Azzum Atme checkpoint border crossing from the West Bank into Israel, where hundreds of Palestinian labourers cross into Israel each day using Israeli buses. These labourers already face long delays at the checkpoint and if they are banned from Israeli buses their trips will take even longer. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, May 24 2015 (IPS)

A  decision by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to segregate buses in the occupied West Bank has backfired after causing an uproar in Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, and political damage on the international stage.

This came as Israel faces mounting international criticism over its land expropriation and settlement building in the West Bank, and other forms of discrimination levelled against Palestinians.

Israel’s new extreme right-wing government is also being attacked on the domestic front with liberal Israelis, and Israeli NGOs involved in human rights, accusing the government of damaging Israel’s image and values.“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action” – Prof Samir Awad, political scientist at Birzeit University

Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been waging a campaign to prohibit Palestinians, particularly labourers who work in Israel, from using their buses in the occupied West Bank for over a year, saying that they represented a security threat, refused to give up their seats for Israelis and expressed sexual interest in Israeli women.

Last week, approval was given for buses to be segregated but after the backlash the plan was quickly scrapped.

However, Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon quickly denied that segregation or racism had anything to do with the issue and that the decision to ban Palestinians from Israeli buses had only been based on “security” needs.

Neither has Ya’alon given up on the plan. He intends to instruct the IDF to come up with a new plan to cover all 13 crossing points from the West Bank into Israel.

This development came simultaneously as European Union foreign policy head Federica Mogherini paid a 24-hour visit May 20-21 to Jerusalem and Ramallah in an effort to push the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward, stating that Europe wanted to play a more prominent role in the process.

But behind Mogherini’s visit was growing approval within the European Union for more pressure to be exerted on Israel to stop expropriating land from the Palestinians to build more illegal Israeli settlements and enlarge current ones.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry was on the defensive following its perception of bias from the European Union.

“The Israeli government will not be pressured by the European Union into making any concessions with the Palestinians in regards to the peace process,” said a spokesman from Israel’s Foreign Ministry – who insisted on remaining anonymous due to “ongoing problems at the ministry”.

“If the EU exerts one-sided pressure on Israel, without putting any pressure on the Palestinians, the situation will backfire because it will allow the Palestinians to avoid direct negotiations with us at the negotiating table,” the spokesman told IPS.

“Any future peace negotiations will have to involve face to face talks between the Palestinians and us. We will accept nothing less.”

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, quoting a mediaeval biblical scholar, instructed all Israeli diplomats not to apologise for Israel’s occupation, stating that “all of the land (meaning East Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories) belonged to Israel.

As Israel finds itself painted into a corner politically, Palestinian and Israeli analysts have been debating whether there would be any European pressure on Israel and whether that pressure would have any effect.

Political scientist Prof Samir Awad from Birzeit University, near Ramallah, believes that the European Union will be able to successfully pressure the Israeli government, despite its extremism.

“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action,” Awad told IPS.

“EU pressure on Israel will also be buoyed by the fact that a number of EU countries have officially recognised a Palestinian state while others have recognised a state in principle and are critical of Israel’s continued occupation and land expropriation in the West Bank,” added Awad.

However, political analyst Benedetta Berti, a research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, is not convinced that the European Union will succeed in pushing Israel to any negotiating table.

“If we look at their record so far there has been a lot of rhetoric but not much actual action. So far, 16 out of the 28 EU ministers have told Mogherini to go ahead with labelling settlement goods exported to Europe,” Berti told IPS.

“It hasn’t happened yet as they have to get 20 of the 28 EU ministers on board for that and due to the divisions in the EU over Israel I’m not sure that it will happen in the near future,” explained Berti.

Meanwhile, an Israeli rights group has accused the Israeli authorities of being indifferent to attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers and security forces.

“Most cases of violent crimes against Palestinians not only go unpunished – but often are completely ignored by the authorities. Even when criminal investigations against soldiers accused of such offences are opened, they almost always fail,” said Yesh Din, a volunteer organisation working to defend the human rights of Palestinian civilians under Israeli occupation.

The groups said that approximately 94 percent of criminal investigations launched by the IDF against soldiers suspected of criminal violent activity against Palestinians, and their property, are closed without any indictments. In the rare cases that indictments are served, conviction leads to very light sentencing.

“Moreover, Palestinians who attempt to file complaints about crimes committed against them face staggering obstacles in their way. The complete absence of military police stations open to the Palestinian public in the West Bank, for example, makes it literally impossible for Palestinians to file complaints directly with the military police,” stated Yesh Din.

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

In the following months, reports of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces multiplied. The most serious was an allegation that the Syrian army had used sarin gas on Mar. 19, 2013 at Khan al Assal, north of Aleppo, and in a suburb of Damascus against its opponents. This was followed by two more allegations of small attacks in April.

Prem Shankar Jha

Seymour Hersh has reported that in May 2013, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan visited Obama, accompanied by his intelligence chief, and pressed him to live up to his “red line” commitment to punish Syria if it used chemical weapons.

But by then U.S. intelligence knew, and had conveyed to Barack Obama,  that it was Turkey’s secret service, MIT, that had been working with the Nusra front to set up facilities to  manufacture sarin, and had obtained two kilograms of the deadly gas for it from Eastern Europe, with funds provided by Qatar. Obama therefore remained unmoved.

Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed.

On May 13, 2013, Republican Senator John McCain paid a surprise visit to Idlib on the Syria-Turkey border to meet whom he believed were moderate leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Photos and videos posted on the web after the visit and resurrected after the rise of the Islamic States (IS) showed that two of the five leaders whom he actually met were Mohammed Nour, the spokesman of ‘Northern Storm’ an offshoot of the brutal Jabhat Al Nusra, and Ammar al Dadhiki, aka Abu Ibrahim, a key member of the organisation. The third was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, known as the ‘Caliph of the Islamic State’.“Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed”

The visit had been organised by Salim Idris, self-styled Brigadier General of the FSA, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a U.S. not-for-profit organisation that is a passionate advocate for arming the ‘moderate’ FSA.

McCain probably did not know whom he was meeting , but the same could not be said of Idris and SETF, because when McCain met them, Nusra was already on the banned list  and Baghdadi was on the U.S. State Department’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, with a reward of 10 million dollars on his head. What is more, by then he had been the Emir of IS for the previous six weeks.

As for the SETF, investigations of its connections by journalists after the McCain videos went viral on the internet showed a deep connection to AIPAC.  Until these exposure made it ‘correct’ its web page, one of its email addresses was “syriantaskforce.torahacademybr.org”.

The “torahacademybr.org” URL belongs to the Torah Academy of Boca Raton, Florida, whose academic goals notably include “inspiring a love and commitment to Eretz Yisroel [Land of Israel] .” SETF’s director was also closely associated with AIPC’s think tank, the Washington Institute of Near East Policy (WINEP).

When Obama ‘postponed’ the attack on Syria on the grounds that he had to obtain the approval of Congress first, Israel’s response was blind fury.

Obama had informed Netanyahu of his decision on Aug. 30, four hours before he referred it to Congress and bound him to secrecy. But Netanyahu’s housing minister, Uri Ariel, gave full vent to it the next morning in a radio interview, saying: “You don’t have to wait until tens of thousands more children die before intervening in Syria.”

Ariel went on to say; “When you throw gas at the population, it means you know you’re going to murder thousands of women, children indiscriminately. [Syrian President Bashar Assad] is a murderous coward. Take him out.”

Netanyahu reprimanded Ariel because he did not want Israel to be seen to be pushing the United States into war, but by then there was no room left for doubt that this is exactly what he and his government had been trying to do.

For, on Aug. 27, alongside U.S. foreign minister John Kerry’s denunciation of the Ghouta sarin gas attack, the right-wing daily, Tims of Israel, had published three stories quoting defence officials, titled ‘Israeli intelligence seen as central to US case against Syria’; ‘IDF intercepted Syrian regime chatter on chemical attack’; and, significantly, ‘For Israel US response on Syria may be a harbinger for Iran’.

The hard “information” that had tilted the balance was contained in the second story: a retired Mossad agent who refused to be named, told another German magazine, Focus, that a squad specialising in wire-tapping within the IDF’s elite ‘8200 intelliogence unit’ had intercepted a conversation between high-ranking officials discussing the sue of chemical agents at the time of the attack.

The similarity of method between this and the earlier leak to Der Spiegel makes it likely that it too was part of an Israeli disinformation campaign designed to trigger a fatal assault on Assad.

Obama gave his first hint that he intended to reverse the [George W.] Bush doctrine while talking to reporters on a tour of Asia in April 2014: “Why is it,” he observed, “that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve gone through a decade of war at enormous cost to our troops and our budget?”

He unveiled the change in a graduation day speech at West Point on May 28, 2014. “Here’s my bottom line”, he said. ”America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.

“But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

“And because the costs associated with military action are so high, you should expect every civilian leader – and especially your Commander-in-Chief – to be clear about how that awesome power should be used.”

Obama’s choice of venue was not accidental, because it was here that Bush had announced the United States’ first strike security doctrine 12 years earlier.

Obama’s repudiation of the Bush doctrine sent a ripple of shock running through the U.S. political establishment. Republicans denounced him for revealing America’s weakness and emboldening its enemies. But a far more virulent denunciation came from Hilary Clinton, the front runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016.

“Great nations need strong organising principles”, she said in an interview with The Atlantic, “’Don’t do stupid stuff’ (Obama’s favourite phrase) is not an organising principle.”

Netanyahu got the message: he may have lost the U.S. president, but Israel’s, more specifically the Israeli right’s, constituency in the United States remained undented. No matter which party came to power in the next election, he could continue his tirade against Iran and be guaranteed a sympathetic hearing.

Since then he has barely bothered to hide his contempt for Obama and spared no effort to turn him, prematurely, into a lame duck President.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* The first part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

Christian youth watch an Israeli military exercise ahead of joining the Israeli army. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

By Pierre Klochendler
QATSRIN, Occupied Golan Heights, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

In the municipal sports hall with an army officer to his side, Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox Arab priest in full regalia, briefs Arab Christian twelfth-graders on the merits of serving in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). “It’s only natural that the country which protects us deserves that we contribute to its defence,” he tells them.

A Christian teenager calls on the officer to reckon on the Christian conscripts’ cultural needs. The officer’s proclamation is unassuming: “The IDF is a melting pot.”

One in five Israelis is an Arab of Palestinian descent. Muslims constitute the overwhelming majority of this sizeable minority.

The 130,000-strong Arab Christian community is a tiny minority within the minority. They’re the original Christians of the Holy Land, the living stones on which the bi-millennial faith was built.“Jews call us ‘Arabs’. For Muslims, we’re ‘Christians,’ not Arabs. We’re Israeli Christians, nothing short of that.”

Encouraged by Nadaf to take advantage of Sunday rest, some 250 youth have preferred to show up at an event organised by the IDF Social Branch than to attend mass.

Entitled ‘In the fighters’ footsteps’, the week-long event brings twelfth-graders from around the country to the nearby Ahmadiyah training ground where, in order to boost their motivation before conscription, military prowess is demonstrated in front of them with the pyrotechnics of live ammunition exercises.

“Deep in the heart a Jewish soul…” the lyrics of the HaTiqva national anthem might have sounded awkwardly discordant to Arab Christians’ ears, yet these boy and girls throw in their lot wholeheartedly in this country.

Anan Nitanes is determined to join those who must join the army. “Israel gives me a lot. So I must give her back,” he tells IPS.

Father Nadaf’s endeavour is beginning to bear fruit – according to the IDF, some 100 Arab Christians are currently serving in the army, up from 35 in 2012, whilst an additional 500 are performing civil service, up from 200 during the same period.

Last year, as he was officiating in the Church of the Annunciation, Nadaf was called up by Bishara Shlayan, a boat captain who resides in Nazareth – Israel’s largest Arab city once dominated by Christian churches, now two-third Muslim.

Shlayan required the priest’s religious imprimatur to his local Forum for the Enlistment of Christian Youth.

Originated in his difficulty to get his son Amir into the army, the initiative exposes conflicting identity dilemmas.

“Jews call us ‘Arabs’. For Muslims, we’re ‘Christians,’ not Arabs. We’re Israeli Christians, nothing short of that,” Shlayan tells IPS.

“We’re Palestinian Christians, an integral part of the Palestinian people,” retorts Azmi Hakim, chairman of the Greek Orthodox community in this Galilee town. “No schizophrenia here.”

Shlayan’s project has also thrown Israel’s Arab Christians into the national “one people, one draft” debate over sharing the national burden more equitably.

Israel is a Jewish state in the sense that its defence is above all the duty of its six million Jewish citizens. Military service is compulsory for 18-year-olds – or should be.

In effect, some 40 percent potential draftees – mostly ultra-orthodox Jews, roughly 12 percent of age-draft youth – are traditionally exempt from it.

The other segment of the population exempt from the draft is the Arab citizens of Palestinian descent. They’re branded by fellow Jewish citizens a “fifth column” suspected of “double allegiance”.

Most Muslims don’t serve in the army. Exceptions to the sweeping exemption, Bedouin, who are Muslim, enlist in the army on a voluntary basis; for Druze, an offshoot of Islam, military service is mandatory.

Shlayan’s forum has now expanded into the Sons of the Alliance Christian party which preaches greater loyalty to the State of Israel.

“Arab citizens enjoy security, but many in their heart dream of Israel’s destruction. Whatever happens to the Jews will happen to us as well,” Shlayan charges.

Hakim reproves Shlayan’s accusation: “This army occupies Palestine. My state fights against my people. This forum for enlisting Christians is a Zionist conspiracy to separate the Christians from the rest of the Palestinians.”

“Besides, ultra-orthodox Jews don’t serve and yet their rights are respected,” Hakim protests.

Arab citizens are made to feel second-class citizens. An endemic dearth of building permits affects their towns and villages. Higher unemployment, inferior municipal services, unequal allocation of resources in education and housing are their common lot.

Banned from the Church of the Annunciation for promoting the draft, Nadaf was embraced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the sports hall, it is Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon who has come to pledge his support.

“I salute your willingness to integrate into the society,” Danon tells the assembly of age-draft Christians.

“We’re citizens who aspire to become full citizens,” Nadaf tells Danon.

Inducements in the form of cheaper loans, job opportunities, government allowances and tax breaks often lure non-Jewish military service aspirants.

“The government plans to advance land re-zoning plans and allocations of plots for Christian ex-servicemen and women,” Danon promises. “The State of Israel is opening its doors to you. We want you ‘equal amongst equals’.”

A question flies from the hall. “When will housing projects break ground?” asks a teenager determined to give the government’s preacher a hard time.

“Our objective isn’t to build houses but to issue tenders for the allocation of plots for those who served in the army,” cautions Danon. “You mustn’t join because you may get a plot of land. Don’t be afraid. Be strong. Do the right thing.”

Samir Jozen encourages his daughter Jennifer to join the army next summer. “So what if we don’t get 100 percent of our rights. What we have, Syria’s or Egypt’s Christians don’t have,” is his declaration of faith.

For now, Arab Christian youth seem to see in the military service a communion of sort with Israel, a conversion from being Arab to being Israeli, a rite of passage from being rejected to hoping to be accepted, and the core of a stronger Christian identity in a precarious area.