> I see that Jean luc Godard has just announced that he is boycotting
> this year's Tel-Aviv film festival, following an open letter
> suggesting he do so from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and
> Cultural Boycott of Israel:
>
> http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&Artic...
>
> I should add that it seems most unlikely that US film-maker John
> Sayles, who has also been invited to the Tel-Aviv film festival, will
> be boycotting the event. This may appear quite incredible given
> Sayles' status as one of America's leading political film-makers of
> the past 30 years; indeed, some of his work is often confused with
> that of British film-maker Ken Loach, who boycotted Zionist Israel
> long ago (many not knowing which of them directed, for instance, Bread
> and Roses, Carla's Song, Matewan, Sunshine State, Lone Star, Land and
> Freedom etc), their social realist aesthetics often indistinguishable.
> But Sayles, unlike Loach, has always funded his independent films from
> the proceeds of his scriptwriting for mainstream Hollywood movies, his
> latest writing venture being the script for Steven Spielberg's soon-to-
> be-released Jurassic Park IV (he also wrote the script that later
> became the basis for Spielberg's E.T. in the early 1980s). An obvious
> political landmine here, business corruption always trumps enlightened
> politics in Hollywood, even on the left, as we know from the legacy of
> McCarthyism..
>
> No, sad to say, Sayles won't be joining.
> ------------------
>
> But to resume the subject at hand:
>
> "The attachment to race theory, for example, was presumably why it
> didn't seem odd for Zionist leaders to be inviting Adolf Eichmann to
> visit Palestine in 1937; why Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of
> Likudism, so admired Mussolini (who was himself pro-Zionist); why
> Mossad was working with the Gestapo to arrange Jewish deportation from
> Germany at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich in 1939, later a chief
> architect of the Nazi holocaust (he gave his name to one of its chief
> components, Operation Reinhard); and why the Haganah (the Zionist
> paramilitary which formed the core of the IDF) was receiving arms from
> the SS. It was, all of it, part of the same murky world of colonial
> domination, racist mysticism (the blood and soil kind) and volkish
> nationalism."
> -------------------------------------------------
> The roots of Israeli barbarism
>
> We have heard from people like UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, who
> says that the Zionist regime is worse than apartheid. The Israeli
> historian Ilan Pappe now argues that Israel is pursuing a genocidal
> policy in Gaza. The Israeli government's open threats of ethnic
> cleansing and mass violence in civilian areas alongside the repeated
> sieges, the imposed starvation, the mass imprisonment and the
> killings, coupled with a deep-rooted perception of Palestinians as a
> 'demographic threat' and, well, everything else, could be seen as
> adding weight to this view. But if the Israeli strategy is genocidal,
> this is the latest degenerate stage in an ongoing counterinsurgency
> war, the character of which is not well understood even by our own
> gluttonously free press. Well, this is what can be said about the
> ordinary run of the mill war, when there isn't a major theatre attack,
> a mass crackdown, a re-invasion, an annexation or another country to
> bomb: Israeli troops repeatedly use indiscriminate violence,
> deliberate violence against civilians including against minors, they
> use civilians as human shields, they detain tens of thousands
> illegally, and they torture and rape prisoners. If you're a B'Tselem,
> Amnesty, or even Human Rights Watch worker concerned with Israel/
> Palestine, you encounter daily, grinding brutality that is rarely if
> ever reported. Let me give you only a few examples. Here are some
> excerpts from the latest B'Tselem report on human rights in the
> 'Occupied Territories':
>
> Of those killed in 2007, at least 132 were civilians who were taking
> no part in the hostilities at the time they were killed. As for
> another 50, we were unable to determine the relevant circumstances.
> According to these figures, approximately 35 percent of the
> Palestinians killed in 2007 in circumstances known to B'Tselem were
> civilians not involved in the fighting. In 2006, 348 civilians
> uninvolved in the fighting were killed (54 percent). Illegal behavior
> of an individual soldier and his commander is not the only cause for
> the high number of Palestinians killed who were not taking part in
> hostilities and posed no danger to security forces. The primary reason
> for these deaths is Israeli policy, set by the army’s top echelon:
> illegal easing of the military's rules of engagement, approval of
> operations that constitute disproportionate attacks, and failure to
> carry out independent investigations in cases in which innocent
> Palestinian civilians are killed.
>
> ...
>
> Another example of illegal expansion of the rules of engagement is the
> establishment of “death zones” in areas close to the Gaza perimeter
> fence. According to testimonies given to B'Tselem, certain units are
> ordered to open fire automatically at any person approaching the
> fence, without giving prior warning and regardless of the
> circumstances or the identity of the person. This practice is
> particularly grave because of the lack of demarcation, by signs or
> otherwise, of the area in which entry is prohibited. In 2007, security
> forces killed 55 Palestinians who tried to cross the Gaza perimeter
> fence or were near the fence, in some cases even at a distance greater
> than 100 meters. Of these, at least 16 were unarmed and not engaged in
> hostilities, including four minors.
>
> ...
>
> In 2007, B'Tselem documented in detail 74 cases in which security
> forces beat (by punching, kicking, clubbing, or hitting with rifle
> butts), humiliated, or threatened Palestinians. The perpetrators were
> soldiers (in 41 cases), Border Police officers (27 cases), and members
> of the regular police (6 cases) ... B'Tselem’s monitoring of
> demonstrations against the Separation Barrier since 2004 indicates
> that about 1,000 demonstrators have required medical treatment due to
> injury from rubbercoated metal bullets, beatings, or tear gas
> inhalation. Over 320 of these people were injured in 2007.
>
> ...
>
> More than 6,000 Palestinians from the West Bank were detained in 2007
> by Israel’s security forces. A significant majority of them were
> subsequently interrogated by the Israel Security Agency on suspicion
> of involvement in "hostile terror activity". In these interrogations,
> the ISA, together with the Prison Service and Israel Police, routinely
> use prison conditions and interrogation methods that individually
> constitute forbidden ill-treatment.
>
> ...
>
> The phenomenon of soldiers using Palestinians to perform dangerous
> military tasks or to protect soldiers from gunfire (in other words,
> using them as human shields) continued in 2007. Until mid-December,
> B'Tselem documented 10 such cases, although it is likely that this
> represents a minority of the cases that occurred.
>
> These are conservative estimates based on documented cases, but they
> clearly describe the systematic use of indiscriminate killing,
> beatings, mass imprisonment, torture and the use of Palestinians as
> human shields. I quoted some other examples of Israel's regular
> brutalisation of civilians here. I want also to comment specifically
> on the treatment of Palestinian children before moving on, because the
> deliberate harming of children in any war is indicative of its
> degeneracy - and is used as an indicator of such in most other wars.
> The arrest and long-term detention of children is typical. For
> example, in the months of February to May 2002, 8,500 Palestinians
> were arrested in the West Bank, 10%% of whom were children. The
> circumstances were characteristic of an Israeli crackdown: door to
> door house searches, with the rounding up of anyone who the soldiers
> deemed a threat. The children, like their relatives, were frequently
> beaten before being arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded for long periods
> of time, denied access to medical treatment which they needed, and
> subject to physical and psychological torture. One fifteen year old
> boy described being beaten for an hour, his legs trampled on, then
> thrown from one corner of the room to another for fifteen minutes,
> then sprayed with cold water, then tied to iron steps which caused him
> to fall and injure himself, then punched in the face. He also had
> cigarettes stubbed out on his body and was struck with a steel ruler.
> That's just one example. (See Catherine Cook et al, Stolen Youth: The
> Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children, Pluto Press,
> 2004). The deliberate baiting and shooting of children has also been
> reported. Chris Hedges wrote in 2001 of this practise by Israeli
> soldiers at an Israeli colony ('settlement') near the Palestinian
> refugee camp Faqah:
>
> It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out
> of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a
> loudspeaker.
>
> "Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of
> Khan Younis? Come! Come!"
>
> I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew:
> "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!"
>
> The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric
> fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob
> rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted
> with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in
> anticipation of what is to come.
>
> A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or
> eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand.
> They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are
> no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets
> from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight
> bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the
> stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.
> ...