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Weekly Newsletter.  November 14 - November 21,  2018. Visit our website: English ; French . To help us , click here . 

Editorial

In Breach of Human Rights, Netanyahu Supports the Death Penalty for Palestinians

By   Ramzy Baroud 
Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is escalating his war on the Palestinian people, although for reasons almost entirely related to Israeli politics. He has just given the  green light to legislation that would make it easier for Israeli courts to issue death sentences against Palestinians accused of carrying out 'terrorist' acts.
Netanyahu's decision was made on November 4, but the wrangling over the issue has been taking place for some time.
The 'Death Penalty' bill  has been the rallying cry for the Israel Beiteinu party, led by ultra-nationalist Israeli politician and current Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, during its 2015 election campaign.
But when Lieberman attempted to push the bill in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) soon after the forming of the current coalition government in July 2015, the draft was resoundingly defeated by 94 to 6 with Netanyahu himself opposing it.
It has been defeated  several times since then. However, the political mood in Israel has shifted in ways that have obliged Netanyahu into conceding to the demands of the even more hawkish politicians within his government.
As Netanyahu's coalition grew bolder and more unhinged, the Israeli Prime Minister joined the chorus. It is time "to wipe the smile off the terrorist's face," he  said in July 2017, while visiting the illegal Jewish settlement of Halamish, following the killing of three settlers. At the time, he called for the death penalty in "severe cases."
Ultimately, Netanyahu's position on the issue evolved to become a carbon copy of that of Lieberman. The latter had made the 'death penalty' one of his  main conditions to join Netanyahu's coalition.
Last January, the Israel Beiteinu's proposed bill  passed its preliminary reading in the Knesset. Months later, on November 4, the first reading of the law was approved by Israeli legislators, with the  support of Netanyahu himself.
Lieberman prevailed.
This reality reflects the competing currents in Israeli politics, where the long-reigning Israeli Prime Minister is increasingly embattled, by accusations from within his coalition and outside of being too weak in his handling of the Gaza Resistance.
Coupled with the tightening ring of  police investigation about corruption by Netanyahu, his family, and closest aides, the Israeli leader is pounding on Palestinians with every possible opportunity to display his prowess.
Even the likes of former Labor Party leader, Ehud Barak, is attempting to resurrect his failed career as a politician by comparing his past violence against Palestinians with the supposedly weaker Netanyahu.
Netanyahu is "weak", "afraid" and is unable to take decisive steps to rein in Gaza, "therefore he should go home," Barak recently  said during an interview with Israeli TV Channel 10.
Comparing his supposed heroism with Netanyahu's 'surrender' to Palestinian Resistance, Barack  bragged about killing "more than 300 Hamas members (in) three and a half minutes," when he was the country's Defense Minister.
Barack's sinister statement was made concerning the killing of hundreds of Gazans, including women, children and newly graduated police cadets in Gaza on December 27, 2008. That was the start of a war that killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians and set the stage for more, equally lethal, wars that followed.
When such ominous comments are made by a person considered in Israel's political lexicon as a 'dove', one can only imagine the vengeful political discourse championed by Netanyahu and his extremist coalition.
In Israel, wars - as well as racist laws that target Palestinians - are often the outcome of Israeli politicking. Unchallenged by a strong party and unfazed by United Nations criticism, Israeli leaders continue to flex their muscles, appeal to their radicalized constituency and define their political turfs at the expense of Palestinians.
The Death Penalty bill is no exception.
The bill, once enshrined in Israeli law, will expectedly be applied to Palestinians only, because in Israel the term 'terrorism' almost always refers to Palestinian Arabs, and hardly, if ever, to Israeli Jews.
Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and one of a few embattled Arab members of the Knesset, like most Palestinians, understands the intentions of the bill.
The law is "intended mainly for the Palestinian people," she  told reporters last January. "It's not going to be implemented against Jews who commit terrorist attacks against Palestinians, for sure," as the bill is drafted and championed by the country's "extreme right."
Moreover, the Death Penalty bill must be understood in the broader context of the growing racism and chauvinism in Israel, and the undermining of whatever feeble claim to democracy that Israel possessed, until recently.
On July 19 of this year, the Israeli government  approved the Jewish 'Nation-state Law' which designates Israel as the 'nation-state of the Jewish people', while openly denigrating the Palestinian Arab citizens of the state, their culture, language, and identity.
As many have feared, Israel's racist self-definition is now inspiring a host of new laws that would further target and marginalize the country's native Palestinian inhabitants.
The Death Penalty law would be the icing on the cake in this horrific and unchallenged Israeli agenda that transcends party lines and unites most of the country's Jewish citizens and politicians in an ongoing hate-fest.
Of course, Israel has already executed hundreds of Palestinians in what is known as "targeted assassinations" and "neutralization", while killing many more in cold blood.
So, in a sense, the Israeli Bill, once it becomes law, will change little regarding the bloody dynamics that govern Israel's behavior.
However, executing Palestinians for resisting Israel's violent Occupation will further highlight the growing extremism in Israeli society and the increasing vulnerability of Palestinians.
Just like the 'Nation-state Law', the Death Penalty bill targeting Palestinians exposes Israel's racist nature and complete disregard for international law, a painful reality that should be urgently and openly challenged by the international community.
Those who have allowed themselves to 'stay on the fence' as Israel brutalizes Palestinians, should immediately break their silence.
No government, not even Israel, should be allowed to embrace racism and violate human rights so brazenly and without a minimum degree of accountability.
- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is 'The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story' (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is  www.ramzybaroud.net .

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Commentary 

Yes, What about Yemen?

After the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, many are asking 'But what about Yemen?' Yes, indeed, what about Yemen, but what about Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Somalia?   What about Egypt in 1956, what about Iran in 1953 and what about Palestine from 1917 to the present day? 
There is a string of 'what abouts?' going all the way back to the French occupation of Algeria in 1830.  The 'western' presence in North Africa and the Middle East is an unbroken record of criminality, invasion, occupation, massacre, assassination and overthrow stretching back over two hundred years. 
The 'west' is always killing someone somewhere, or helping someone else to kill them. Nothing has ever stopped it.  Not 9/11 and certainly not the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Even now Britain is ramping up its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, consolidating its position as a partner in the slaughter of Yemenis. 
This is the template for what we now see around us.  In the Middle East, the 'west' has been a curse. But what is 'the west'?
No more than a useful cover, basically for three countries, Britain, France, and the US.  Their outriders, Australia, Canada, other European states, in it for the money, or bullied and intimidated into joining the 'coalition of the willing' or whatever propaganda phase is cooked up to conceal the massacre of millions, are no more than useful bit players masquerading as independent countries.   
From 1798 when French warships arrived off the coast of Egypt until 1956 when Britain and France were humiliated at Suez it these two countries that brought havoc to the Middle East, wave after wave and country after country.  If the Palestinians lost Palestine it was because the British gave it to the Zionists. If the Zionists have nuclear weapons it is because France gave them their nuclear reactor.
These two powers have a disgusting record wherever you want to look. Their 'peace conference' after the end of the First World War was a 'more war' conference.  Wars on the people of Palestine and Iraq, along with the wars already running, on the people of Egypt and Algeria, where the French butchered Algerians in the streets of Paris in the 1960s, having butchering them in their occupied home country.  They massacred them and asphyxiated them with smoke in the caves where they were hiding. So much for  la mission civilisatrice.
By the 1960s, finally, exhausted, militarily and financially, no longer able to hang on to their empires, the two governments had to let go and hand power over to the third pillar of the 'western' imperium, the US.  Eisenhower stopped the Suez war in 1956 but only because it was an opportunity to let France and Britain know who was boss in the Middle East from now on. 
It is scarcely remembered that at the time, the US, having overthrown the Iranian government in 1953, and the Guatemalan government in 1954, was planning to overthrow the Syrian government at the very moment the British, French and the Zionist colony in Palestine attacked Egypt.
France and Britain are no longer able to start wars of their own. They themselves are now bit players. They follow the US wherever it wants to go, into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, running in to grab whatever they can from the chaos.  
The consequences for the people of the Middle East are deaths on a massive scale and refugees pouring out of their ruptured countries, drowning in the Aegean or the Mediterranean while the killing continues somewhere else.  No 'western' country takes any responsibility for any of this. When they jump ashore from their rubber boats or press against border fences, the collective 'west' is affronted as if this humanitarian crisis had nothing to do with it, as if these people were the cause of the problem rather than the symptom.
Morality, justice, law, human rights, civilization, democracy are all irrelevant, an insult when coming from the mouths of the politicians responsible for this devastation. The clichés are uttered and the caravan of death moves on. Witness Khashoggi. They want him forgotten as soon as possible so they can get on with business as usual, i.e. selling weapons so the Saudis can bomb more buses and wedding parties in Yemen and starve more children to death.
Has it escaped anyone's attention that all the countries or territories they or their colonial implant in the Middle East, Israel, invade, bomb or occupy, with the single exception of the attack on Serbia in the 1990s, are almost wholly or predominantly Muslim?   
The Syrians and Yemenis this year, Iraqis, Libyans and Afghans, Somalis often, the Palestinians all the time and just about everyone in the Muslim world at some point, going back to 1798.  
Did Fouad Zakaria really have to ask, after 9/11, 'why do they hate us?' If there is a 'clash of civilization,' who does anyone think has created it and whose blood was really shed along 'Islam's bloody borders,' as described by Samuel Huntington?
Have a look at a map of the Middle East and North Africa. At some point, virtually all of it has come under 'western' attack.  The exceptions happen to be those pandering countries that give the 'west' what it wants and keep on giving, the Gulf states for example.
Money trumps morality every time. What is the shocking murder of one man compared to the hundreds of billions to be made from arms sales and other deals with Saudi Arabia? They armed Saddam and then they hanged him. They devastated Libya and then Hillary Clinton guffawed when told of Qadhafi's murder. 
Now the world has Trump but he is no worse than Bush junior or Bush senior. Certainly, he has not killed as many people. Behind the orange hair, the baggy suits and the crude locker room talk he is certainly no worse than the well-dressed, well-spoken Obama, who made ringing speeches while firing missiles into Yemen and Somalia while starting the war on Syria and while giving more money to Israel.  
The pseudo-liberals, from the babbling talk show hosts to the editors of their house journals, the  Washington Post  and the  New Yorker , hate Trump because he is not one of them. He offends them by his presence. Neither do they have any affinity with the people he represents, including the soldiers from impoverished regions and decaying cities who fight the wars they support.   
They are no more interested in how many Palestinians, Syrians or Yemenis died last week than Trump is. They just want him gone, by whatever means, by whatever misrepresentation, deception or provocation it takes.
They like Hillary. She is a woman, after all, a feminist icon who crashed through the glass ceiling by being as bad as the men and worse than most. This is what is called a victory for women everywhere. She is no more outraged by the murder of the women and children of Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Yemen than they are but she is still a woman.
Apparently, the biological fact of gender trumps everything and would have trumped Trump had not the scheming, diabolically cunning Vladimir Putin corrupted the elections from somewhere in the heart of the Kremlin. The man with the orange hair was his Manchurian candidate. 
This is the nonsense these frauds prefer to believe. What they blindly refuse to accept is that a woman who looks like them and talks like them was a warmongering, arrogant, lying psychopath who lost because the American people had enough common sense to reject her.  
Is Trump worse than Hillary would have been? Who knows? Who cares? Outside the serried rank of the pseudo-liberals baying for Trump's blood, who gives a rat's arse? Let the Americans fight their civil war. The more damage they do to each other the less the damage they might be able to do to other countries. 
- Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.


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