by Alex Kane 

Ben Gurion Airport

Israeli authorities have implemented another way to impede free access to the occupied Palestinian territories for American travelers.

Haaretz’s Amira Hass reported over the weekend that Israel is now forbidding “tourists from the United States and other countries to enter the territories under Palestinian Authority control without a military entry permit – but it has not explained the application process to them.”

Hass’s report was published as opposition mounts to the Senate bill that grants Israelis visa-free travel to the U.S. while also codifying Israel’s practice of denying U.S. travelers entry on the basis of security concerns. That Senate bill exposes a galling aspect of the “special relationship.” All the military aid and diplomatic support to Israel doesn’t shield Americans from being routinely discriminated against based on their political affiliations or ethnic background. And Israel can count on the U.S. not putting up a fight. Having the whole Congress behind you means never having to think twice about these actions.

The policy Hass exposes is yet another example of Israeli authorities’ free reign at border crossings, which includes detaining, interrogating and deporting Americans.

Here are some of the details in the Haaretz report: Christian clerics from the United States told Hass they can’t go meet Palestinians in the West Bank because they signed an official Israeli declaration at Ben-Gurion Airport stating that they need a special military permit to visit those areas. (Their mistake, apparently, was that they were honest about wanting to visit the West Bank.) The catch is that the Israeli authorities wouldn’t explain to them how to get these permits.

Hass provides the text of the document the Christian clerics signed:

1. I understand that this permit is granted me for entry and visitation within Israel only, and it has been explained to me that I am unable to enter the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority without advance authorization from the Territory Actions Coordinator and I agree to act in accordance with these regulations.

2. I understand that in the event that I enter any area under the control of the Palestinian Authority without the appropriate authorization all relevant legal actions will be taken against me, including deportation and denial of entry into Israel for a period of up to ten years

Americans wishing to visit illegal settlements in the West Bank do not have to sign such a document, an Israeli attorney told Hass.

It’s another element of Israel’s crackdown on foreign travel in occupied Palestine. In January 2013, Hass reported that Israel renewed restrictions on foreigners already living in the West Bank by stamping their passports with the words “Judea and Samaria.” The move, which was first revealed by the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, aims to prohibit foreigners in the West Bank–some of whom are Palestinians who lived abroad or people who married Palestinians–from visiting East Jerusalem or Israel.

The report on the Christian clerics notes that the practice of requiring tourists wishing to go to the West Bank to sign a declaration “was discontinued and renewed only at the beginning of this year.” But I had to sign a similar declaration–perhaps not exactly the same one–in January 2011.

The background to why I had to sign an Israeli government document stating I would not go to the areas under the Palestinian Authority’s control begins in early 2010.

I had joined a small delegation part of the larger Gaza Freedom March and entered the besieged territory to spend a few days there. Afterwards, I naively thought it was a good idea to try to enter Israel through the Taba border crossing to make my way to the other part of occupied Palestine I had not seen. I was denied entry; my assumption is that it was because I had been to Gaza.

The next year, I flew into Ben-Gurion Airport to join a human rights delegation traveling through the West Bank. I had arrived with a brand new passport, but it was to no avail: Israeli authorities detained me at the airport and held me for a good five hours. They immediately knew I had been to Gaza in the past and wanted to go to the West Bank, and so I admitted that fact after initially concealing it. I was questioned by an Israeli official who told me he was a Ministry of Defense employee. He mentioned the word terrorism and wanted to know who I met with in Gaza. He asked me to write down the names of who I was going to meet with in the West Bank; I scribbled down some names but nothing that would truly reveal my friends.

The interrogation occurred within the first hour I was there, and then four slow hours passed by with no word from Israeli authorities. At that point I was steeling myself for the experience of deportation. But eventually, they asked me to come into a separate room. They furnished a piece of paper with a declaration similar to the one that the Christian clerics Hass reports on had to sign. I looked it over; by then I was desperate to get out of Ben-Gurion. It said that I will agree not to enter areas that the Palestinian Authority controlled. I signed it. And then I made my way to Ramallah–there was no way for Israel to enforce the declaration I put my name on.

My experience could have been much worse; my whiteness probably had a lot to do with why I was not deported. It was a very tiny slice of what people like Nour Joudah went through. And the Senate bill being pushed by Barbara Boxer will give a red, white and blue seal of approval to the Israeli crackdown on U.S. travel to the West Bank–which means that we can expect many more stories like Joudah’s and the Christian clerics’, with the U.S. not doing a thing about it.

BBC survey finds that Germany is most widely approved country internationally

Times of Israel

A poll released Tuesday by the BBC confirms Israel remains one of the world’s least popular countries, with more than half of those surveyed identifying its influence as “mainly negative.” Only North Korea, Pakistan and Iran fared worse.

Fifty-two percent of respondents view Israel in a negative light; 21% rated it in positive terms, placing it far behind China’s 42% and Russia’s 30%.

The global survey ranked Germany as the country with the best public image — 59% described Europe’s economic powerhouse as playing a “mainly positive” role in international affairs, ahead of runners-up Canada and the UK.

The same percentage that found Germany mostly positive rated Iran’s perception as mostly negatively, placing the Ayatollahs last among the 16 countries (and the EU) that were rated by respondents.

The BBC’s write-up of the survey didn’t offer a precise geographical breakdown of which countries participated in the poll, simply describing respondents as “randomly selected people” in 25 nations.

Israelis can hope that certain countries excluded from the study might have performed worse. Participants weren’t asked to express their impressions of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

NOVANEWS

Anesthesiologists in Gaza Hospitals confirmed that a nitrous oxide canister, bought from IsraHell, contained carbon monoxide and was used mistakenly. 

Gaza minister of health, Mufeed Mukhallalati, says medics at al-Shifa Hospital had an “unprecedented case, which almost killed several patients at the Hospital’s main operation room.”

He added that anesthesiologists noticed that the patients’ reaction to the anesthetic gas was very dangerous. Four patients suffered severe cardiac arrest, but medics managed to save the patients’ lives.

“We decided to stop all surgeries as a precaution,” he said.

The minister added that a special committee was appointed to probe the case. Initial findings show that gas in the canister used for anesthetisation was carbon monoxide instead of nitrous oxide. Carbon Monoxide is toxic to humans.

“In Gaza, we are not allowed to produce nitrous dioxide or import it except via Israel, so we are investigating how the anesthetic gas was replaced with carbon monoxide,” al-Mukhallalati said.

• NOVANEWS

• May 23, 2013 Exclusive: The Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s does not just implicate President Ronald Reagan and his senior aides but the Israeli government which secretly supplied helicopters, guns and computers that were used to hunt down and exterminate Ixil Indians and other perceived enemies of the state, reports Robert Parry. By Robert Parry At the height of Guatemala’s mass slaughters in the 1980s,

  May 23, 2013

  Exclusive: The Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s does not just implicate President Ronald Reagan and his senior aides but the Israeli government which secretly supplied helicopters, guns and computers that were used to hunt down and exterminate Ixil Indians and other perceived enemies of the state, reports Robert Parry.

  By Robert Parry

  At the height of Guatemala’s mass slaughters in the 1980s, including genocide against the Ixil Indians, the Reagan administration worked with Israeli officials to provide helicopters that the Guatemalan army used to hunt down fleeing villagers, according to documentary and eyewitness evidence.

  During testimony at the recent genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, one surprise was how often massacre survivors cited the Army’s use of helicopters in the scorched-earth offensives.

  Journalist Allan Nairn, who covered the war in Guatemala and attended the Rios Montt trial, said in an interview, “one interesting thing that came out in the trial, as witness after witness testified, was a very substantial number of them talked about fleeing into the mountains and being bombed, attacked and machine gunned from U.S. planes and helicopters.

  “At the time this was going on, I was aware this was happening in some cases, but from the testimony of the witnesses, it sounded like these attacks from U.S. planes and helicopters were more frequent than we realized at the time. That’s an example of how we don’t know the whole story yet – how extensive the U.S. complicity was in these crimes.”

  Part of the mystery was where did Guatemala’s UH-1H “Huey” helicopters come from, since the U.S. Congress continued to resist military sales to Guatemala because of its wretched human rights record. The answer appears to be that some helicopters were arranged secretly by President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff through Israeli intelligence networks.

  Rios Montt began pressing the United States for 10 UH-1H helicopters in June 1983, as his military campaign was ramping up. Since Guatemala lacked the U.S. Foreign Military Sales credits or the cash to buy the helicopters, Reagan’s national security team looked for unconventional ways to arrange the delivery of the equipment.

  On Aug. 1, 1983, NSC aides Oliver North and Alfonso Sapia-Bosch reported to National Security Advisor William P. Clark that his deputy Robert “Bud” McFarlane was planning to exploit his Israeli channels to secure the helicopters for Guatemala, according to a document that I discovered at Reagan’s presidential library.

  “With regard to the loan of ten helicopters, it is [our] understanding that Bud will take this up with the Israelis,” wrote North and Sapia-Bosch. “There are expectations that they would be forthcoming. Another possibility is to have an exercise with the Guatemalans. We would then use US mechanics and Guatemalan parts to bring their helicopters up to snuff.”

  By then, McFarlane had a long and intimate relationship with Israeli intelligence involving various backdoor deals. [For more on McFarlane's Israeli channels, see Consortiumnews.com's "How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast."]

  Israeli Channel

  McFarlane’s approach to Israel for the helicopters was successful, according to former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, who described some of the history behind Israel’s activities in Guatemala in his 1992 memoir, Profits of War.

  Ben-Menashe traced the Israeli arms sales to Guatemala back to a private network established in the 1970s by Gen. Ariel Sharon during a gap when he was out of the government. Sharon’s key representative in Guatemala was a businessman named Pesach Ben-Or, and through that channel, Israel supplied military gear to Guatemala’s security services in the 1980s, Ben-Menashe wrote.

  In an interview on Thursday, Ben-Menashe said the Israelis supplied a total of six helicopters to the Guatemalans along with computers and software to keep track of alleged subversives who could then be identified and executed. Ben-Menashe said he learned of the mass slaughters during his travels to Guatemala and reported back to his Israeli superiors about the atrocities involving the equipment that they had authorized. The response, he said, was concern but inaction.

   “They weren’t for killing these people, not at all,” Ben-Menashe said. “But they thought their interest was to help the Reagan people. If the Reagan people wanted it [the equipment sent to Guatemala], they would do it. [They thought,] ‘this is bad, but is it any of our business? Our American friends are asking for our help, so we should help them.’”

  After our phone interview had ended, Ben-Menashe called me back to stress that the Israelis were unaware of the genocidal nature of the Guatemalan military campaigns against the Ixil Indians, although the Israelis did recognize that they were assisting in mass murders of dark-skinned Guatemalans.

  “As we saw it, they [Guatemalan military authorities] were targeting all non-white villagers who were sitting on fertile lands that the white Guatemalans wanted,” he said, adding that when he reported this information to his superiors, “the Israelis rolled their eyes [in dismay] but said, ‘this is what our friends in the Reagan administration want.’” [For more on Ben-Menashe's work for Israeli intelligence, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege and America's Stolen Narrative.]

  Besides the helicopters for hunting down villagers who fled into the jungles, the computer equipment and the sophisticated software made the Guatemalan killing machine vastly more efficient in the towns and cities. A former U.S. Green Beret operating in Guatemala once told me that he witnessed Guatemalan security forces stopping buses and inputting identification numbers of the passengers into a computer to select those who would be dragged off to the side of the road and summarily shot.

  Death Lists

  From first-hand reporting in Guatemala, journalist Nairn also observed the security advantages gained from detailed death lists. Nairn said soldiers under Gen. Otto Perez Molina, the current president, “described how they would go into town armed with death lists provided them by G2 military intelligence, death lists of people who were suspected of being collaborators of the guerrillas or critics of the army.

  “They told how they would strangle people with lassos, slit women open with machetes, shoot people in the head in front of the neighbors, use U.S. planes, helicopters and 50 gram bombs to attack people if they fled into the hills.”

  Nairn said, “The U.S. had also arranged for Israel to step in and become the principal supplier of hardware to the Guatemalan army, in particular assault rifles, the Galil automatic rifle. This was because the administration was running into problems with Congress, which wouldn’t go along with a lot of their plans to aid the Guatemalan military, so they did an end run by using the government of Israel.”

  Though the focus of the case against Rios Montt has been the genocide inflicted on Ixil villages in the northern highlands – where some 626 villages were eradicated by the Guatemalan military – those massacres were only part of the estimated 200,000 killings perpetrated by right-wing Guatemalan regimes since a CIA-sponsored coup ousted an elected government in 1954.

  The bloodbath was at its worst in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as he encouraged the anti-leftist slaughters that claimed the lives of some 100,000 Guatemalans. Reagan expanded his support for the Guatemalan security forces even though the CIA was keeping his administration informed of the systematic killings underway.

  Another document that I discovered in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to Guatemala’s dictators so they could pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but people associated with their “civilian support mechanisms.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide.”]

  As for Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala for 17 especially bloody months in 1982-83, the 86-year-old ex-general was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by a criminal court on May 10 and was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

  But that conviction was overturned on Monday on a 3-2 vote by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court which is still dominated by allies of the military and the oligarchy. As for the Reagan administration officials and the Israelis who aided and abetted Rios Montt and his fellow generals, there is no indication that any accountability will be exacted.

  Source: http://consortiumnews.com/

   

In curious interview with little-known US magazine, hardline legislator also suggests America might not survive its current financial woes

Times of Israel

Israel should not accept US foreign aid because it is immoral and allows Washington to exert political pressure on Jerusalem, a lawmaker from the Knesset’s ruling party said in an interview with an American magazine published Monday.

Deputy Knesset Speaker Moshe Feiglin (Likud) also seemed to suggest that the US was doomed to fall due to its economic woes, but that Israel’s survival was guaranteed because the country “carries moral weight.”

“I’m totally against this [US foreign] aid [to Israel],” Feiglin told The New American, a relatively unknown publication affiliated with far-right American politics. “It cannot be when, first of all, the Americans are standing in line like two or three miles in the snow to get a job. To get any kind of aid from America when, economically, we are in a much, much better position doesn’t look moral to me.”

Furthermore, American aid “is not in our favor, not economically, not militarily, not in any way,” the MK told the magazine’s Alex Newman. (He gave the interview last month in the Knesset, but it only appeared on Monday.) “This aid serves psychological purposes, not anything else. We are talking about 1.5 percent of our income, of what Israel is producing — we can definitely deal without it.”

Since World War II, Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, having received a total of $118 billion, most of it in the form of military assistance. Currently, Washington supports Israel with about $3 billion per year.

Newman asked Feiglin about former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s argument that the US administration is using the aid “to obtain leverage over the Israeli government when Israel should be thinking about its own interests rather than what Washington thinks.”

Feiglin responded, “I 100 percent agree.”

A freshman lawmaker from the far-right flank of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, Feiglin is known in Israel for his controversial views, which range from denying that the Palestinians are a people to advocating on behalf of medical marijuana. In recent weeks, he made headlines for his efforts to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Last month, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein approved a decision to prevent Feiglin from visiting the volatile holy site for fear his presence there could spark violence and endanger Israel’s security. Protesting the move, Feiglin suspended himself from coalition discipline, vowing to cease all parliamentary work until he’s allowed to visit the Temple Mount.

‘History shows that big empires fall, and it doesn’t look like America today is on the rise’
In the lengthy interview with The New American, Feiglin also espoused the curious view that the US might not be able to survive its current financial crisis, while he is more optimistic about Israel’s future.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen with America — I’m more worried about America than about Israel,” he told the magazine. “I know it sounds maybe a little bit crazy. However, we are a nation of 3,300 years. We have our little ups and downs over our history, but it seems like physically we are stronger than ever.

“History shows that big empires fall, and it doesn’t look like America today is on the rise,” he continued. “So there’s more — from my historical understanding — there’s more to worry about now for America than about Israel. I think — and again, excuse me for saying so — I think America needs Israel not any less than Israel needs America.”

Feiglin said he is aware that his comments sound “a bit funny” — though not because the world’s last remaining superpower is also the world’s strongest economy, but because the US has so many more inhabitants than Israel. “But even though I’m aware of the numbers, I’m still saying what I’m saying because I think that Israel carries moral weight, and also technological and strategic and territorial weight, that is much bigger than its size.”

Based in Wisconsin, The New American is a biweekly magazine affiliated with the American far right. The publication admits to not trying to report objectively and instead having “an editorial point of view,” which regarding foreign policy is based on “avoiding foreign entanglements and going to war only when necessary to defend our country and citizens.”