European Jews Sign Petition Critical of Israel
The "Call for Reason."
Huffington Post
05/ 2/10
PARIS - More than 3,000 European Jews, including prominent intellectuals,
have signed a petition speaking out against Israeli settlement policies and
warning that systematic support for the Israeli government is dangerous.
The petition's signatories include French philosophers Bernard-Henri Levy
and Alain Finkielkraut as well as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Greens leader in the
European Parliament.
Backers - who compare their goals to those of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel
Jewish lobbying group in the U.S. - plan to present their position at a news
conference at the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday.
Supporters hope to build a European movement that is both "committed to the
state of Israel and critical of the current choices of its government."
Israeli columnist Yossi Sarid, a former Cabinet minister identified with
Israel's dovish peace movement, praised the initiative in an op-ed published
in the Haaretz daily Sunday.
"These are people who seize every opportunity to defend Israel publicly and
remain faithful to it," he wrote. "But even their patience is running out
and their hearts are filled with sincere concern."
Israel's Foreign Ministry declined to comment because the initiative is not
government-sponsored.
Many signatories are from France, where the petition has received much press
coverage. France's Jewish community has hotly debated the petition, entitled
"Call for Reason." The president of France's leading Jewish association,
CRIF, declined to sign, saying he objected to some of its language and its
tone.
"Do Israelis need the Jewish Diaspora to know what is 'the right' decision,
what should be the borders of a country that their sons and daughters are
protecting?" Richard Prasquier wrote in Le Figaro newspaper.
***
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18574
*The Dark Underbelly of Israel's Security State
Anat Kamm: Spy or whistleblower?*
by Jonathan Cook
Global Research: April 9, 2010
What is misleadingly being called in Israel the "Anat Kamm espionage affair"
is quickly revealing the dark underbelly of a nation that has worshipped for
decades at the altar of a security state.
Next week 23-year-old Kamm is due to stand trial for her life -- or rather
the state's demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret
documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily.
She is charged with spying.
Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at
least the stringent efforts of Israel's security services to get him back to
Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too.
This episode has been dragging on behind the scenes for months, since at
least December, when Kamm was placed under house arrest pending the trial.
Not a word about the case leaked in Israel until this week when the security
services, who had won from the courts a blanket gag order -- a gag on the
gag, so to speak -- were forced to reverse course when foreign bloggers
began making the restrictions futile. Hebrew pages on Facebook had already
laid out the bare bones of the story.
So, now that much of the case is out in the light, what are the crimes
committed by Kamm and Blau?
During her conscription, Kamm copied possibly hundreds of army documents
that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating
in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court
rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh,
who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.
Blau's crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked
information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing
their contempt for the rule of law.
His reports included revelations that the senior command had approved
targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military's extra-judicial
assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a
commitment to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted
Palestinians even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the defence
ministry had a compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of
settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are
illegal in international law).
In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defence
against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau
would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile.
But this is Israel. Here, despite a desperate last-stand for the principles
of free speech and the rule of law in the pages of the Haaretz newspaper
today, which is itself in the firing line over its role, there is almost no
public sympathy for Kamm or even Blau.
The pair are already being described, both by officials and in chat forums
and talkback columns, as traitors who should be jailed, disappeared or
executed for the crime of endangering the state.
The telling comparison being made is to Mordechai Vanunu, the former
technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who exposed Israel's secret nuclear
arsenal. Inside Israel, he is universally reviled to this day, having spent
nearly two decades in harsh confinement. He is still under a loose house
arrest, denied the chance to leave the country.
Blau and Kamm have every reason to be worried they may share a similar fate.
Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's secret police, which has
been leading the investigation, said yesterday that they had been too
"sensitive to the media world" in pursuing the case for so long and that the
Shin Bet would now "remove its gloves".
Maybe that explains why Kamm's home address was still visible on the charge
sheet published yesterday, putting her life in danger from one of those
crazed talkbackers.
It certainly echoes warnings we have had before from the Shin Bet about how
it operates.
Much like Blau, Azmi Bishara, once head of a leading Arab party in Israel,
is today living in exile after the Shin Bet put him in their sights. He had
been campaigning for democratic reforms that would make Israel a "state of
all its citizens" rather than a Jewish state.
While he was abroad in 2007, the Shin Bet announced that he would be put on
trial for treason when he returned, supposedly because he had had contacts
with Hizbullah during Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006.
Few experts believe Bishara could have had any useful information for
Hizbullah, but the Shin Bet's goals and modus operandi were revealed later
by Diskin in a letter on its attitude to Bishara and his democratisation
campaign. The Shin Bet was there, he said, to thwart the activities of
groups or individuals who threatened the state's Jewish character "even if
such activity is sanctioned by the law".
Diskin called this the principle of "a democracy defending itself" when it
was really a case of Jewish leaders in a state based on Jewish privilege
protecting those privileges. This time it is about the leaders of Israel's
massive security industry protecting their privileges in a security state by
silencing witnesses to their crimes and keeping ordinary citizens in
ignorance.
Justifying his decision to "take the gloves off" in the case of Kamm and
Blau, Diskin said: "It is a dream of every enemy state to get its hands on
these kinds of documents" -- that is, documents proving that the Israeli
army has repeatedly broken the country's laws, in addition, of course, to
its systematic violations of international law.
Diskin claims that national security has been put at risk, even though the
reports Blau based on the documents -- and even the documents themselves --
were presented to, and approved by, the military censor for publication. The
censor can restrict publication based only on national security concerns,
unlike Diskin, the army senior command and the government, who obey other
kinds of concerns.
Diskin knows there is every chance he will get away with his ploy because of
a brainwashed Israeli public, a largely patriotic media and a supine
judiciary.
The two judges who oversaw the months of gagging orders to silence any press
discussion of this case did so on the say-so of the Shin Bet that there were
vital national security issues at stake. Both judges are stalwarts of
Israel's enormous security industry.
Einat Ron was appointed a civilian judge in 2007 after working her way up
the ranks of the military legal establishment, there to give a legal gloss
to the occupation. Notoriously in 2003, when she was the chief military
prosecutor, she secretly proposed various fabrications to the army so that
it could cover up the killing of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Khalil
al-Mughrabi, two years earlier. Her role only came to light because a secret
report into the boy's death was mistakenly attached to the army's letter to
an Israeli human rights group.
The other judge is Ze'ev Hammer, who finally overturned the gag order this
week -- but only after a former supreme court judge, Dalia Dorner, now the
head of Israel's Press Council, belatedly heaped scorn on it. She argued
that, with so much discussion of the case outside Israel, the world was
getting the impression that Israel flouted democratic norms.
Judge Hammer has his own distinguished place in Israel's security industry,
according to Israeli analyst Dimi Reider. During his eight years of legal
study, Hammer worked for both the Shin Bet and Israel's Mossad spy agency.
Judge Hammer and Judge Ron are deeply implicated in the same criminal outfit
-- the Israeli security establishment -- that is now trying to cover up the
tracks that lead directly to its door. Kamm is doubtless wondering what
similar vested interests the judges who hear her case next week will not be
declaring.
Writing in Haaretz today, Blau said he had been warned "that if I return to
Israel I could be silenced for ever, and that I would be charged for crimes
related to espionage". He concluded that "this isn't only a war for my
personal freedom but for Israel's image".
He should leave worrying about Israel's image to Netanyahu, Diskin and
judges like Dorner. That was why the gag order was enforced in the first
place. This is not a battle for Israel's image; it's a battle for what is
left of its soul.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the
Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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