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Two states or a state of two nations?

Following the Israeli elections the far-right leader Avigdor Lieberman has become foreign minister and deputy prime minister. His views on the Arab-Israeli conflict have provoked a clash with President Obama. And he is calling the Israeli Palestinians’ citizenship into question, even talking of eventual ‘transfer’

by Joseph Algazy and Dominique Vidal

David Rotem’s leitmotif is allegiance to the state, but he never spells it out. So much so that, before leaving, we put it to him: “Imagine yourself in Nazi Germany. Where would your loyalty lie?” “To the state,” he replied, without blinking an eye. That retort, given in the Knesset building in Jerusalem, left us stunned, particularly since he went on to tell us how his father left Germany when Hitler came to power.

Rotem is a lawyer, former deputy speaker of the Knesset, prospective director of the new Law Commission and close confidant of Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party (Israel is Our Home). He rehashes his recent election speeches. “Whether he’s a Jew, a Muslim or a Christian, a citizen must demonstrate his loyalty to the state. If he does not, he’s not a citizen,” he says. The same tirade castigates Rabbi Meyer Hirsh for having met Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1), and those Arab parliamentarians who dared to protest against the recent Gaza massacres.

The party’s stance is that every Israeli should swear an oath of allegiance to the flag (which includes the Shield of David, the symbol of Judaism), sing the national anthem (which evokes the “Jewish soul”) and do military service (Arabs, apart from the Druze and some Bedouin, are exempt along with ultra-orthodox Jews).

Yisrael Beiteinu’s electoral slogan leaves no doubts: “Only Lieberman speaks Arabic”. The historian Shlomo Sand quipped: “In his native Moldova he was a night-club bouncer. Now it’s the Arabs who get bounced”. This joke does, however, ignore one fact about the “Russian” party (2): its official line is not to expel Palestinians (3) – as in 1948 – but to form a future Palestinian state around the areas where they are most populous, particularly Umm al-Fahm and the northern Triangle. In exchange, Israel would annex parts of the West Bank settled by Jews, starting with those who surround East Jerusalem.

Le Monde Diplomatique for more

By Ronalyn V. Olea

MANILA — In his follow-up report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Prof. Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said the Philippine government has not eliminated extrajudicial killings from its counterinsurgency operations.

Alston visited the country in February 2007 to investigate the spate of killings in the country. A year after, he released his findings and recommendations in April 2008.

In his report to the UNHRC dated April 29, 2009, Alston said that the ‘most important shortcoming has been the Government’s failure to institutionalize or implement the many necessary reforms that have been identified.’

Alston’s primary recommendation is the elimination of extrajudicial executions from counterinsurgency operations.

The special rapporteur noted that, “The AFP has not changed its counterinsurgency techniques in such a way as to eliminate the likelihood that leftist activists will be killed.”

Alston said he is not aware of any public statement by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo instructing the security forces to stop the targeting and public labeling of political and civil society organizations as fronts for New People’s Army (NPA) operations.

In fact, Alston said, Arroyo’s order that the Armed Forces of the Philippines [AFP] should end the insurgency “once and for all” by 2010 has been used to justify vilification of civil society organizations.
While some public statements have been made, Alston said he has not received evidence of any institutional reforms by the Philippine government designed to prevent the targeting and execution of civil society activists.

Bulatlat for more

Evan Abramson

In October, I visited rural communities in two Paraguayan departments, Alto Paraná and San Pedro, to photograph the social conflicts generated by industrial soy production. Slightly smaller than California, Paraguay is the world’s fastest-growing producer of soybeans and the fourth-largest soy exporter in the world. In 2007, soy covered 6.2 million acres of the country, and the area devoted to the crop was expected to increase to 6.5 million acres by the end of 2008.1 This exponential increase is a result of the rising demand for meat and cattle feed in China, as well as the booming agro-fuel industry in Europe. Industrial soy serves these markets.
…

Miguela Céspedes Bogado (above), 15, was born in the village of San Isidro, Alto Paraná, without legs. She has a partial foot extending directly from her right thigh, and two fingers are missing from her right hand. Her father used to use a backpack kit to apply pesticides and herbicides to his fields for his family’s own consumption, but stopped doing so about eight years ago. San Isidro, a small community composed of 100 or so houses clustered around one single road, is surrounded by transgenic soy plantations on all sides, at a higher elevation than the community itself. Cancer rates are high in the area; miscarriages are common, and several children have been born with birth defects.

Due to a dangerous combination of widespread corruption among local authorities, porous borders, and lax enforcement of environmental laws, soy cultivation dumps more than 6 million gallons of pesticides and herbicides into the Paraguayan soil every year, including several that are classified by the World Health Organization as extremely hazardous, like 2,4-D, Gramoxone, Paraquat, Metamidofos, and Endosulfan. About 90% of the soy produced in Paraguay is transgenic Roundup Ready, a variety engineered by the St. Louis–based Monsanto Company to be resistant to its patented herbicide.5 Fields of RR soy are indiscriminately fumigated with the herbicide, which kills everything in its path except the soy.

NACLA for more photos and stories

By Heather Pringle

A photo published in the Independent, one of Britain’s best newspapers, this week sparked outrage from some readers. The image showed a new facial reconstruction by British forensic artist Richard Neave of the earliest known anatomically modern human in Europe. Neave based his reconstruction on a partial skull and jawbone excavated from a cave in Romania and radiocarbon dated to some 34,000 to 36,000 years ago. But here was the shocker for some British readers: the reconstruction, made for the BBC’s The Incredible Human Journey program, showed a dark-skinned individual who blended what we think of as European, Asian and African features.

First some background. Neave is a leading facial reconstruction expert whose work has long received accolades from both archaeologists and by British homicide detectives. I have met him, interviewed him, and found him a meticulous researcher. Moreover, current scientific evidence tells us that anatomically modern humans originated in Africa some 200,000 years ago, and likely migrated into Eurasia 60,000 years ago or earlier. So the idea that Europe’s first Homo sapiens sapiens possessed facial features from Asian or African populations makes perfect sense to me and to many others. Indeed, Alice Roberts, a physical anthropologist at Bristol University, reportedly told the BBC’s Radio Times, “That’s probably what you’d expect of someone who was among the earliest populations to come to Europe.”

But some British readers took real umbrage at the idea that they were descended from Africans. “This is total crap. Pseudoscience,” wrote one angry reader on the Independent’s website. “Expect more insults and junk science until the BNP [the far-right British National Party, which reportedly has a whites-only policy] comes into power,” warned another. Someone else offered up his own origins myth. “The white and oriental races are not of this planet,” he explained. “Our first visit here was 22 million years ago….Theories such as originating in Africa from Lucy, Iraq cradle of civilization, etc., is mainstream misinformation.”

There was much here that disturbed me—the blatant racism, the disdain for science, and the touting of nutty ideas gleaned from crackpot internet sites. But I think what bothered me most was that I had heard this all before, when I was researching archaeology and anthropology in Nazi Germany for my book, The Master Plan. Senior Nazis, including Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, believed that most Germans descended from blonde-haired, blue-eyed supermen and women who climbed down from heaven and lived for a time in Atlantis. These Nazi leaders deliberately ignored all the scientific evidence on human origins.

Achaeology for more

(Submitted by Zakir Gowani)

By Steve Lancaster

You won’t find many references to it in the media in the West, but over the past 23 years, the government of Uganda and a rebel group called the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony and based in the north of the country, have been engaged in a civil war in which the LRA has abducted children as young as nine years old and then forced them to fight as front-line troops. These children – perhaps as many as 30,000 in number – have been kidnapped and then trained to be soldiers involved in actions which include torching villages, killing villagers and abducting other children. The stories of LRA atrocities are hard to stomach. The knock-on effects are enormous. Every day, literally thousands of children in Uganda leave their homes and walk (often many kilometres) to the nearest town to find sanctuary in the hope that they will avoid the fate of their LRA contemporaries. They sleep in the corridors of hospitals or schools, hidden away to avoid being kidnapped. They are the invisible children.
This weekend (25-26 April), The Invisible Children campaign organized a protest action in over 100 cities throughout the world. The idea was simple. For just one day, people involved in the protest would pretend to be ‘abducted’. Then they would be ‘rescued’ by a mogul and, having spent a single night in discomfort would go back to their homes, hopefully having achieved a degree of media exposure and sufficient motivation to spread the word that the kidnapping of children with the aim of training them to be soldiers is a moral outrage which the authorities should place at the top of their political agendas.

Yes, we may have problems in our own back yard. But surely not on this scale. In Uganda (and other neighbouring countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo), thousands, if not millions of young lives are being blighted. This protest was an attempt to cast light on this.

New Internationalist for more

By Alex Bivol

Reuters
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Entropa, the art installation that prompted an outcry in Sofia when it was unveiled inside an European Union building in January, was being dismantled on May 11, the Czech presidency of the EU said in a statement.

David ?erný, the Czech author of the installation, requested that his artwork was taken down after the centre-right government of former prime minister Mirek Topolanek lost a parliamentary confidence vote, AFP reported.

The government had been “wiped out by the old bolsheviks and socialists and president (Vaclav) Klaus,” AFP quoted ?erný as saying.

“The Czech presidency preferred the option to let the installation remain in Brussels as originally planned. However, the presidency fully respects artistic freedom and therefore also the wish of the creator of the installation to remove the work already on the chosen day,” the presidency’s statement said.

Entropa attracted large crowds of onlookers in front of the Justus Lipsius building, routinely used for EU summits. But it also sparked controversy as soon as it went up, since it played on widely-spread and unflattering stereotypes of EU member states, portraying Romania as a Dracula theme-park, France as a country on strike, while Britain was not represented at all.

Yet nowhere else did the outrage reach the same proportions as in Bulgaria, depicted as a squat toilet, which in Bulgaria is known as a “Turkish toilet”.

Sofia Echo for more

By Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner

JERUSALEM — Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.

The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny. However, certain elements related to it — the threatened destruction of unauthorized Palestinian housing in the redevelopment areas, for example — have brought widespread condemnation.

But as Pope Benedict XVI prepares to visit Christian sites here this week and as the Obama administration promotes a Palestinian state with parts of Jerusalem as its capital, Israeli activity in the area, known as the holy basin — land both inside and just outside the Old City — will be cause for growing concern and friction.
“Everything Israel does now will be highly contentious,” said Robert H. Serry, the United Nations special Middle East coordinator, on a recent tour of East Jerusalem. He warned the Israeli authorities “not to take actions that could pour oil on the fire.”

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, however, that it will push ahead. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said last week of the activity in one core area: “I intend to act on this issue with full strength. This is the land of our sovereignty. Jewish settlement there is our right.”

New York Times for more

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

By Feryal Gauhar, author of the book “The scent of wet earth in August”, based on the screenplay of Tibbi Gali.

On Friday, May 15th 2009
Time: 6:00-8:30 pm
Moderator: Omair Rana
Venue: South Asian Media Centre, 177-A, Shadman2, Lahore

Ms Gauhar will be joining us for a discussion after the film.

Ms. Sarah Tareen
Coordinator
South Asian Documentary Festival
Lahore Film and Literary Club
177-A,Shadman-2,Lahore
South Asian Media Centre.
(92-42) 7555621-8