February 1st, 2012
David Sheen‘s devastating report for the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC) on the mistreatment of asylum seekers in Israel was submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on January 30, 2012.
by Udi Aloni on January 29, 2012
There has been a flood of new laws, practices and rules of apartheid in Israel. Sometimes many of us feel paralyzed because of the racist manifestations in the judiciary, legislature and executive and don’t know where to start fighting. Yet when those laws begin to destroy the lives of close friends, we know this is a good place to start.
On January 12th, 2012 the Israeli Supreme Court upheld a ruling allowing Israel to prevent Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, who marry Israelis, to reside with their spouses in Israel. This law further permits the deportation of Palestinians who are currently living with their families in Israel.
I remember a year ago when I wrote against the collaboration of the Supreme Court of Israel with the apartheid regime within the ’48 borders of the State. Some of my colleagues claimed that we were pushing it too far. While they all agreed that the Supreme Court collaborates with the occupation, they stilled maintained the belief that within Israel there exists equality before the law.
Yet on January 12th, 2012 the Supreme Court proved otherwise by allowing “the only democracy in the Middle East” to destroy the basic human right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to maintain a family unit, just because they are Arab.
Some of you have probably already heard about the horrific decision of the Supreme Court, but I would like to introduce you to the story of my good friend, Taiseer, and how this new decision can rupture the life of his family just because they are not Jews.
I am asking for your help to disseminate his story to the world and to be in contact with him (email) to enhance the campaign against the new discriminatory rule of the Supreme Court.
Taiseer Khatib is not only a friend, but a colleague of mine from the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee camp. He began working there six years ago, teaching creative writing and helping to establish the multi-media division at the Theatre.
The January 12th ruling has paved the way for the impending deportation of Taiseer’s wife Lana, a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Jenin, who has been living with him in Israel since their marriage six years ago. The couple lives in Acre and have two children together – Adnan, 4, and Yusra, 3. Currently, the family is terrified of what might happen if Lana is deported, breaking their family apart.
Taiseer’s case is just one of thousands, but I believe that through supporting him we can combat this ruling. It would mean a lot to me if you could contact Taiseer to try to help the cause in any way possible.
I believe that today, pressure from outside of Israel is the only way to reduce the damages of the racist flood, at least until the time comes when the entire ideological structure of the racist ideology that mobilizes Israel will fall apart.
Please see his email address below, along with links to more information about the ruling.
Thanks for your support,
Udi Aloni
Taiseer Khatib’s email is: taiseerk@gmail.com
by Nima Shirazi on January 23, 2012 9
Did you see this? From Ha’aretz, “Study: IDF officers less committed to Jewish values after visits to Nazi death camps.” The headline exposes unsatisfactory indoctrination levels in IDF soldiers. The whole article is worth a read (especially to see how the paper doesn’t quote the actual report at all, yet then tries to do damage control by referring to a different survey that showed increased indoctrination levels among Israeli high schoolers who take similar trips).
Here’s the key section:
As a result, Ha’aretz reports, “Army sources said they were ‘stunned’ by the findings, which seem to indicate that the trips are achieving the opposite of their declared purpose.”
Note how the bad news of the report is that tribalist and exclusivist ideologies decline while ideas “such as understanding the universal context of the Holocaust” and a “commitment to universal democratic values such as human dignity, the sanctity of life and tolerance” remain the same. Yeah, what a bummer.
by Annie Robbins on January 23, 2012 8
The Guardian published a scathing article over the weekend by Harriet Sherwood on human rights abuses suffered by Palestinian children in Al Jalame prison in northern Israel.
The report is a culmination of interviews conducted by the Guardian including descriptions of sworn testimonies of minors collected by Defence for Children International (DCI), a human rights organization that has collected hundreds of testimonies from Palestinian children since 2008. The Guardian also viewed rare audiovisual recordings of the interrogations of two boys from the village of Nabi Saleh. Their report is corroborated by B’Tselem’s study No Minor Matter, published last July. It’s a must read.
During interrogation, he was shackled. “They cursed me and threatened to arrest my family if I didn’t confess,” he said. He first saw a lawyer 20 days after his arrest, he said, and was charged after 25 days. “They accused me of many things,” he said, adding that none of them were true.Eventually Shabrawi confessed to membership of a banned organisation and was sentenced to 45 days. Since his release, he said, he was “now afraid of the army, afraid of being arrested.” She said he had become withdrawn.
Ezz ad-Deen Ali Qadi from Ramallah, who was 17 when he was arrested last January, described similar treatment during arrest and detention. He says he was held in solitary confinement at Al Jalame for 17 days in cells 36, 37 and 38.
“I would start repeating the interrogators’ questions to myself, asking myself is it true what they are accusing me of,” he told the Guardian. “You feel the pressure of the cell. Then you think about your family, and you feel you are going to lose your future. You are under huge stress.”
His treatment during questioning depended on the mood of his interrogators, he said. “If he is in a good mood, sometimes he allows you to sit on a chair without handcuffs. Or he may force you to sit on a small chair with an iron hoop behind it. Then he attaches your hands to the ring, and your legs to the chair legs. Sometimes you stay like that for four hours. It is painful.
We must admit, this is the Syrian people’s finest hour. It is not our finest hour.
By Aner Shalev
What is the red line that if crossed will make the world say, Enough? If Syrian blood is so cheap, perhaps the injuring of Arab League observers is a red line? Or mortar fired directly at a group of foreign correspondents and the death of a French journalist? What is the exchange rate for the blood of different nationalities?
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Syrian protesters marching in Homs in late December. A heroic uprising that Israel hopes will fail. |
| Photo by: Reuters |
Of all the revolutions in the Arab world, the Syrian uprising is depicted as being the most impressive and heroic. In Tunisia and Egypt, the army sided with the protestors within a relatively short time and forced almost immediate regime changes that gained American support. In Libya, the struggle took longer but even from its early stages seemed like a civil war with protestors using a range of weapons and later on receiving military assistance from NATO.
In no Arab country except for Syria has such restrained protest encountered such violent suppression, so determined and so cruel. In no other Arab country have protestors been abandoned by the enlightened world like they have been in Syria. And despite the tremendous risk, the many casualties and the uncertain chance of success, these protestors go out to the streets every day, without weapons, without support, armed only with faith. Yes, it is permissible to be moved by a heroic struggle for freedom and impressive displays of courage even in an enemy country.
Less impressive is the Israeli response to events in Syria. Defense Minister Ehud Barak posed as usual as a fortune teller and predicted that Bashar Assad would fall within a few weeks. Since then many weeks have gone by and Assad is still in power and still slaughtering. In the Israeli defense establishment, however, the prevailing sentiment seems to be panic over the possibility that the struggle to obtain freedom will succeed and the Syrian regime will fall.
Chief of Staff Benny Gantz spoke of a stream of Alawite refugees potentially flooding into Israel in such a scenario, and of Israel Defense Forces preparations for such an eventuality. Gloomy predictions of the transfer of dangerous Syrian weapons to Hezbollah are being made around the clock.
It is possible to read between the lines – Israel is not interested in Assad’s downfall. Israel is secretly rooting for Assad. Israel is silently praying that the murderous Syrian dictatorship hangs on, a dictatorship that means quiet on the Golan Heights without any threat of peace. As always, Israel prefers the status quo, the world of yesterday.
The world of tomorrow does not interest us, even if it may contain possibilities and dramatic change. Perhaps the fall of Assad will actually lead to the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran in Lebanon and in the entire region? Who cares? We’ll take the threats. The Syrian uprising has already prompted Hamas to move from Damascus to other Arab capitals and made it more moderate. But it seems that we prefer an extremist Hamas.
The present Israeli leadership consists of the people of yesterday, who look forward to the past, swim against the tide of history and hastily flee from any change. The familiar is preferable to what is good and right. Who knows, perhaps the stream of Alawite refugees they are predicting for us here will also include Assad and his family. If we are already rooting for Assad, why don’t we give him political asylum?
We must admit, this is the Syrian people’s finest hour. It is not our finest hour.
January 2012
2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards
Prose: High School
First Place (Tie)
Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong
Jesse Lieberfeld
11th grade, Winchester Thurston
I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world—and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time. Once, I thought that I truly belonged in this world of security, self-pity, self-proclaimed intelligence, and perfect moral aesthetic. I thought myself to be somewhat privileged early on. It was soon revealed to me, however, that my fellow believers and I were not part of anything so flattering.
Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up. It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives. I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.
This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel’s spotless reputation to the back of my mind. “Our people” were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified. We would never be so amoral as to fight an unjust war. Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called “conflict” with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. “Genocide” almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms. Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a “difficult situation.” It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. “We need to defend our race,” they told me. “It’s our right.”
“We need to defend our race.”
Where had I heard that before? Wasn’t it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans sixty years ago? In that moment, I realized how similar the two struggles were—like the white radicals of that era, we controlled the lives of another people whom we abused daily, and no one could speak out against us. It was too politically incorrect to do so. We had suffered too much, endured too many hardships, and overcome too many losses to be criticized. I realized then that I was in no way part of a “conflict”—the term “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict” was no more accurate than calling the Civil Rights Movement the “Caucasian/ African-American Conflict.” In both cases, the expression was a blatant euphemism: it gave the impression that this was a dispute among equals and that both held an equal share of the blame. However, in both, there was clearly an oppressor and an oppressed, and I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.
I thought of the leader of the other oppressed side of years ago, Martin Luther King. He too had been part of a struggle that had been hidden and glossed over for the convenience of those against whom he fought. What would his reaction have been? As it turned out, it was precisely the same as mine. As he wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail, he believed the greatest enemy of his cause to be “Not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who…lives by a mythical concept of time…. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” When I first read those words, I felt as if I were staring at myself in a mirror. All my life I had been conditioned to simply treat the so-called conflict with the same apathy which King had so forcefully condemned. I, too, held the role of an accepting moderate. I, too, “lived by a mythical concept of time,” shrouded in my own surreal world and the set of beliefs that had been assigned to me. I had never before felt so trapped.
I decided to make one last appeal to my religion. If it could not answer my misgivings, no one could. The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and-answer session about any point of our religion. I wanted to place my dilemma in as clear and simple terms as I knew how. I thought out my exact question over the course of the seventeen-minute cello solo that was routinely played during service. Previously, I had always accepted this solo as just another part of the program, yet now it seemed to capture the whole essence of our religion: intelligent and well-crafted on paper, yet completely oblivious to the outside world (the soloist did not have the faintest idea of how masterfully he was putting us all to sleep). When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a “fact of life” was simply too much for me to accept. I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back. I thought about what I could do. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience. I could not live the rest of my life as one of the pathetic moderates whom King had rightfully portrayed as the worst part of the problem. I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong.
It was different not being the ideal nice Jewish boy. The difference was subtle, yet by no means unaffecting. Whenever it came to the attention of any of our more religious family friends that I did not share their beliefs, I was met with either a disapproving stare and a quick change of the subject or an alarmed cry of, “What? Doesn’t Israel matter to you?” Relatives talked down to me more afterward, but eventually I stopped noticing the way adults around me perceived me. It was worth it to no longer feel as though I were just another apathetic part of the machine.
I can obviously never know what it must have been like to be an African-American in the 1950s. I do feel, however, as though I know exactly what it must have been like to be white during that time, to live under an aura of moral invincibility, to hold unchallengeable beliefs, and to contrive illusions of superiority to avoid having to face simple everyday truths. That illusion was nice while it lasted, but I decided to pass it up. I have never been happier.
View the complete list of the 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Award winners.
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It wasn’t easy, finding Jim Traficant. Without the help of the American Free Press, (AFP), we never would have found him. Traficant of Youngstown Ohio was running for his old Congressional seat. What sort of campaign could he be running? After all, we’d seen the Greta von Susteren Fox News interview (Sept. 9, 2009, just a few days after Traficant was released from prison). Here’s some of what Traficant had said, “I believe that Israel has a powerful strangle hold on the American government. They control…the House and Senate. They have us involved in wars of which we have little or no interest. Our children are coming back in body bags. Our nation is bankrupt over these wars, and if you open your mouth, you get targeted. And if they don’t beat you at the polls, they’ll put you in prison… It’s an objective assessment that no one will have the courage to speak about. They’re controlling much of our foreign policy. They’re influencing much of our domestic policy. Wolfowitz as Under Secretary of Defense manipulated President Bush #2 back into Iraq. They pushed definitely, definitely to try and get Bush, before he left, to move into Iran. We’re conducting expansionist policy of Israel and everybody’s afraid to say it. They control much of the media…”
WAS IT POSSIBLE somewhere in Ohio someone could say such things and not be ostracized, denounced, trounced? Actually, no. There really was no campaign. Few in the political business dared have anything to do with him, donate to him, invite him, quote him. Only a maverick Tea Party organizer offered him an evening campaign event. Otherwise, the popular sheriff and then Congressman was pretty much shunned. And yet he came in a close third on Nov.2, 2010, with over 30,000 votes.
Reposted with permission from www.gazagateway.org
Gaza is not as isolated from the rest of the world as it was a few years ago, but it is still cut off from the West Bank and it’s hard to find convincing security reasons why. For example, Israel prohibits students from traveling from Gaza to the West Bank – individual security checks are not even an option because the ban is sweeping. Israel does not allow goods from Gaza to be sold in the West Bank or Israel, while at the same time allowing exports from Gaza to Europe to be transferred through its own airports and seaports. It also imposes restrictions on the import of building materials into the Gaza Strip. The impact is felt mainly by international organizations rather than the local government, which gets all the cement, gravel, and steel it needs from the tunnels. Ongoing restrictions make it difficult for Gaza’s economy to recover, but they also split families apart and impede Gaza residents’ access to higher education and the opportunity to acquire training in a number of highly needed fields.
True, Israel does give Gaza residents electricity and water. That is, if by “give” you mean “sells”. Israel also does not “give” money to Gaza’s residents – it does transfer tax monies it collects on their behalf, although sometimes with great delay.
The Palmer Commission decided not to examine the legality of the overall closure of the Gaza Strip and determined only that the naval blockade imposed on Gaza was legal. In its report, the commission included a recommendation for Israel to continue easing restrictions on movement “with a view to lifting its closure and to alleviate the unsustainable humanitarian and economic situation of the civilian population”.
Six months ago, we posted the top ten reasons why the opening of Rafah Crossing just doesn’t cut it. The list is still valid, but here’s the gist of it: Even if Egypt fully opens Rafah to movement of people and goods, this would still not provide a solution for the problem of movement restrictions between Gaza and the West Bank. The desire to push Gaza onto Egypt and therefore make it possible to cut the Strip off from the West Bank is a common one, but its implementation would entangle Israel legally and politically.
Firing Qassam rockets on civilians is an unjustifiable war crime. This much is clear. We should keep in mind that the rockets didn’t start after the disengagement from Gaza and that four and a half years of closure have done nothing to reduce the threat of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel – but don’t take our word for it. As for disengagement, Israel did remove its permanent military installations and civilian settlements from the Gaza Strip, but did this really end Israeli control over Gaza? Try asking a Palestinian from Gaza if she feels that Israel has really “disengaged” from her life. She wouldn’t think twice before responding in the negative. Israel controls her ability to study in the West Bank, export goods, fish, farm her lands and visit relatives. True, it’s hard to imagine control of a territory without permanent military presence on the ground, but this is exactly Gaza’s unique situation today.
Hamas’ victory in parliamentary elections in 2006, shortly after the “disengagement” was met with surprise. Withdrawal from Gaza didn’t bolster those in support of the peace process as many in Israel had expected. Today, more than five years after the elections were held, they are still used as an excuse for the closure.
First of all, it is important to stress that international law prohibits collective punishment of a civilian population and for good reason. Past experience has taught that civilians, irrespective of their political convictions, must remain “off limits”. This principle must be upheld in Gaza, in Israel and in all other places in the world facing conflict.
While we’re on the topic of the elections, and to be accurate, the elections Hamas won were not held just in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. It was more than a year after the elections, in June 2007, that Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip.
No elections have been held in Gaza since 2006 and the debate between the various political movements in the Strip has been ongoing. One way of following this debate is through polls, such as those published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. For example, a poll from December 2011 shows that if elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council were to be held now, Hamas would get 35% of the vote and Fatah 43%. It’s worth recalling also that over half of Gaza’s population is below voting age. How can children be blamed for the outcome of elections in which they didn’t take part?
An Israeli defence consultancy is assisting with dirty work in Colombia previously monopolised by the United States.
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| Global CST, a defence industry firm, got close to Colombian President Santos over a period of years [EPA] |
Much fuss has been made in recent years in neoconservative circles in the US and among Israeli foreign ministry officials, regarding the danger to global security posed by an alleged Islamist infiltration of Latin America.
A pet factoid wielded by self-appointed experts on the matter is that it is currently possible to travel by air from Caracas to Tehran with only one stop in Damascus. Lest policymakers and the general public fail to respond with adequate alarm to such news, the severity of the threat is underscored via invented links between Muslims in Latin America and every potentially unfavourable regional trend, resulting in a spectre of Islamo-narco-socialist crime cartels menacing the southern border of the US.
In a WikiLeaks cable from the US embassy in Bogota dated December 1, 2009, a rather unexpected entity joined the usual lineup of Latin America-based threats. The cable discusses the manoeuvres in Colombia of the Israeli firm Global Comprehensive Security Transformation (Global CST), founded by Major General (Res) Israel Ziv – former head of the Operations Directorate of the Israeli military – and contracted to aid in the fight against both criminal organisations and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as to evaluate potential perils emanating from Ecuador and Venezuela:
“Over a three year period, Ziv worked his way into the confidence of former [Colombian] Defense Minister [Juan Manuel] Santos by promising a cheaper version of USG [US government] assistance without our strings attached. We and the GOC [government of Colombia] learned that Global CST had no Latin American experience and that its proposals seem designed more to support Israeli equipment and services sales than to meet in-country needs”.
It is not clear why the US government should express surprise at the apparent failure to address “in-country needs” when its own Latin American experience includes the multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia, inaugurated more than a decade ago ostensibly as a means of curbing drug production and trafficking. In 2009, I spoke with farmers in the southern department of Putumayo who outlined in-country effects of the plan, such as repeated airborne fumigation of their subsistence crops, livestock, water supplies and children.
A substantial portion of Plan Colombia funds went to US-based private security contractors. Today, 97 per cent of cocaine that reaches the US reportedly hails from said country.
As for the strings that are allegedly attached to official US assistance, Amnesty International has objected to the fact that “the State Department continues to certify military aid to Colombia, even after reviewing the country’s human rights record” – which happens to hold the distinction of being the worst in the hemisphere.
Global CST’s experience
Ziv’s contention regarding the international relevance of his background in the Israeli military – “We felt that our experience could contribute tremendously to the world security and the world peace [sic]” – is, meanwhile, challenged by the following passage from the Bogota cable:
“In February 2008, [Colombian National Police] sources reported that a Global CST interpreter, Argentine-born Israeli national Shai Killman, had made copies of classified Colombian Defense Ministry documents in an unsuccessful attempt to sell them to the [FARC] through contacts in Ecuador and Argentina. The documents allegedly contained high value target (HVT) database information. Ziv denied this attempt and sent Killman back to Israel”.
http://www.aljazeera.com/AJEPlayer/player-licensed-viral.swf
Colombia’s new scheme to reach reconciliation
Ziv’s denial becomes less compelling in light of the fact that Global CST has lent its services to both the armed forces of the nation of Georgia as well as to Georgia’s breakaway republic of Abkhazia. The firm’s peaceable aims are furthermore called into question by the arms and training it reportedly provided to the Guinean military junta responsible for massacring pro-democracy protesters in Conakry in 2009.
Present on the board of Global CST is former Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh, whose recent efforts on behalf of peace have included defending the mass slaughter of Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead because Hamas had failed to “bring… investors to Gaza”. The former minister did not explain how investors were expected to navigate an Israeli military blockade when smaller items such as pasta and pencils were not permitted passage.
‘The Israelites of Latin America’
The encroachment of Global CST into the imperial realm of the US government was facilitated by Juan Manuel Santos, current president of Colombia, who has explained that the firm was recommended to him during his term as defence minister by his friend, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.
In a promotional video for Global CST, Santos characterises the company as follows: “They are people with a lot of experience; they have been helping us to work better. It’s like the person who is in the gym, and when you go and you do the exercise he tells you how to do it better.”
More effusive praise is offered on behalf of the athletic trainers in a video for an Israeli television programme – in which Santos announces: “We’ve even been accused of being the Israelites [sic] of Latin America, which personally makes me feel really proud.”
This pronouncement occurs shortly after the programme’s narrator has described Colombia’s 2008 raid into Ecuador and assassination of FARC second-in-command Raul Reyes. The narrator’s Hebrew assessment of the operation is transcribed with English subtitles: “All of a sudden, the methods that proved efficient in Nablus and Hebron begin speaking Spanish.”
In addition to a shared pride in illegal extraterritorial targeted killings, there are other reasons Colombia might qualify as the Israel of Latin America. For starters, the late Carlos Castano Gil – father of modern Colombian paramilitarism – acknowledged copying the paramilitary concept from the Israelis during a training excursion to Israel in the 1980s.
In matters requiring the displacement of human beings from land, the Zionist example is undoubtedly invaluable, though the Colombians unfortunately lack the option of citing Biblical endorsement of territorial claims. In both locales, the liberal application of the term “terrorist” provides convenient justification for the elimination of excess sectors of the populace, be they Palestinians in refugee camps or Colombian peasants whose existence infringes on the designs of international corporations vis-a-vis area resources.
That the death and destruction wrought by the Jewish state and the paragon of military-paramilitary collusion that is the state of Colombia quantitatively and qualitatively outweighs that wrought by their respective nemeses has meanwhile not jeopardised their positions as top recipients of US military aid.
Military creativity
The necessity of casting victims in the role of aggressors has resulted in a range of creative military performances in both the original Israel and its Latin American apprentice. In 2008, Colombian soldiers were revealed to have murdered possibly thousands of civilians and then dressed the corpses in FARC attire in order to receive bonus pay and extra holiday time.
Juan Manuel Santos was serving as defence minister under President Alvaro Uribe when the “false positives” scandal broke. Despite this and other details – such as that, since Uribe’s assumption of office, more trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined – Santos managed to comment on the aforementioned Israeli television programme that fear “no longer exists” in Colombia and that “now we feel free”.
As for Israeli military creativity, spokeswoman Avital Leibovitch explained in the aftermath of the 2010 massacre on the Mavi Marmara – part of the Freedom Flotilla endeavouring to break the Gaza siege – that the victims of the incident were not the nine slain Turkish humanitarian activists – but rather the commandos who had shot them.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry dutifully uploaded a Flickr photo set entitled “Weapons found on Mavi Marmara“, which underscored the violent tendencies of the seafarers and consisted of images of water bottles, kitchen knives, screwdrivers, keffiyehs, and a slingshot decorated with pink and purple stars and the word “Hizbollah”. That the slingshot was not actually “found on Mavi Marmara” but rather resurrected from an irrelevant archive is suggested by the label accompanying the image, according to which “This photo was taken on February 7, 2006 using a Nikon D2Xs”.
Colombians were given the opportunity to defend their position as the Israelites of Latin America when, upon completion of Uribe’s presidential term in 2010, he was recycled into the post of Vice-Chairman of the UN panel tasked with investigating the flotilla massacre. The resulting report – which determined that a group of flotilla activists had engaged in an “extreme level of violence”, and which upheld the validity of the Israeli siege of Gaza in spite of the UN’s own classification of the siege as illegal – presumably benefited from Uribe’s professed notion that human rights organisations often serve as fronts for terrorists.
The peace community of San Jose de Apartado
Defending her position as de facto Colombian paramilitary of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, meanwhile, Mary O’Grady reported an alliance between FARC terrorists and “peaceniks” in a 2009 article about the Colombian peace community of San Jose de Apartado, affiliated with various NGOs.
The peace community, which I visited that same year, was founded in 1997 in the Uraba region in northwestern Colombia as a response to decades of armed conflict. Employing a system of collective work groups dedicated to the cultivation of crops ranging from miniature bananas to cacao, the community rejects collaboration with all armed actors: military, paramilitary and FARC guerrillas alike. Nevertheless, as of its twelfth anniversary in 2009, it had suffered 184 assassinations out of a population of approximately 1,500.
Twenty-four assassinations have been attributed to the FARC, while the remainder is attributed to the armed forces and/or paramilitary formations. Such calculations render all the more ludicrous O’Grady’s advertisement of the claim that “the peace community helped the FARC in its effort to tag the Colombian military as a violator of human rights”.
Community co-founder Maria Brigida Gonzalez – whose 15-year-old daughter Elisena was murdered in her sleep in 2005 by members of the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade, which claimed Elisena was a FARC combatant – speculated to me that the ultimate purpose of such attacks was “to sow terror so that we all flee and the land’s resources can be exploited”.
Colombia as regional security model
In a WikiLeaks cable from March 2009, the US embassy in Bogota specified that the region of Uraba was one of “17 strategic focus areas” within one of “two key swathes of territory” in Colombia where Global CST was assisting the Uribe government in “achiev[ing] irreversibility” in the battle against the FARC. Nine months later, the same embassy sounded the alarm that the firm had infringed on US territory.
It is doubtful, of course, that the Israelis will usurp the US legacy in Colombia, one ironic manifestation of which was contained in the email update I received last year from the peace community listing recent instances of harassment and killing of area residents: “John Kennedy was assassinated the afternoon of Wednesday, May 11 when he left his house to meet some neighbours for a game of soccer.”
Whether or not Colombians start naming their offspring David Ben-Gurion, the fact that the country has been applauded by the US State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank as a regional role model in confronting security threats ensures the fortification of a system in which profits depend on the perpetuation of insecurity.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in Nov. 2011. She is an editor at PULSE Media, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Guernica Magazine, and many other publications.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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