Regretfully we came closer to Milan and the closer we got, the rougher and rockier the mountains got. By the time we reached Milan, we promised each other that Switzerland has not seen the last of us.

With all that peace and tranquility in mind (and ofcourse the size of the county) i find it odd that  the WEF named Switzerand the world’s most competitive economy more than once (including this year).  However, it should not be such a big surprise. After all, the country is known for its hard working citizens, high quality of education (and health care), political stability,  international trade and banking, cultural diversity and add in it’s self imposed neutrality and we have most, if not all the ingredients for a well economy.

Also worth mentioning is the friendliness of the Swiss. In Italy we came across some pretty cranky Italianos (so much for the cliché of happy Italians or maybe it only applies to southerners?), while I found people in Switzerland surprisingly welcoming and helpful, from the hotel personnel to the guy selling warm roasted chestnuts outside the town hall.

Definitly a place worth revisiting!

Somehow it is 2010 and I have no idea how we got here.

I remember the Millennium hysteria like it was yesterday, but somehow it was 10 (!!) years ago. My “little” cousin whose diaper I helped change when she was a few months old, is turning 21, Titanic is  an old movie and cd players are not hip anymore. How and when did this happen!?

People who were born in the early 90’s are called “adults” now. They are active in our society without knowing or remembering life before Friends or SATC. To them Osama bin Laden is the real life boogieman (aren’t kids supposed to believe everything we tell them?) and Lewinsky is  something that happened a really really long time ago.

Ten years ago my peers were looking forward to our exciting 20’s and now 40 is right around the corner. I guess I’ll have to start applying anti-wrinkle cream if it is not too late already.

On a more serious note, is it not deadly scary how easy we tend to forget yesterday, especially those of us who were not around then? Did we ever get an answer to what really caused the twin towers to collapse like that? Or who was behind Ocalan’s arrest? What are Kongamato’s?  Everything seems to be losing its importance as time goes by. No wonder why Zionists are holding on so tightly to the commemoration of the Holocaust in the way they see fit. Q: How big of a hypocrite does it take to do that and at the same time try to ban everyone from remembering their massacre and deportation of Palestinians with the  Naqba bill?

Gaza is 45 km long and 5-12 km wide. Inhabited by almost 1.5 million, including almost 1 million refugees who fled there after they were forced out of their homes in what is now called “Israel”.  Gaza is completely sealed off from the outside world by a guarded Israeli wall. No where for them to run and hide. 1.5 million people locked in an area that small, waiting for death to come or not while hearing the 65 fighter jets above them “delivering” their late Christmas packages.  Those who are not dead yet are starving… the price they pay for democracy.

Everyone is pointing fingers at Hamas. Everyone wants Hamas out. By everyone I mean the same idiots who cried democracy after Yasser Arafat died and when no one could stand in his shoes. The Palestinians voted and by the end of January 2006 it was clear that a large majority voted Hamas. Young, old, Christian, Muslim.. they wanted Hamas for many reasons. One of them being they were tired of Fatah doing the puppet dance for Israel. The other puppets (the U.S., Egypt, Jordan etc) are tired of Hamas; in fact they never wanted Hamas to begin with and have tried everything to make the puppet master happy, but nothing worked. A few days ago Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni went to Egypt, presumably to inform them of what was about to come. Not that they need Egypt’s okay… or anyone else’s.

The UN’s Secretary General , weak as ever, “condemns violence on both sides”: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29425&Cr=Palestin&Cr1=

 How consoling is the thought that no one in their right mind expected anything more from them.

A huge disappointment on my side is the way the most popular (yes, they won an award this year) Dutch news site reports about the rising death toll as a result of the Israeli terror attacks, or to be more accurate, doesn’t report about it… not yesterday and not as I am writing:

 Yes, yes, we know… Hamas is the big bad terrorist… Let’s all forget about what’s really going on…

Israel “retaliated” and Gaza is burying more than 155 people today… and trying to treat 250 wounded in a hospital with no electricity. What more has to happen for the int’l community to speak of a massacre? We are taught to remember the genocide in the 40’s. No, we are punished for refusing to agree on the details. Like nothing else happened afterwards that is worth remembering with such intensity. How long will it take us to forget what happened today?

Manipulators and hypocrites write the loudest reports, while law makers mute morality.

The world should bow down in shame for expecting the people of Gaza to forget their daily sorrows and years, no, decades of suffering. The kind no sane person should undergo. The kind no sane person can let go without a fight, even while knowing it could cost them their lives. What kind of person would expect the people of Palestine to forget those who died today and yesterday and to start a jolly life ignoring the blood of their sisters and brothers?

What kind of people are we to have let it go this far???

Today it came to light something that I, and I am certain many others, suspected: India is one big Bollywood movie set. Having watched a few movies from the Indian Industry, it pisses me off how exaggerated the hero finally saves the day and gets the girl. Don’t get me wrong, I am a chick flick kind of girl myself and after all, who doesn’t love a happy ending, but why do the men all have to sound and act like a super queer Sylvester Stallone who can take a lot of deadly punches and a rain of bullets all at the same time and still survive and most likely save the girl and her entire family… at once. Makes a person want to scream for sanity!

Now the problem is not the actors or the people they play or even the movies. The problem is the average Indian, when he lives his life in one of those movies. Something in me tells me not to generalize, but is it really a generalization when trained military professionals handle their job like each of them is a Bollywood hero?

An example: On the 18^th of November the Indian navy patrolling the waters off the coast of Somalia sank what they called a “pirate mother ship”, after the pirates on board opened fire on them. The Indians firing on that ship caused it to explode and according to them, the pirates could escape in speed boats. A week later the “mother ship” turned out to be a Thai fishing boat. A memo was sent around to ships patrolling that area that the Thai vessel had been seized by pirates. Yet, when the Indian “heroes” arrived at the scene, they saw a “mother ship” that needed to be blown up. A Cambodian crewman was fished out of water six days later by a passing ship. Fourteen others are still missing.

It’s not just the military, the police live in Bollywood as well. Shortly after the navy stars blew up the “pirate mother ship” and most likely killed 14 innocent fishermen on board, hotels in Mumbai were seized by what the Indians blamed on “Pakistani terrorists”. Regardless of the question “Who did it!?”, which is on everyone’s mind, one has to look at what the Indian forces did to protect the innocents. Today, the BBC told the story of a gynaecologist who was trapped in one of the hotels and barricaded himself along with others into a room until police officers told them it was safe to leave because they cornered the gunmen on a different floor. About 30 people followed them, only to get killed… each one of them. The gynaecologist, along with other survivors blame the police for risking people’s lives which resulted in the death of dozens. Obviously they too thought they were acting along with Salman Khan in an overly dramatized scene where it’s no big deal to put people in the line of fire since the bullets never hit them if not bounce off their bodies.

Considering India is the new up and coming global power, I can’t help but wonder if we should all take drama classes sooner or later to keep up with the new world order.

For the people in France hope is all they have when they cast their vote. The cynics among them know that the faces may change over the years, but the deeds or more precisely the misdeeds, do not.

The victims of modern colonization in Palestine have to hold on to hope in every aspect of life. Anyone in their right mind can’t blame them for occasionally loosing it. We stand by and watch the Israeli government do whatever it wills to make the lives of Palestinians bitter and sour and unlivable and at the same time cry out to world to protect the state of Israel. Can someone say “cuckoo”?

At the moment its bright and sunny outside, but we all know the clouds never disappear forever.

On this stage, not so long ago, I claimed that
Israel is conducting genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. I hesitated a lot before using this very charged term and yet decided to adopt it. Indeed, the responses I received, including from some leading human rights activists, indicated a certain unease over the usage of such a term. I was inclined to rethink the term for a while, but came back to employing it today with even stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.  

On 28 December 2006, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published its annual report about the Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories. Israeli forces killed this last year six hundred and sixty citizens. The number of Palestinians killed by
Israel last year tripled in comparison to the previous year (around two hundred). According to B’Tselem, the Israelis killed one hundred and forty one children in the last year. Most of the dead are from the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli forces demolished almost 300 houses and slew entire families. This means that since 2000, Israeli forces killed almost four thousand Palestinians, half of them children; more than twenty thousand were wounded. 

B’Tselem is a conservative organization, and the numbers may be higher. But the point is not just about the escalating intentional killing, it is about the trend and the strategy. As 2007 commences, Israeli policymakers are facing two very different realities in the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the former, they are closer than ever to finishing the construction of their eastern border. Their internal ideological debate is over and their master plan for annexing half of the
West Bank is being implemented at an ever-growing speed. The last phase was delayed due to the promises made by
Israel, under the Road Map, not to build new settlements.
Israel found two ways of circumventing this alleged prohibition. First, it defined a third of the
West Bank as Greater Jerusalem, which allowed it to build within this new annexed area towns and community centers. Secondly, it expanded old settlements to such proportions so that there was no need to build new ones. This trend was given an additional push in 2006 (hundreds of caravans were installed to mark the border of the expansions, the planning schemes for the new towns and neighborhoods were finalized and the apartheid bypass roads and highway system completed). In all, the settlements, the army bases, the roads and the wall will allow Israel to annex almost half of the
West Bank by 2010. Within these territories there will be a considerable number of Palestinians, against whom the Israeli authorities will continue to implement slow and creeping transfer policies — too boring as a subject for the western media to bother with and too elusive for human rights organizations to make a general point about them. There is no rush; as far as the Israelis are concerned, they have the upper hand there: the daily abusive and dehumanizing mixed mechanisms of army and bureaucracy is as effective as ever in contributing its own share to the dispossession process.  

The strategic thinking of Ariel Sharon that this policy is far better than the one offered by the blunt ‘transferists’ or ethnic cleansers, such as Avigdor Liberman’s advocacy, is accepted by everyone in the government, from Labor to Kadima. The petit crimes of state terrorism are also effective as they enable liberal Zionists around the world to softly condemn Israel and yet categorize any genuine criticism on
Israel’s criminal policies as anti-Semitism.  

On the other hand, there is no clear Israeli strategy as yet for the Gaza Strip; but there is a daily experiment with one. Gaza, in the eyes of the Israelis, is a very different geo-political entity from that of the
West Bank. Hamas controls Gaza, while Abu Mazen seems to run the fragmented
West Bank with Israeli and American blessing. There is no chunk of land in Gaza that Israel covets and there is no hinterland, like
Jordan, to which the Palestinians of Gaza can be expelled. Ethnic cleansing is ineffective here.  

The earlier strategy in
Gaza was ghettoizing the Palestinians there, but this is not working. The ghettoized community continues to express its will for life by firing primitive missiles into
Israel. Ghettoizing or quarantining unwanted communities, even if they were regarded as sub-human or dangerous, never worked in history as a solution. The Jews know it best from their own history. The next stages against such communities in the past were even more horrific and barbaric. It is difficult to tell what the future holds for the
Gaza population, ghettoized, quarantined, unwanted and demonized. Will it be a repeat of the ominous historical examples or is a better fate still possible? 

Creating the prison and throwing the key to the sea, as UN Special Reporter John Dugard has put it, was an option the Palestinians in Gaza reacted against with force as soon as September 2005. They were determined to show at the very least that they were still part of the West Bank and
Palestine. In that month, they launched the first significant, in number and not quality, barrage of missiles into the
Western Negev. The shelling was a response to an Israeli campaign of mass arrests of Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists in the Tul Karem area. The Israelis responded with operation ‘First Rain’. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the nature of that operation. It was inspired by the punitive measures inflicted first by colonialist powers, and then by dictatorships, against rebellious imprisoned or banished communities. A frightening show of the oppressor’s power to intimidate preceded all kind of collective and brutal punishments, ending with a large number of dead and wounded among the victims. In ‘First Rain’, supersonic flights were flown over
Gaza to terrorize the entire population, succeeded by the heavy bombardment of vast areas from the sea, sky and land. The logic, the Israeli army explained, was to create pressure so as to weaken the
Gaza community’s support for the rocket launchers. As was expected, by the Israelis as well, the operation only increased the support for the rocket launchers and gave impetus to their next attempt. The real purpose of that particular operation was experimental. The Israeli generals wished to know how such operations would be received at home, in the region and in the world. And it seems that instantly the answer was ‘very well’; namely, no one took an interest in the scores of dead and hundreds of wounded Palestinians left behind after the ‘First Rain’ subsided.  

And hence since ‘First Rain’ and until June 2006, all the following operations were similarly modeled. The difference was in their escalation: more firepower, more causalities and more collateral damage and, as to be expected, more Qassam missiles in response. Accompanying measures in 2006 were more sinister means of ensuring the full imprisonment of the people of
Gaza through boycott and blockade, with which the EU is still shamefully collaborating.  

The capture of Gilad Shalit in June 2006 was irrelevant in the general scheme of things, but nonetheless provided an opportunity for the Israelis to escalate even more the components of the tactical and allegedly punitive missions. After all, there was still no strategy that followed the tactical decision of Ariel Sharon to take out 8,000 settlers whose presence complicated ‘punitive’ missions and whose eviction made him almost a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, the ‘punitive’ actions continue and become themselves a strategy.  

The Israeli army loves drama and therefore also escalated the language. ‘First Rain’ was replaced by ‘Summer Rains’, a general name that was given to the ‘punitive’ operations since June 2006 (in a country where there is no rain in the summer, the only precipitation that one can expect are showers of F-16 bombs and artillery shells hitting people of Gaza). 

‘Summer Rains’ brought a novel component: the land invasion into parts of the Gaza Strip. This enabled the army to kill citizens even more effectively and to present it as a result of heavy fighting within dense populated areas, an inevitable result of the circumstances and not of Israeli policies. With the close of summer came operation ‘Autumn Clouds’ which was even more efficient: on 1 November 2006, in less than 48 hours, the Israelis killed seventy civilians; by the end of that month, with additional mini operations accompanying it, almost two hundred were killed, half of them children and women. As one can see from the dates, some of the activity was parallel to the Israeli attacks on
Lebanon, making it easier to complete the operations without much external attention, let alone criticism.  

From ‘First Rain’ to ‘Autumn Clouds’ one can see escalation in every parameter. The first is the disappearance of the distinction between civilian and non-civilian targets: the senseless killing has turned the population at large to the main target for the army’s operation. The second one is the escalation in the means: employment of every possible killing machines the Israeli army possesses. Thirdly, the escalation is conspicuous in the number of casualties: with each operation, and each future operation, a much larger number of people are likely to be killed and wounded. Finally, and most importantly, the operations become a strategy — the way
Israel intends to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip.  

A creeping transfer in the West Bank and a measured genocidal policy in the Gaza Strip are the two strategies
Israel employs today. From an electoral point of view, the one in Gaza is problematic as it does not reap any tangible results; the West Bank under Abu Mazen is yielding to Israeli pressure and there is no significant force that arrests the Israeli strategy of annexation and dispossession. But
Gaza continues to fire back. On the one hand, this would enable the Israeli army to initiate more massive genocidal operations in the future. But there is also the great danger, on the other, that as happened in 1948, the army would demand a more drastic and systematic ‘punitive’ and collateral action against the besieged people of the Gaza Strip.  

Ironically, the Israeli killing machine has rested lately. Even relatively large number of Qassam missiles, including one or two quite deadly ones, did not stir the army to action. Though the army’s spokesmen say it shows ‘restraint’, it never did in the past and is not likely to do so in the future. The army rests, as its generals are content with the internal killing that rages on in
Gaza and does the job for them. They watch with satisfaction the emerging civil war in Gaza, which
Israel foments and encourages. From Israel’s point of view it does not really mater how
Gaza would eventually be demographically downsized, be it by internal or Israeli slaying. The responsibility of ending the internal fighting lies of course with the Palestinian groups themselves, but the American and Israeli interference, the continued imprisonment, the starvation and strangulation of
Gaza are all factors that make such an internal peace process very difficult. But it will take place soon and then with the first early sign that it subsided, the Israeli ‘Summer Rains’ will fall down again on the people of
Gaza, wreaking havoc and death.  

And one should never tire of stating the inevitable political conclusions from this dismal reality of the year we left behind and in the face of the one that awaits us. There is still no other way of stopping
Israel than besides boycott, divestment and sanctions. We should all support it clearly, openly, unconditionally, regardless of what the gurus of our world tell us about the efficiency or raison d’etre of such actions. The UN would not intervene in Gaza as it does in Africa; the Nobel peace laureates would not enlist to its defense as they do for causes in
Southeast Asia. The numbers of people killed there are not staggering as far as other calamities are concerned, and it is not a new story — it is dangerously old and troubling. The only soft point of this killing machine is its oxygen lines to ‘western’ civilization and public opinion. It is still possible to puncture them and make it at least more difficult for the Israelis to implement their future strategy of eliminating the Palestinian people either by cleansing them in the West Bank or genociding them in the Gaza Strip. 

  Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in
Haifa. His books include, among others, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (
London and New York 2005) and his latest, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). 

Woensdag 21 maart 2007
Israël en het internationale recht
Vanwege de conflictueuze relatie tussen Israël en haar buurlanden zijn vele aspecten van deze relatie aan VN-resoluties en verdragen gebonden. De meest belangwekkende internationale afspraken worden in deze context kort besproken. Hierbij zal aandacht worden gegeven aan de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van het internationale recht, de verschillen in benadering van een populatiegroep of een officiële staat en de grootste uitdagingen voor de verdere ontwikkeling van het internationale recht. Ook zal de spreker dieper ingaan op het advies dat het Internationaal Gerechtshof heeft uitgebracht aan de Algemene Vergadering van de VN over de (on)rechtmatigheid van de bouw van de muur in de bezette gebieden.
Spreker: Prof.dr. Peter Kooijmans, emeritus hoogleraar internationaal recht aan de Universiteit Leiden, oud-minister en voormalig rechter bij het Internationaal Gerechtshof in Den Haag.

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Those were some pictures I took spring 2006.