many of our friends on the left share. The drive to end the occupation and Israeli apartheid stems not from universal human values, but from the drive for the Tikkun Olamization of the Jewish people. Everything else is secondary.

This is simply made up. Nowhere in this passage does Gurvitz even mention anything Jewish, or indeed provide any rational at all for “ending the occupation,” Jewish or otherwise. Nowhere does he mention Tikkun Olam or even raise any of the issues Moor mentions. Gurvitz contrasts an Israeli attitude that one could describe perhaps as a “stiff upper lip” (if there is any allusion here, one that comes to mind perhaps is the popular representation of British calm under the Blitz) with a kind of histrionic politics that is allegedly shared by Palestinians and settlers alike. Is this racist? You bet. But the contrast between the rational, self-disciplined European and the emotional, childish, impulsive native is a commonplace of Western colonialism. One can find it in representations of native Americans, or Africans, of black slaves in the US, and of course, of Arabs in the Middle East. The racism of Gurvitz’s language, at least to the extent that a textual reading can reveal, does not come from a “Jewish-centric” worldview, a worldview Moor ascribes to Gurvitz based on the mere fact that Gurvitz is in fact Jewish. It comes from Gurvitz’s western cultural references.

Furthermore, the expression “going native,” which Gurvitz uses, is a familiar English idiom that doesn’t even have an easy counterpart in Hebrew (Although the ideas are certainly familiar in Israeli culture). Here is the definition of the idiom from “Post Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts:”

The term [going native] indicates the colonizers’ fear of contamination by absorption into native life and customs. The construction of native cultures as either primitive or degenerate in a binary discourse of colonizer/ colonized led, especially at the turn of the century, to a widespread fear of ‘going native’ amongst the colonizers in many colonial societies.

What does that have to do with “Tikkun Olam” or Jewish exceptionalism? Nothing. Gurvitz uses an English idiom to articulate an idea that is familiar to English speakers precisely because of the colonial history of the term which allows him to put Israeli Jews inside a larger implied context of whiteness. If there is an argument about Jews in there, it precisely the opposite of what Moor thinks, it is that the Jews are the same as other (Europeans).

Additionally, it is worth noting how much Moor’s distinction between “universal values” and whatever he imagines as Jewish values is itself a deep internalization of the same colonial discourse about the natives that traverses Gurvitz’s text. It is primarily in the name of “universal values” that Europeans argued that slavery was “civilizing” Africans, that killing native-Americans was an effective way to save their souls, and recently that Iraq ought to be “liberated” so that it is made to conform to the “universal” political norms of US-European kleptocracies. Here is George Bush on universal values:

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages. (The National Security Strategy of the United States of America)

And here is, taken from the same post-colonial dictionary, the entry on “universalism:” a bit simplistic, but given how well it fits the previous paragraph, good enough for my purpose here.

The assumption that there are irreducible features of human life and experience that exist beyond the constitutive effects of local cultural conditions. Universalism offers a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values and expectations of a dominant culture are held to be true for all humanity. For this reason, it is a crucial feature of imperial hegemony, because its assumption (or assertion) of a common humanity – its failure to acknowledge or value cultural difference – underlies the promulgation of imperial discourse for the ‘advancement’ or ‘improvement’ of the colonized, goals that thus mask the extensive and multifaceted exploitation of the colony. (my emphasis)

So yes. The drive to end the occupation and apartheid does not stem from any universal value, because no values exist outside of concrete traditions of thinking about values. It does stem, for some, from certain values that some of us would like to be universally shared. I, for once, would like to impose on everyone my commitment to equality, because I believe that inequality is harmful. When we put it like that, however, that is, when we own the power relations we play when we talk about values, rather than naturalize the superiority of our perceptions under the false claim of universality, we become accountable for what we seek to impose on others. Imposing some ideas, especially about what is ethically acceptable or not, on others, is unavoidable in any context of shared existence. Being disingenuous about it is not. If Moor doesn’t like the way some Jews articulate their reasons to opposing Israeli apartheid, he has every right to his feelings. But if he wants to impose on them his notion of the “correct” reason to oppose apartheid he needs at least to provide a justification other than pretending that his own preferences are “universal” whereas theirs are merely “Jewish.”

More importantly, before getting into what Jewish values offend Moor and why, there is also the issue of the value of reading accurately, and criticising authors for what they wrote, rather than for what can be assumed about their state of mind on the basis of their religion or nationality. I don’t know if this is a Jewish value or not, but I would certainly recommend it to Moor, along with spending less time learning about “Jewish-centrism” from the “native informants” at Mondoweiss.

Here is, for reference, a definition of the “native informant”:

A native informant is someone from a particular race or place who is seen as an expert on it simply by virtue of belonging to it. (Abagond)

* As an aside, this elaborate discussion is taking place as if it is already known that the perpetrators were Palestinians. Let me note that we do not in fact now that. Therefore, I think it is inappropriate to “defend” the alleged perpatrators as much as it is inappropriate to condemn them, but with that in mind, it is fair to address the general questions raised.