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By Kaya Purchase,Red Pepper.
September 29, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/liverpool-mobilises-against-the-aoc-europe-arms-fair/
After Two Decades Of War In Afghanistan, There Is No Option But To Protest A Conference For Companies Complicit In Human Rights Violations.
A national protest against an upcoming arms fair took place in Liverpool on 11 September with over 3,000 people in attendance. Jeremy Corbyn and Maxine Peake were among those who showed support. In his speech to the gathered crowd of protestors Corbyn urged, ‘let’s turn the page and learn the lessons from the past. Let humanity prevail.’
AOC Europe, the Association of Old Crows’ electronic warfare conference, is set to be hosted by the city’s ACC Exhibition Centre between 11 and 13 October. For an event of this nature to occur in the wake of US withdrawal from Afghanistan, feels particularly offensive. The ongoing effects of human rights violations perpetrated by Western intervention in the Middle-East are playing out in Afghanistan as I write these words. It is no secret that arms companies have directly profited from this conflict. At least seven of such companies are on the list to attend the fair, including Textron, MBDA, L3 Harris and Teledyne.
Prior to the protest on Saturday Liverpool Mayor Joanne Anderson claimed that she is ‘powerless’ to stop the fair from taking place. Declaring that she is ‘appalled’, Anderson nevertheless stated that the fair is ‘lawful’ and the council is not able to interfere with bookings taken by ACC. The venue is actually owned by the council, but the mayor claims that it has no say in its management since launching the ACC Liverpool Group Ltd to run the venue on their behalf. Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) disputed this, accusing Anderson of evading responsibility in an ‘unlawful delegation of powers’. Local campaigners aim to hold the council accountable for their influence as sole shareholder in ACC Liverpool. They want them to stop the fair and institute an ethical policy for all bookings.
‘Safe’ Weapons
The chair of ACC Max Steinberg stated that the event will ‘allow the development of sophisticated systems used to make the world a safer place’. Such a claim is a delusional simplification. Arms trade is never exclusively about safety. It is primarily about profit and profit can be made and has been made by supporting repressive regimes and countries with a track record of human rights abuses. This spreads violence, instability and fear – the very antithesis of safety – across a significant portion of the world.
Steinberg also reiterated the AOC’s claim that all the traders have been thoroughly vetted and are under scrutiny. However, one only has to look at the history of a few of the companies on the fair’s list of traders to discover a myriad of infringements of humanitarian laws.
Elbit provides up to 85 per cent of land-based equipment procured by the Israeli military, as well as 85 per cent of its drones, which have been used to aid Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
Raytheon is known to supply military arms to Saudi Arabia, including their Paveway IV bombs which have been used by the coalition to destroy civilian economic structures in Yemen. These structures include farms, factories, warehouses and power stations. Before their destruction these structures were used to produce and distribute food, medicines and electricity to the local community. The UK government confirmed that some of these bombs were manufactured in response to Saudi requests for additional UK support.
Textron was the last company to stop producing cluster bombs. These bombs were prohibited by the Convention on Cluster Munitions because of the tendency of the bomblets they release to not all explode on impact. This means they remain on the ground and pose a long-term risk to civilians. Although the Convention’s treaty was drafted in 2008, Textron continued to make these cluster bombs until 2016.
Leonardo has experience in the hostile border control sector, meaning that they profit from the refugee crisis. They provide helicopters for Italy’s anti-migration operations in the Mediterranean and for Libya’s notorious border patrol. An often overlooked source of global arms trade profits, the ‘border security’ market is worth around £13.5bn per year.
The conduct of the listed arms companies demonstrates a disregard for the international obligations of the Arms Trade Treaty which states that all companies have a responsibility to not send military equipment and services to countries where it is likely to be misused. Such disregard for the treaty is a breach of international law.
Liverpool should not support such a reprehensible event at any time, but particularly not in the current political climate when the crisis in Yemen, the occupation of Palestine and the conflict in Afghanistan remain unresolved. Liverpool is the city of Lennon’s Imagine, the Capital of Culture 2008. Its modern spirit of liberal vibrancy needs to be combined with an acknowledgment of its past role in slavery to create a hyper-vigilance against any present injustices. The rest of the nation has joined the people of Liverpool to speak out against this fair. Now we need to maintain the pressure on both the ACC and the City Council until they choose the ethical path and stop the arms fair.
ByOrinoco Tribune.
September 29, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/jorge-rodriguez-expresses-outrage-over-atrocities-committed-against-alex-saab/
After receiving a letter from the diplomat Alex Saab, the head of the Venezuelan government delegation in the Mexico Talks, Jorge Rodríguez, expressed outrage at the atrocities committed against this representative of Venezuelan diplomacy.
In a post on his Twitter account, Rodríguez wrote: “This letter from our special envoy Alex Saab was received this morning by the members of the Venezuelan government delegation. His message moved us, and at the same time we felt deep indignation at the atrocities committed against our diplomat. Truth and life will prevail!”
In the letter, Saab denounced his subjection to torture in Cape Verde, including psychologically torment. For example, authorities had deprived him of water for days, wrote Saab, “because according to them they must pass the transparent bottles through the x-ray, and the machine is always damaged.”
Below is the full text of the letter sent by diplomat Alex Saab:
Monday, September 27, 2021
Dear Jorge, members of the dialogue table, government officials, and opposition representatives, I send you my greeting and I hope you are all well.
To my government and our delegation, they do not know how it has moved me to hear of the gesture towards me that you made when you arrived in Mexico.
I can’t see photos, but I felt full of strength and pride for the country when they told me about it.
I am and will always be eternally grateful to the entire delegation and to our government for the honor they gave me.
That is the country that I love.
The Patria that defends just causes.
The Patria that seeks the welfare of the people every day.
The Patria that is going through an immoral and cruel blockade, but continues to be brave. The Patria that does not surrender.
I was kidnapped by Trump, his henchmen, and his failed policy 473 days ago. They have physically tortured me in Cape Verde until they got tired.
They continue to torture and provoke me psychologically each day until today.
I have been denied medical attention among so many other basic human rights.
Sometimes they even leave me without water for days, because according to them they have to pass the transparent bottles through x-rays and the machines are always “damaged.”
I have been threatened with death in a US prison almost every day since I was vilely kidnapped.
They threatened my family’s life.
I have been slandered, reviled, mistreated and, according to them, humiliated. But the soul of a warrior does not break. Only the one who kneels sees his enemy as a giant.
They sanctioned me in 2019—not only me but my two eldest children, who were almost minors, about to graduate from university, and who have nothing to do with this political conflict.
My children had to interrupt their studies and go into exile, again, barely having reached adulthood.
Their accusations against me are so ridiculous and politically motivated that they have not been able to find a single piece of evidence against me.
Even Switzerland trashed the case of judicial overreach by investigating me for three years and NOT finding in 3,000 pages a single operation even suspected of being something illegal.
The same has happened in other countries that have investigated me, always prompted by the disinformation networks that Elliott Abrams himself publicly confessed to using.
However, the US in its impotence constantly threatens me, even threatening to accuse my children without good reason, if I do not give in to their demands to stop serving my country and to falsely denigrate my government.
The US was infuriated because, among other things, food and medicine continued to arrive [in Venezuela] despite the blockade. According to them, it was a sign that they were failing in their “plan” which they disrespectfully call “regime change.”
They literally wanted the people to rise up due to hunger.
They even brazenly asked me via my lawyers to stop helping my country for 120 days, leaving it without food or medicine, in exchange for “amnesty.” For them [the US] 120 days of hunger would be enough. Did it imagine it would make me responsible for a genocide?
I never gave up and I ALWAYS communicated it to my superiors.
I lived through the death of my father and my mother during this abduction, alone, without saying goodbye to them. This was not the fault of COVID-19 but due to its tyranny.
They separated me from my family, my wife, my five children, the youngest five months old. I still feel the last kiss I gave my baby.
My family has been abducted for the same 473 days as me, because the abduction is experienced by the family even worse than by the one who is abducted.
And what have they achieved in these 473 days? Nothing. Every time I have been able, the only thing I send are messages of strength to the brave Chavista people to surround [protect] our President.
By G. Dunkel posted on September 28, 2021
https://www.workers.org/2021/09/59254/
After images of the U.S. Border Patrol agents using long reins as whips against Haitians camped in Del Rio, Texas, trying to get into the U.S., spread worldwide, a top-level decision was made to shut the Del Rio camps down.
Haitian migrants crossed the Rio Grande between Texas and Mexico with supplies Sept. 23 and spent the night under the international bridge connecting Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña.
Hundreds of progressive organizations condemned the Border Patrol’s actions — from the World Federation of Trade Unions, representing more than 105 million workers in 133 countries, to U.S. labor unions, to the NAACP’s local affiliates and celebrities of all stripes. News from Del Rio made the front page of Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s major daily newspaper, and was prominently featured on all the YouTube and web chats Haitian-oriented social media use.
There have been scores of demonstrations throughout North America, calling on the U.S. and Canadian governments to stop expelling Haitians and accept their asylum claims. According to the AP, the U.S. only accepted 5% of Haitian asylum claims in 2020, the lowest rate for any national group.
Miami, Sept. 22.
The Sept. 23 resignation of Special Envoy Daniel Foote really irritated the White House. Foote is a senior career foreign service officer, and this is the first time in over 30 years that one of this elite group resigned over his bourgeois “principles.”
Foote argued that the deportation policy was self-defeating as it would only fuel more migration. His explanation was: “The people of Haiti, mired in poverty, hostage to the terror, kidnappings, robberies and massacres of armed gangs and suffering under a corrupt government with gang alliances, simply cannot support the forced infusion of thousands of returned migrants lacking food, shelter and money without additional avoidable human tragedy.”
He was answered by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who said in a press conference on the issue that Foote had given a misleading version of the events leading to his resignation and had advocated military intervention.
The Department of Homeland Security said nearly 30,000 migrants had been encountered in Del Rio in the past two weeks, but none were left by Sept. 24. Around 2,000 were expelled to Haiti on numerous flights.
While Haiti didn’t formally object to receiving them, the Haitian office of Immigration didn’t provide much help. Often refugees did not get all of the $100 that they were supposed to get — just $25 and a promise of more later. Sometimes the promised meals were missing. People were tested for COVID, but no plan was in place to quarantine anyone.
Le Nouvelliste ran a short piece Sept. 24 on how the people expelled on the flights had to struggle to get their passports back. A Haitian passport, according to their website, cost $125 — more than an average Haitian worker makes in a month.
One of the workers interviewed was Belone Mpembele, an Angolan who became friendly with some of the Haitians he worked with in Brazil. Mpembele decided to try to get into the U.S. with them. When he got picked up in Del Rio, U.S. immigration didn’t believe him when he said he was Angolan and had never lived in Haiti.
More than 12,000 migrants will have a chance to make their case for asylum before U.S. immigration judges. Many of the families have mixed citizenship, with at least one Haitian parent but the children being Brazilian, Chilean or Panamanian, depending on where they were born. The odds of a Haitian getting permission to stay are low.
An estimated 8,000 voluntarily returned to Mexico; some of them are hoping to get permission to work there. The rest were taken to ICE detention centers to be processed and learn their fate.
U.S. historic exploitation of Haiti
The U.S. establishment seems to believe that if they proclaim they are nasty and illegally reject refugees and asylum seekers, then all their immigration problems will be solved. But the United States has spent over 200 years inflicting pain and economic suffering on Haiti, and Haitians still keep coming.
Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president (1801 to 1809), set up an economic and political blockade of Haiti in 1804 that lasted until 1862. In 1915, just before the U.S. began a 19-year-long occupation of Haiti, a Marine brigade stole Haiti’s gold reserve and turned it over to CitiBank.
Economically, whenever the U.S. supplies financial, material, medical aid to Haiti, it demands Haiti undertake “reforms,” such as cutting the duties on U.S. subsidized rice so it can drive Haitian rice, and the farmers which grow it, out of business. Former President Bill Clinton apologized for this, but in 2009 when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and Haiti tried to raise its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, roughly $5 a day, the U.S. forced Haiti to maintain their 24 cents an hour wage — less than $2 a day.
There have been whole books written on how, and why, the U.S. economically exploits Haiti, but until the U.S. stops, people are going to be pushed out of Haiti towards the U.S.
By Dianne Mathiowetz posted on September 28, 2021
https://www.workers.org/2021/09/59244/
Atlanta
On Aug. 7, 2020, 60-year-old Julian Lewis, a semiretired Black carpenter, was driving home in Sylvania, Ga., after going to a convenience store to get his spouse a grape soda. Georgia State Trooper Jacob Gordan Thompson followed him on Screven County dirt roads to cite him for having a broken taillight.
The 63 mile march to Savannah, Ga. where Julian Lewis was murdered, on Sept. 19, fourth day of the march.
Thompson conducted a PIT (pursuit intervention technique) maneuver, causing Lewis’ car to careen into the ditch and smash into a tree. According to the dash cam footage in the patrol car, the 27-year-old white officer fired his gun within 1.6 seconds, striking Lewis in the forehead, killing him.
In his official police report, Thompson claimed that he feared for his life and fired once because Lewis was revving his engine and turning the wheels of his car in an effort to injure him. He also claimed the headlights of the car were in his eyes.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that the force of the car hitting the tree had dislodged the battery cables and that the car had no power. No revving, no lights possible, the agent determined. In addition, the wheels were all turned away from Thompson’s vehicle.
Within days, the GBI issued warrants for Thompson’s arrest on aggravated assault and felony murder charges.
In quick order, he was fired by the Georgia State Patrol, and on Aug. 24, denied bond despite the “generations” of family in Screven County that his lawyer said would vouch for him.
Members of Lewis’ large family were relieved that justice would be done, since the facts were so clear that Julian Lewis had posed no threat to Thompson.
No justice, no peace!
So how could it be that on June 28, 2021, a grand jury of 22 people who saw the video, read Thompson’s false report and heard the GBI agent’s testimony that the trooper had lied, declined to indict him?
Perhaps it has to do with those “generations” of family in rural Screven County where cotton fields line the dirt roads. Or the demographics of the grand jury of six Black jurors and 16 white members, when it takes 12 jurors to indict.
Lawyers Francys Johnson and Mawuli Davis say that multiple community members told them Thompson had a reputation for harassing Black and Brown motorists. An examination of Thompson’s file shows three complaints, two for racial profiling and misconduct and one for unprofessional behavior at a crash site.
Brook Bacon, Lewis’s son, vowed to continue the fight and called for a march to start from the very place on Stoney Pond Rd. in Sylvania, Ga., where his father was murdered, to end 63 miles away in Savannah. The goal was to press the Southern District of Georgia’s U.S. District Attorney General to open a federal investigation into the case.
Marchers, including family members of other Georgia Black men killed by police, set off in the pouring rain on Sept. 16. On Sept. 20, they reached Savannah and met with federal officials who agreed to “examine the case in consultation with the FBI.”
Julian Lewis’s family welcomed that news but vowed not to stop their fight until justice is won.
Tamara Nassar 29 September 2021
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/iraq-resists-push-ties-tel-aviv
The Iraqi government is taking action against officials and public figures who called for full normalization of relations with Israel at a conference in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
The conference on Friday was hosted by the Center for Peace Communications, a US-based nonprofit that promotes ties between Israel and Arab countries. It was reportedly attended by hundreds of people.
Long-time Israel lobbyist and former US “peace process” diplomat Dennis Ross sits on the center’s board of directors.
The organization’s COO, Michael Nahum, lived in Israel, where he studied at IDC Herzliya, a university closely tied to the state’s military and official propaganda apparatus.
This fact is disclosed on the Center for Peace Communications website, but curiously is omitted from Nahum’s page on the professional networking site Linkedin.
Nahum also lived in Damascus “during the early phases of the Syrian civil war,” according to his organization’s website, supposedly to increase his fluency in Arabic.
From 2011 to 2016, Nahum worked for AECOM, a major contractor with the US defense department where, according to his group’s website, he provided analysis on such topics as “Syrian militia dynamics” to “high-level US government clients.”
Speaking at the conference, Sahar al-Tai, who works at Iraq’s culture ministry, called on Iraq to join the so-called Abraham Accords – the normalization deals brokered by the United States last year between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco.
Propaganda tactics
Al-Tai employed a common propaganda tactic of using religious and cultural tolerance to mask political, economic and military rewards that come with normalizing relations with Israel.
“Iraq today has to change its policy for the sake of peace in the region, it has become imperative that Israel be recognized as a friendly country,” al-Tai said, “especially since about half a million Israelis are of Iraqi origin.”
Al-Tai did not mention the sordid story of how Iraqi Jews ended up in Israel – a history that involved sabotage and terrorism by Israel’s Mossad spy agency, aimed at destroying the sense of security for Iraq’s Jews so that they would leave en masse.
Painting conflict in the region as stemming from a lack of cultural or religious understanding is also a way to obscure its true origin: Israel’s violent and ongoing dispossession and military occupation of Palestinians and theft of their land.
Al-Tai proposed establishing committees to promote trade and investments within the Emirati-Israeli framework.
Hundreds of millions of dollars of deals have already been signed between the Emirates and Israel, further tying their economies together, including agreements to sell Israeli settlement goods in the UAE.
The Gulf state hopes to raise the value of its trade with Israel to a staggering $1 trillion over the next decade.
The leader of the Sons of Iraq Awakening movement, Wisam al-Hardan, also advocated Iraqi normalization with Israel during the Erbil conference.
In addition, al-Hardan published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.
“We demand that Iraq join the Abraham Accords internationally,” he writes. “We call for full diplomatic relations with Israel.”
Al-Hardan’s article regurgitates Zionist propaganda that Iraq expelled its Jewish population.
“Through their forced migration, Iraq effectively cut one of its own principal veins,” al-Hardan asserts.
But in fact, as Columbia University professor Joseph Massad has explained, Israel waged a global pressure campaign on Iraq to allow Jews to leave.
This campaign involved fabrications that Nuri al-Said, the British-backed strongman who ruled Iraq at the time, was persecuting Jews.
Amid economic pressure from Britain and the United States, Iraq relented and passed a law allowing Jews to emigrate.
As Massad notes, Zionist agents in Iraq wired their handlers in Israel, “We are carrying on our usual activity in order to push the law through faster.” That was the prelude to the departure of some 120,000 Jews.
Al-Hardan’s article also contains the usual animosity aimed at Iran and Israel’s other regional enemies held by Arab rulers seeking to get in bed with Israel.
Al-Hardan gleefully describes the “legality, decency, peace, and progress” that he imagines normalization with Israel will bring.
Evidently, he has not asked Palestinians what sort of “legality” and “decency” or other benefits they experience under Israel’s apartheid regime.
Al-Hardan acknowledges that Friday’s conference was a stepping stone towards normalization, saying that “next we will seek face-to-face talks with Israelis.”
Amid uproar in Iraq over the conference, the Sons of Iraq Awakening movement – known as al-Sahwa in Arabic – suspended al-Hardan from its leadership.
Al-Sahwa was founded after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and its members were directly paid by the American occupiers to help control the country – a total of at least $370 million.
Chemi Peres, son of Shimon Peres, the late Israeli president who was responsible for decades of crimes against Palestinian and Lebanese people, also addressed the conference virtually.
Crackdown
The Iraqi government said it unequivocally opposed any normalization with Israel. Arrest warrants were issued against some of the participants, including al-Hardan.
Colonel Wayne Marotto, the spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve, a US-led military effort to “defeat ISIS,” distanced the operation from the conference.
The US-led military coalition “had no prior knowledge of the event, nor do we have any affiliation with its participants,” Marotto said.
In 2009, the Iraqi government disbanded the US-backed al-Sahwa militias, though in 2014 the Obama administration considered reviving them as a tool against ISIS.
The United States undoubtedly favors Iraq-Israel normalization.
However, given its past close association with al-Sahwa, the US military is likely concerned that al-Hardan’s open embrace of Tel Aviv could discredit whatever Iraqi allies the US still has.
Operation Inherent Resolve continues to operate inside Iraq and train and equip Iraqi government forces.
In response to Marotto’s comments, Robert Satloff, the head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a major Israel lobby think tank, urged the US to back the “brave Iraqis” calling for normalization with Israel.
The normalization efforts were well-received by other Israel lobbyists and leaders.
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s prime minister, celebrated the event, as did right-wing anti-Palestinian Israel lobby groups StandWithUs and the Anti-Defamation League.
The Center for Peace Communications previously hosted discussions on YouTube about how Israel should have developed closer ties with Syria’s opposition.
As a matter of fact, Israel directly armed and funded al-Qaida-linked jihadist armed groups in Syria.
Ali Abunimah contributed reporting.
Omar Karmi 29 September 2021
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/omar-karmi/eu-embraces-lapids-empty-promises
So much sound and so much fury. So very little action.
It seems that the peace process industry is cranking into gear again, even though both Israel and the US have made explicitly clear that there is nothing to see here.
In fact, so determined was Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to dampen any expectations that in his speech to the UN’s General Assembly on Monday, he completely omitted mention of the Palestinians.
Yet none of that seems to have put off European officials.
The EU has been fawning over remarks on Gaza by an Israeli foreign minister who has said nothing new – he doesn’t like Hamas – and promised even less – if Hamas wasn’t there then maybe Israel would contemplate easing a draconian closure on Gaza that has pushed two million people to the brink of humanitarian disaster.
Yair Lapid’s comments nevertheless occasioned optimism from Denmark’s ambassador to Israel as well as in Sweden, whose previously frosty relations with Israel seem to have warmed inexplicably.
It’s odd, made odder by the fact that Lapid is head of a ministry which openly celebrated cancellations at this year’s Durban conference against racism. Though, perhaps not that odd considering that Sweden and Denmark both joined a “boycott” of Durban IV at Israel’s prompting.
(Apparently boycotts are fine if Israel wants them. Otherwise, not so much.)
Indeed, Israel’s foreign ministry thanked the 37 countries, including the US, Canada and the UK, for what Israeli media reported as their “support” in undermining the international effort to combat racism.
Lovely.
It’s a mystery
So why the excitement?
September’s opening session of the UN General Assembly may have something to do with it.
Before Bennett ignored the Palestinians, US President Joe Biden had made sure to distance himself from the position of his predecessor Donald Trump by stating that the US supports a two-state solution.
But he did so only, he said, because he believed that this was “the best way” to ensure Israel’s future.
Not, of course, out of any commitment to Palestinian rights or international law.
Nor was there any suggestion of urgency.
“We’re a long way from that goal at this moment,” Biden continued, though he vowed not “to give up on the possibility of progress.”
It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the kind of outcome the EU sees as a “fundamental interest.”
Nor can the excitement have been occasioned by any position from Bennett.
On the contrary. Bennett has tried his best to dampen expectations. There will be no Palestinian state on his watch, he told The New York Times ahead of meeting Biden in Washington last month.
There will be a continuation of settlement construction, even if he has dropped his former support for the formal annexation of these settlements.
And there will be no peace talks with the Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank (to everyone’s relief).
“This government will neither annex nor form a Palestinian state, everyone gets that,” Bennett said. “I’m prime minister of all Israelis, and what I’m doing now is finding the middle ground — how we can focus on what we agree upon.”
The “we” here is of course Israel and the US, a periodic reminder that, as it always has been, the Palestinian future is to be determined by Israel and Israel’s supporters in Washington.
So why are European countries getting all excited about a threadbare Israeli coalition government that offers no new thinking?
Trauma
Are EU countries simply so traumatized by the years of Benjamin Netanyahu that they’ve forgotten that Netanyahu was a symptom, not a cause of the problem?
Have they been so blindsided by their glaring double-standards that any fig leaf, however pitiful, is seized upon to justify a verbal commitment to human rights and an actual commitment to military occupation?
Did they forget that the new Israeli prime minister not long ago urged Israel to end cooperation with the EU over settlements?
Do they believe that a motion passing through US Congress – the so-called Two-State Solution Act – even in the unlikely event that it passes, will change anything?
Probably not. As the ancient saying – passed down from generation to generation – goes, the EU is a payer, not a player.
In this context it makes perfect sense for Denmark on the one hand to laud the empty rhetoric of Lapid while, on the other, fund the Palestinian Authority to the tune of $72 million over five years.
There is no strategy here. There is no endgame. This is hush money. Conflict management via the wallet.
The real decisions are made in Washington and on Israel’s terms.
The shock and horror expressed over a two-day delay in handing over an extra $1 billion of US taxpayer dough to Israel is far more indicative of where the wind is blowing.
There will be no change until either the Palestinians take on more suffering and reject the hush money, Americans become sufficiently embarrassed by their obsequiousness or Europeans lose at least one of their faces.
Tamara Nassar 28 September 2021
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-kills-six-palestinians-48-hours
Israeli occupation forces ran over a Palestinian child with a military vehicle after shooting him, a human rights group stated on Monday.
Yousef Muhammad Odeh, 15, was among six Palestinians killed in multiple areas in the West Bank in recent days.
All but one were killed by Israeli forces during a major arrest operation in different areas of the occupied West Bank on Sunday.
The military targeted Hamas “military infrastructure” in the Ramallah and Jenin areas “after intelligence showed the group was planning to carry out attacks in Israel,” according to the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz.
The operation involved two death squads: Duvdevan, an elite Israeli military unit whose members often disguise themselves as Palestinians in order to carry out extrajudicial executions, and Yamam, a unit of Israel’s paramilitary Border Police whose members shot and killed two Palestinian police officers in Jenin earlier this year.
Gunfire exchange
Israeli forces launched their arrest operation late Saturday in the city of Jenin and nearby Kafr Dan in the northern occupied West Bank where two Palestinians were arrested without any exchange of fire, according to The Times of Israel.
Soldiers then surrounded a house in Burqin village, where a wounded Palestinian was arrested following a firefight.
Shortly after, Burqin was the scene of another gunfight during which Osama Subuh, a 22-year-old member of the Islamic Jihad resistance group, was killed by Israeli fire.
An Israeli soldier and an officer were injured by friendly fire during the raid, according to Haaretz.
Israeli forces also killed 15-year-old Yousef Muhammad Odeh in Burqin.
Odeh arrived at the scene at the same time during the early morning hours that a Palestinian shot at invading Israeli soldiers near the entrance of the town on Sunday morning, eyewitnesses told Defense for Children International Palestine.
The Palestinian gunman, who was injured in the leg by Israeli soldiers, dropped his weapon and fled.
Odeh had allegedly picked up the firearm when an Israeli sniper shot him in the leg. He dropped the gun, picked it up again and fired two shots at an Israeli military vehicle located 400 feet away.
An Israeli sniper fired at Odeh again, striking him in the leg and head.
“After he was shot, an Israeli military vehicle approached Yousef and ran over his body,” DCIP said.
Soldiers then evacuated Odeh’s body, which has not been transferred to his family for burial, according to the rights group.
Three killed in raid
Three Palestinians were killed by the Yamam unit of Israel’s Border Police in another gunfight in the village of Beit Anan in the Jerusalem governorate in the occupied West Bank.
They were identified as Ahmad Zahran, Zakaria Badwan and Mahmoud Humeidan. They were from the nearby village of Biddu.
Their bodies are being held by Israel, the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz reported. No Israeli soldiers were injured, the military told media.
Badwan worked at the Palestinian Museum, which closed its building in Birzeit, near Ramallah, on Sunday in mourning.
“We remember Zakaria for his cheerful face and kind manners,” the museum stated.
A Hamas media spokesperson pointed to high-level meetings between Palestinian Authority officials and Israeli ministers in Ramallah in the days leading up to deadly raids.
He cited the continued collaboration between the Palestinian Authority and Israeli lawmakers under the banner of “security coordination.”
The spokesperson said the meetings “encouraged the occupation once again to pursue the resistance, kill its rebellious youth and commit more crimes against our people.”
Killed in Beita
Meanwhile, Israeli occupation forces shot Muhammad Ali Khabisa, 28, in the head with live ammunition on Friday in Beita, a village near the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
Khabisa, father to an infant, died of his wounds hours later.
Khabisa was wounded by Israeli army fire during a demonstration in Beita two weeks earlier.
Israeli forces have killed several Palestinians in the village this year, including two children who were friends.
Beita residents are protesting the building of a colonial settlement on a hill belonging to Palestinian villages.
The new outpost, named Evyatar, was established on Jabal Subeih in May.
Israel has previously evacuated Evyatar but is permitting structures there to remain following an agreement made with settlers.
