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Sunday, August 14, 2011

Egypt: Israeli 'Mossad agent' to be tried in absentia

Cairo alleges that Israeli Ofir Harari, Jordanian national worked for Mossad to recruit Egyptians in telecoms sector
 
Roee Nahmias and AFP 
 
Latest Update: 08.14.11, 22:21 / Israel News

An Israeli and a Jordanian are to go on trial in Egypt on charges of spying for Israel's intelligence services, Cairo's news agency MENA reported on Sunday.

Ibrahim abu-Zaid, a telecoms engineer from Jordan and Israeli Ofir Harrari, who the Egyptians say is an "officer with the Mossad" are to go on trial in Egypt's State Security Court on charges of "spying for a foreign country with the purpose of harming Egyptian national interest," the report said.

Harari, who has not been arrested, will be tried in absentia.



Egypt: Israeli 'spy' to remain in jail / Roee Nahmias

Israeli-American Ilan Garpel to be held for another 15 days on espionage charges
Full story

Abou Zeid was reportedly arrested in April 2010, prior to Egypt's January 25 Revolution. He was interrogated by National Security Prosecution after Egyptian intelligence had detected "espionage activities" between him and Harari, serving Israeli intelligence.

Harari had allegedly tasked the Jordanian with recruiting Egyptians working in the telecoms sector "to obtain technical data," and the two had devised a system to bug telephone calls in Egypt.

It was not immediately clear when the trials would begin.

On June 12, Egypt arrested US-Israeli dual national Ilan Grapel on suspicion of spying for Israel, which denied any such charge.

Egypt's espionage allegations come at a sensitive time when Israel is trying to understand where Egypt's new temporary regime is headed. I


It has been estimated both in Israel and in Egypt that the Egyptian allegations stem from a wish to appease Egyptian demonstrators protesting against the close relations that existed between Israel and Egypt in the pre-uprising days.
 
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4108817,00.html

Israeli textbooks portray Palestinians as ‘terrorists, refugees, and primitive farmers’

by Omar Barghouti on August 8, 2011

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This insightful research by respected Israeli scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan will confirm what Palestinian researchers have always known: Israel's prevailing culture of racism, fundamentalism, support for war crimes, and apartheid against Palestinians is mainly a product of an educational system that indoctrinates Jewish-Israeli students with militant colonial values and extreme racism that turn them into "monsters" once in uniform.

Guardian: Academic claims Israeli school textbooks contain bias "Nurit Peled-Elhanan of Hebrew University says textbooks depict Palestinians as 'terrorists, refugees and primitive farmers"

"Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service.
"People don't really know what their children are reading in textbooks," she said. "One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians."
In "hundreds and hundreds" of books, she claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a "normal person". The most important finding in the books she studied – all authorised by the ministry of education – concerned the historical narrative of events in 1948, the year in which Israel fought a war to establish itself as an independent state, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the ensuing conflict.
The killing of Palestinians is depicted as something that was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state, she claims."
Those who see this as an aberration of Zionism seem to lack sufficient understanding of what Zionism really is and the central role it plays as a patently racist ideology in justifying ethnic cleansing and racist domination over Palestinians.

One should not wonder then why, at the height of the Israeli massacre in Gaza  2008-09, a Tel Aviv University poll (reported in the Jerusalem Post,  Jan. '09) of Jewish-Israeli opinion showed a shocking 94% support for the assault, despite full knowledge of the enormous suffering this Israeli aggression had inflicted upon the 1.5 million Palestinians incarcerated in the Gaza "prison camp" and of the massive destruction of their civilian infrastructure.

As in every other colonial system, only sustained and effective pressure from within as well as from without can put an end to this downward spiral of criminality, impunity and unspoken racism. More BDS is needed to end Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid. Other than the obvious benefits to indigenous Palestinians, suffering more than six decades of this three-tiered system of Israeli oppression, an end to this system of oppression may well transform most Israelis from colonial "monsters" into normal humans.

(ed note: Nurit Peled-Elhanan is author of  Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. International publisher I.B.TAURIS description: "She analyzes the presentation of images, maps, layouts and use of language in History, Geography and Civic Studies textbooks, and reveals how the books might be seen to marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish-Israeli territorial identity. This book provides a fresh scholarly contribution to the Israeli-Palestinian debate, and will be relevant to the fields of Middle East Studies and Politics more widely.")

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/08/israeli-textbooks-portray-palestinians-as-terrorists-refugees-and-primitive-farmers.html

'Israel aims to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque'



Sat Aug 13, 2011 4:28PM GMT
 
 
A former US congressional candidate believes that Israel's ultimate objective in constructing new settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque.


“I have believed for a long time that Israel wants this al-Aqsa Mosque simply not to exist,” Mark Dankof told Press TV on Friday.

“Basically I think this [settlement expansion] is part of a systematic plan to take all of Jerusalem and to replace ... the al-Aqsa Mosque with a so-called rebuilt Jewish temple based on the model of the one that was destroyed in 1870,” he added.

On Thursday, the Israeli regime approved the construction of 1,600 new illegal settlement units in East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

According to Israeli officials, Tel Aviv also plans to authorize the building of another 2,700 illegal housing units in the occupied land within “a couple of days.”

The regime claims the construction has been endorsed because of the "economic crisis" in Israel.

Israelis have been protesting against rising housing prices and social inequalities since mid-July. The protesters demand a new taxation system (lower indirect taxes, higher direct taxes), free education and childcare, an end to the privatization of state-owned companies and more investment in social housing and public transport.

Israel occupied East al-Quds alongside the West Bank in 1967 and later annexed both territories. The international community has refused to recognize either of the moves.

In September 2010, the Israeli regime resumed the expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territories after a 10-month partial freeze, prompting the Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders to break off US-sponsored talks with Tel Aviv that had been resumed after a lengthy stalemate.

MSK/HGH

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/193776.html

Israel uses "primitive, racist" policies against Palestinian prisoners

11 August 2011
Thousands of Palestinian families have a loved one in Israeli prison.
 
RAMALLAH (IPS) - “I’m sick with worry about my daughter,” Yehiya al-Shalabi says. “I’m afraid of what they are doing to her. She has done nothing to deserve this. If they have anything against her why don’t they bring her to trial?”

Hana al-Shalabi, Yehiya’s 27-year-old daughter, has been languishing in Israeli administrative detention for more than two years. She is the longest serving Palestinian female political prisoner in administrative detention.

According to her lawyer, the young woman from Jenin in the northern West Bank does not know why Israeli soldiers arrested her several years ago. She also does not know how long they will keep her in jail or what they will charge her with.

Shalabi, like nearly 200 other Palestinian prisoners, is being held in Hasharon prison. A senior Israeli military officer has just renewed the administrative detention order against her for the fourth time.
Israel’s “administrative detention” policy states that Palestinian political prisoners can be held for six months without trial or charges being brought against them. The detention order can be renewed every six months.

According to the official narrative, the policy of administrative detention is used by the Israeli military when they have “classified and secret” information against Palestinian prisoners. Both the prisoner and their lawyer are forbidden from seeing the classified information, and therefore are unable to challenge accusations or to question those who made the accusations.

The administrative detention policy is used when Israeli authorities have “secret witnesses” such as Palestinian informants, or has obtained intelligence in a clandestine manner which would not stand up in an Israeli civilian court but are par for the course in Israeli military courts.

No fair trial

It’s a primitive and racist way to hold a trial and no civilized country in the world uses such methods. Needless to say Israel’s legal system could never do this to an Israeli Jew. Even the Israeli settlers who carry out acts of terror against Palestinians in the West Bank are not treated in this manner,” Qadura Fares, the president of the Palestinian Society Prisoners’ Club in Ramallah, said.

Administrative detainees are not given a fair trial. Basically the Israeli military prosecutor and the military judge are in agreement. It is very rare for a judge to disagree with the military prosecutor,” Fares says.

In the 1970s Ali Jamal, also from Jenin, spent seven years in administrative detention. He holds the record for the longest administrative detention to date.

At that time the Israeli military courts relied on confessions from Palestinian prisoners for convictions,” Fares explained. “But Jamal wouldn’t confess so the laws were changed to allow the ‘secret witnesses and secret files’ to be used by the IDF [Israeli military] to convict political prisoners.”

The soldiers came for Hana al-Shalabi in the middle of the night over two years ago. “They ransacked the house and assaulted me when I tried to stop them from taking my daughter away,” Yehiya al-Shalabi said. “My daughter had finished her studies and was engaged to get married. She was very diligent and stayed home most of the time except for when she helped tend our agricultural crops. She had no social life outside and wasn’t political in any way.”

However, Israeli special forces assassinated Hana’s 24-year-old brother several years ago after they accused him of being a member of Islamic Jihad, Yehiya said. “They had shot and wounded him. He phoned us, as he lay badly injured on the ground. But before he could finish the call the death squad moved in and shot him at close range, several times in the head and in the eye.”

The conditions in administrative detention are harsh, just as they are for all Palestinian prisoners.

Confessions through coercion

Confessions are coerced through physical and verbal humiliation, torture, emotional blackmail such as bringing in elderly or sick relatives who are held as hostages until the prisoner confesses,” Fares said.
Imani Nafa, aged 47, spent ten years in an Israeli jail as a young woman, from 1987 to 1997 during the first Palestinian intifada. Nafa had everything going for her. She had finished university and was working as a nurse. But, she became politically involved and had planned to carry out a shooting and bombing attack against Israeli soldiers.

Nafa was caught and kept in a filthy, cramped cell with no window. Fluorescent lights were kept on permanently, causing sensory deprivation and the inability to distinguish between day and night.
I was beaten and held in stress positions while handcuffed for several days, unable to move. I was deprived of sleep and when the interrogation finished I was forced to drink from the drain in my cell and eat mouldy food,” Nafa said. “I was told that if I worked with them to spy on other prisoners I would be freed, but if I refused to do so I would be imprisoned for a very long time and harshly treated.”

http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-uses-primitive-racist-policies-against-palestinian-prisoners/10256

Sources of fun dwindle for Gaza’s children

10 August 2011
The seashore is a place for Gaza families to relax, if they can afford to get there.
 
GAZA CITY (IPS) - On any given evening, Gaza’s small downtown pedestrian area, the Jundi, is crowded. Many people are fleeing the heat of their homes during the regular power cuts. Most are there for want of something to do, even if that means merely sitting on the park’s simple concrete benches to talk and sip tea.

Snack vendors sell roasted nuts and seeds, and tea and coffee sellers circulate with flasks of sweet mint tea and strong Arabic coffee. In recent years, mimicking New York City’s Central Park, three horses with old-fashioned style carriages also trot around the park.

The organizers of the carriage rides say their idea came from the old days.

Four years ago, my father saw a horse and carriage in an old film and it reminded him of Palestine in the past when horses and carriages were common,” says Ramadan Al, a 21-year-old blacksmith.
Al and his 13 siblings became jobless when Israel imposed its extensive siege on the Gaza Strip in 2006. The family needed a new source of income.

We used to make doors, windows, whatever people wanted, but after the borders closed, steel stopped coming into Gaza, and we couldn’t do much with the steel we had because of the constant power cuts,” Al says.

Since we already had horses and knew how to work with metal, we decided to design a leisure carriage.”

The project was an immediate success. “We had a lot of work right away, because it was a novelty. People started asking us to deliver couples to their wedding halls.”

But now, a few years later, work is not as steady. “The novelty has worn off a little,” Al admits. On an average evening, ten families ride the carriages; on a weekend, half as many more.

The problem is that people who have money are saving it for gifts and donations during the month of Ramadan and for the new school year,” says Al.

We charge five shekels to circle around the park, but when I see families who don’t have the money but whose children want to ride, we take them without fare, so the kids can enjoy themselves a little.”
Al says he preferred working as a blacksmith but was left with no choice under the Israeli siege than to find a new source of income. “As difficult as the siege is and our lives in Gaza have become, we always find a means to continue living, despite the worst conditions.”

Train offers respite from reality

With a similar desire to create something novel, Gaza engineers created their version of a children’s train.

Made largely from scraps and spare car parts, the red and white, two-car one-engine train cruises from the Jundi along Gaza’s main streets playing music and giving children a ride for just two shekels. Idyllic scenes of green pastures dress the passenger cars as Gaza’s children escape the bleak reality of grey cement, bombed buildings and bulldozed farmland.

Gaza City’s municipal park offers little other than dehydrated greenery and a different place to while away the hot afternoon hours. The fountain is waterless, the plants stunted. The children’s play area has a number of short plastic slides and a swing-less swing.

With a dearth of leisure options to choose from, families still visit the park, friends take breaks together and children hunt for a place to play.

Beach is free but excursions cost

In summer, Gaza’s coast is the most congested leisure venue, families seeking cool and change. Most families come equipped with flasks of tea and picnic spreads. Children swim, fly kites and play football, women wade and cool off in the low waves and young men sit together with tea and tobacco water pipes.

Yet while the sea itself doesn’t cost anything, getting there does and not everyone can afford the excursion. Jaber Rjila, from a repeatedly bulldozed farming area in southeastern Gaza, is among those who rarely go to the beach, even though it is just a half hour ride from his home.

To take my six kids and my wife, it’d cost nearly 200 shekels just for transportation and a simple picnic,” he says. “We can’t afford that, so we just try to enjoy ourselves on our land here. Our kids might have a school trip once a year to the sea or a park and for half a day they get to play. But that’s not enough, it’s not like elsewhere where there is safety, where there is work and children have places like amusement parks.”

Slightly south of the Gaza harbor, the women and children of a family from Beach refugee camp not far away bask in the sea’s cooling water. Children, having learned about buoyancy, stuff their shorts and t-shirts with washed up pieces of styrofoam. Simplicity at its best, the sea is the main leisure option in a Strip devoid of movie theatres and where the few existing playgrounds are run down.
For those with the shekels to spare at the beach, Fadel Bakr’s small motorboat offers short coast-hugging jaunts on the sea.

I started this seven years ago. But these days not as many people take rides: either they don’t have money or they are afraid of the Israeli navy’s shooting,” says Bakr.

A 10-minute boat ride costs 20 shekels.

We used to go much further out into the water, a real sea ride, but now we generally go just a few hundred meters. Even so the Israelis have shot at my boat with passengers in it.”
Some are still willing to risk it, keen for a change and some leisure activity in their lives encaged and under siege.

All rights reserved, IPS - Inter Press Service (2011). Total or partial publication, retransmission or sale forbidden.

http://electronicintifada.net/content/sources-fun-dwindle-gazas-children/10253