Warsaw 1943 German Nazi - Gaza Israel Nazi 2008
Warsaw Guetto (1940-1943): Górecky & Schindler
Appalling photographs of abuse and torture by American guards at U.S. military bases and detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan shocked the international community, but the Palestinians have been suffering harsher treatment inside Israeli prisons since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians' suffering at the hands of the Israelis is worse than in any other part of the world. Many of the Palestinian detainees are children, who are subjected to physical and psychological torture by Israeli interrogators and prison guards.
Mohammed Mahsiri, a 17-year-old resident of Dheisheh refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, was arrested by Israeli occupation forces almost a year and a half ago. "I was taken to a detention centre and interrogated…The interrogation would begin at 2 o'clock in the afternoon and would finish after eleven p.m. I was beaten all the time, especially if the soldiers did not get the answers they wanted," he told IPS.
"I was sent to be beaten by other soldiers and forced to stand in the rain with only thin clothes on. They would try to convince me that I did something that I did not do in order to get the confession they wanted. After being tortured at the detention centre for one month, I was in prison for 13 months."
Recent reports by human rights groups and legal experts document widespread, systematic violation of international laws at Israeli detention centers, where several prisoners are children under the age of 18, most of whom are subjected to torture, harsh interrogation tactics, physical beatings, deplorable living conditions and no access to fair trial.
Although the International Convention of the Rights of the Child as well as Israeli law defines "a child" as someone under the age of 18, Israeli military order system in force inside the occupied West Bank and Gaza classifies Palestinian children over the age of 16 as adults. The lack of protection afforded to Palestinian child prisoners contrasts sharply with the generous rights and treatment granted to arrested Israeli children.
Conditions in Israeli prisons violate a range of international human rights standards. Palestinian children are isolated from adult Palestinians. Accommodation is overcrowded and unhygienic. There is often not enough bedding or even space for the basic mattresses. Food is very poor and often insufficient. Washing and use of toilets is restricted and children lack access to medical provision and formal education.
Moreover, Palestinian children over 14 years old are tried as adults in Israeli military courts, and are often detained with adult inmates - another direct violation of international law.
Latest figures released by Defense for Children International (DCI), an independent group that defends children's rights, show that there are 398 Palestinian children currently held inside Israeli detention centers and prisons, the youngest of whom is just 14 years old.
"Usually, the Israeli troops invade the child's house in the middle of the night, in order to frighten the child and his family," Ayed Abuqtaish, research coordinator with DCI's Ramallah offices. "Many Israeli soldiers and vehicles surround the house, and other soldiers invade or force their way into the house…
"They intimidate the child to prepare him for interrogation. When the child arrives at the interrogation centre, they employ different methods of torture."
There are widespread accusations of physical abuse, Abuqtaish says, "but currently, they concentrate mainly on psychological torture like sleep deprivation, or depriving him of food or water, or putting him in solitary confinement, or threatening him with the demolition of his home or the arrest of other family members."
"Children have also reported that the Israeli interrogators have threatened to sexually abuse them," Abuqtaish added.
Like the United States, Israel defends its interrogation techniques, saying that they are a necessary tool against the "war on terror". In 1987, according to Israel's Landau Commission of Inquiry into interrogation policies, the Israeli government ruled that "a moderate degree of pressure, including physical pressure, in order to obtain crucial information, is unavoidable under certain circumstances."
"Israel is a state party to the International Convention Against Torture," Abuqtaish said. "In its reports to the committee, Israel always says that their use of 'moderate physical pressure' is consistent with the obligation of the treaty, but, needless to say, 'moderate physical pressure' is obviously torture in itself."
Legal experts, meanwhile, say that the military courts that try Palestinian children are presided over by military personnel, most of whom lack legal qualifications. Moreover, Palestinian child prisoners have no guaranteed right to legal representation and it is extremely difficult for any lawyer to represent Palestinians before these courts.
"The Israeli court system does not look like any other court system in the world," says Arne Malmgren, a Swedish lawyer who has worked as legal observer inside Israeli military courts during trials of Palestinian children. "Israeli military staff, the judge, the prosecutor, the interpreter — they are all in military uniform. There are plenty of soldiers with weapons inside the courtroom.
"The small children come into the courtroom in handcuffs and full chains; there can be up to seven children at the same time in the courtroom. One lawyer described it as a cattle market. The trial is more like a plea bargain — before the proceedings, the prosecutor and the lawyer have already agreed on the child's sentence, and then they just ask the judge if he agrees, and he almost always does."
"There are no witnesses, nothing. And the worst thing is what happened before the child arrives at the courtroom — when they interrogate these young boys and girls to get them to sign confessions to things they may or may not have done, Malmgren added.
Although the vast majority of arrested Palestinian children are charged with throwing stones at Israeli occupation forces, it's extremely rare for them to avoid prison sentence, raising concerns that the punishment is based on political conditions rather than on objective legal standards.
Hopefully, when negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli officials continue this week over a possible prisoner exchange deal that may involve the release of all Palestinian woman and children in return for an Israeli occupation soldier captured by Palestinian resistance groups last summer, Palestinians will be able to see their relatives, friends and loved ones again.
"When I was released from prison, it was the best day of my life," said Mohammed Mahsiri, who was recently released from Israeli prisons. "We were beaten every day. The food was very bad. It was the hardest thing we had to face. No child should ever have to experience that."
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Żydzi w Polsce w czasie 2 wojny światowej.wmv
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West Bank 29 July 2008
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The conflict did not begin in 1967, and anti-Zionism and Arab objections to the existence of Israel did not begin then either. All of the ills that have befallen the Arabs of Palestine result in large part from their refusal to allow Jewish settlement in their midst. Violent opposition began with the riots and massacres of the 1920s, and continued in the 1948 war of independence. Despite the opposition of Palestinian Arabs, the Jews of Palestine built a state, and because of the war, the Arabs of Palestine were deprived of their own chance for self determination. Their opposition to Israel was expressed as Palestinian Arab nationalism in the formation of the Fatah and the PLO, well before 1967. These organizations aimed to destroy all of Israel, "occupied" by the "Zionist entity." Given that position, it was hardly likely that Israel could negotiate peace with the Arabs of Palestine.
Gamal Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and threatened to annihilate Israel in 1967. The PLO declared that their goal was to evict every Jew who had entered Israel after 1917. Jordanian guns fired continuously on Jerusalem and other parts of Israel despite warnings to stay out of the conflict. Israel was forced to defend itself. The territories were conquered primarily as "hostages for peace." This was an Israeli government decision, and it was repeated often and openly in public speeches by Israeli officials in the summer of 1967. However, it soon became apparent that there would be no peace negotiations. At the Khartoum conference, the Arab states vowed, "no peace, no negotiations, no recognition." In their 1968 covenant, the PLO vowed to "liberate" all of "Palestine" - including Israel.
Until 1967, the West Bank was part of Jordan and Gaza was administered by Egypt. Israel did not prevent the Palestinians from forming a state, but they did not do so. The 1949 armistice borders were never recognized by any Arab state. They were meant to be the basis of peace talks, not permanent borders, but the peace talks never happened. In international law, an occupied territory is territory of another sovereign that has been conquered in war. Jordan renounced its claims to the West Bank, and Egypt never claimed the Gaza strip as part of its territory. The Palestinians do not have a state, and have said they do not want a state with interim borders. Therefore the legal status of these territories as "occupied" is dubious. Nonetheless, many Zionists have come to recognize that another people live in Gaza and the West Bank. The Arabs of Palestine have declared themselves to be a nation, just as we Jews recognized our own nationhood in the Zionist movement. Most Zionists now recognize that we must take cognizance of Palestinian national aspirations. However, at the same time, and by the same logic, the Arabs of Palestine and their supporters must honor the Jewish right to self determination.
The occupation was for many years relatively benign. Palestinian Arabs worked in Israeli towns and Israelis visited Arab towns. There was no "Apartheid" and the checkpoints were usually a formality.
A part of the Zionist public believed that the newly conquered territories should be part of Israel. They included areas that had held Jewish communities for many years, as well as holy places of the Jewish religion such as the wailing wall in Jerusalem, the tomb of Rachel near Bethlehem, and the tomb of Abraham in Hebron. They included areas such as Gush Etzion, Atarot and the old city of Jerusalem, where Jewish communities had been ethnically cleansed and expelled or forced to flee in 1948. Nonetheless, initially, the majority consensus in Israel was that most, or all of these territories would be returned in return for a genuine peace offer.
As the years passed, attitudes hardened. In 1975, the UN passed the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution. Israeli political sentiment veered to the right in reaction, and the Labor government was forced to allow the founding of Elon Moreh. In 1977, the rightist Likud party came to power. They believed in the cause of Greater Israel, and they gave settlement expansion a big boost. However, even the leader of the Likud, Ariel Sharon, has come to understand that it is wrong to rule over another people. Israel is withdrawing from the heavily populated Gaza strip, taking the calculated risk that this area may become a base for intense terrorist activity against Israel, under the control of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad extremists. These organizations believe it is their holy duty to wipe Israel off the map.
Optimism over a reasonable solution that would allow self-determination for both sides was born in the Oslo accords. Unfortunately, though the PLO officially renounced violence in the Oslo accords, Palestinian Arab extremist organizations began a series of lethal terror attacks, forcing Israel to institute a harsh regime of checkpoints, and to build "Jews only" bypass roads to Jewish settlements. In 2000, the negotiations broke down and the Palestinian Arabs resorted to terror attacks and suicide bombings in Israeli cities. At one point, there were 130 Israeli casualties in a single week. To control the bombings, Israel stepped up the regime of checkpoints and is building a security fence. These measures undoubtedly cause regrettable hardship to the Palestinians. However, they were implemented reluctantly. They are not the result of an "apartheid" ideology, as critics claim, nor are they attempts to "ethnically cleanse" Palestinians. They are security measures implemented with the greatest reluctance. In particular, the security fence contradicts the "Greater Israel" ideology and is certainly not a product of radical Zionism.
The occupation is more benign than its critics would have you believe. The "evils of the occupation" have been deliberately exaggerated by Palestinians and enemies of Israel. Officials of the Palestinian Authority spread false rumors that Israel was injecting Palestinian children with AIDs and distributing poisoned candies, that Israel had dumped radioactive waste in the West Bank, that Israel was irradiating Palestinians and giving them cancer at checkpoints, and that Israel had killed over 500 Palestinians in Jenin in operation "Defensive Wall." Several anti-Zionist writers insisted that the Israeli government is engaged in a diabolical plot to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, offering no proof at all. None of these rumors and announcements have any truth to them. They are part of a propaganda war aimed at justifying terrorism and extremist demands.
One of the most diabolical claims of anti-Zionists is that Israelis are like Nazis, and are perpetrating an Holocaust in the Palestinians. Israelis are not putting Palestinians in gas chambers or starving them to death. Israel is fighting a war, against a vicious and implacable enemy. The Jews of Europe were innocent citizens who were selected by the Nazis for extermination solely because of their religion. Israel has instituted security measures that are cause hardships for the Palestinians and are sometimes harsh. Occasional excesses, committed by Jewish and Muslim and Druze IDF soldiers alike are not the result of evil conspiracies or racist ideology, but errors of individuals that are the sad and inevitable result of a war that has been forced on Israel.
Ami Isseroff
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