By Jonathan Cook * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Israeli Arab Ameer Makhoul arrives at Haifa’s district court. Amnesty International has termed his continuing prosecution as “pure harassment”. Oded Balilty / AP Photo

The lawyers said the Shin Bet was exploiting the law to characterize innocent or accidental meetings between members of Israel's large Arab minority and Arab foreign nationals as criminal activity.

The chances of such contacts have increased rapidly with advances in new technology and opportunities for Israel's Arab citizens to travel to the wider Arab world, said Hussein Abu Hussein, a lawyer who represents security detainees.

"Pure harassment"

The lawyers' criticisms come at a particularly sensitive moment, as Israel has been widely accused of hounding two prominent political activists. Both were arrested on the grounds that they spied for the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah.

One, Omar Said, was released last week after a plea bargain in which the Shin Bet reduced a serious security charge of "aggravated espionage" to "contact with a foreign agent".

The evidence it revealed suggested that Said had attended the meeting in Egypt unaware that his contact was a possible Hizbollah agent and that he had turned down an alleged offer to spy for the organization.

Amnesty International has termed the continuing prosecution of the other defendant, Ameer Makhoul, as "pure harassment".

As he was freed, Said, from Kfar Kana, near Nazareth, accused Israel of persecuting activists whose politics it does not like.

Abir Baker, a lawyer with the Adalah legal centre, said cases such as Said's were intended to have a "chilling effect" on Israel's Arab community, which comprises one-fifth of the population.

She said his arrest should be seen in the context of efforts by Israel to limit the right of Arab citizens to strengthen cultural and political ties to the rest of the Arab world.

Several of Israel's Arab political parties, including the one Said belongs to, have been trying to inform the Arab world about the minority's campaign for democratic reforms to end Israel's status as a Jewish state.

A 2008 law removed the diplomatic immunity from Arab members of the Israeli parliament to visit Arab countries defined as enemy states.

One MP, Said Nafaa, who is to be tried over a visit to Syria with a party of Druze clerics in 2007, faces charges of contact with a foreign agent for meetings he held with Syrian politicians.

"Israel wants to make us invisible"

"There are laws to stop us from visiting countries classified as enemy states such as Syria and Lebanon, but Israel uses this particular offence to make us afraid to talk to any Arab national, whether at international conferences or online," said Baker. "Israel wants to make us invisible."

Khaled Ghanayim, a law professor at Haifa University, said misuse of the offence of contact with a foreign agent had grown with the right wing's ascendance in Israel.

"Paradoxically, the Soviet Union advanced a similar policy for decades to prevent Jews in the Eastern bloc from meeting Israeli Jews. Israel and the West denounced that policy as a violation of their human rights, but today Israel is doing the same to its Arab citizens."

Abu Hussein said the offence was particularly hard to challenge because, uniquely in Israeli criminal law, the onus to prove that the meeting did not harm state security rested with the defendant, not the prosecution.

The Shin Bet was unavailable for comment. But the agency is believed to be concerned that Hizbollah, which fired thousands of rockets into Israel during a month of hostilities in 2006, is trying to recruit spies among Israel's Arab community.

According to the Shin Bet's website, Hizbollah is particularly keen to identify the sites of Israeli security facilities in the north that might be targeted in a future confrontation and gauge the Jewish public's mood.

Gideon Ezra, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet and now a member of parliament, said: "The state of Israel does not seek to put people in jail, but to carry out proper investigations. There is always a gap between what is known at first and the final outcome."

Baker, who is studying the use of the "contact" offence, said there was a clear pattern in which the Shin Bet started its investigation with a serious security violation, such as transferring information to the enemy, which carries a life sentence, in addition to the allegation of contact.

"That way an impression is created with the public and the media that the suspect was harming state security."

As the investigation proceeded, she said, the Shin Bet typically dropped the serious charge and sought a plea bargain on contact with a foreign agent. The charge carries a sentence of up to seven years in jail.

Defendants, faced with secret evidence and limited rights as security prisoners, were under pressure to agree, Abu Hussein said.

Baker said it was difficult to be sure exactly how often the law was being used but pointed to several notable recent cases.

In 2005, Sheikh Raed Salah, the head of the main wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and Suleiman Aghbaria, mayor of the city of Umm al Fahm, served jail terms of 30 months and 46 months, respectively, after agreeing a plea bargain.

The Shin Bet's case that the pair belonged to a terrorist organization, Hamas, and supplied it with weapons, collapsed during the trial.

Torture

In the most recent case, both Said and Makhoul claimed they were tortured while they were held without access to a lawyer.

Ghanayim said it was notable that both men were publicly involved in activities to challenge Israeli policies. Makhoul is known to have angered the Shin Bet by leading demonstrations against Israel's attack on Gaza in winter 2008 and by heading calls for a boycott of Israel.

In the past the Shin Bet has warned that it would use all the powers at its disposal to "thwart" political activities it regarded as a threat to the state's legitimacy.

Baker said use of the law against contact with a foreign agent had begun shortly after the start of the second intifada in 2000 to prevent Arab citizens meeting Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Last year, in a case that attracted wide attention in Israel, Rawi Sultani, a 24-year-old activist from Tira in central Israel, was sentenced to five and a half years after attending an international Arab summer camp in Morocco at which he was approached by a Hizbollah agent.

Mr Sultani was originally accused of conspiring to assassinate Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel's chief of staff. The charge was dropped but he was convicted of giving information to the enemy by revealing that he had visited a gym used by Ashkenazi.

* Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair".

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi. The version here is published by permission of Jonathan Cook.

Photo: Baz Ratner/Reuters

By Dr. Elias Akleh* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Terrorist Israelis had done it again. One more time they had conceitedly acted as the only God's chosen people, who have the right to violate international laws set by all other nations; the Goyims, who according to Israel's Talmudic teachings, are only animals, sub-humans at the best, whom God had created only to serve his chosen people.

Terrorist Israeli naval forces had boarded early Wednesday morning (11/4/09) the Antiqua-flagged trading ship "Francop" while in the international waters close to Cyprus, and kidnapped it to Ashdod port in Israel. The Israelis claimed that the ship was carrying Iranian weapons, with English markings, destined to Syria and to Lebanese Hezbollah.

They consider it their duty to intercept every ship they suspect of carrying any weapons to their enemy and to confiscate these weapons. It is an act of self defense as they claim.

This Israeli false claim of self defense comes as a violation of international laws and freedom of trade, and is consider a piracy. Contrary to all laws Israelis are proud of this piracy, broadcast it through international media, and demand it to be legitimized. Furthermore they demand their enemies to be punished for weapons trade that many countries, including Israel itself, are deeply involved in, and consider a major pillar to their economy. Such hypocrisy can be found only in God's chosen people.

Israel is claiming, without any proof, that these weapons were destined to Lebanese Hezbollah in violation of UN Resolution 1701 that prohibits weapons delivery to any Lebanese entity except its government. On the other hand Israel's military fighter planes are routinely penetrating Lebanese skies in flagrant violation of the resolution.

Israeli Prime President Benjamin Netanyahu had pledged to take to matter to the Security Council to demand an investigation into the alleged arms smuggling. Iran, Syria, and Lebanon had denied any knowledge of the arms shipment, and accused Israel of staging the whole incident as another step towards another war against Lebanon. Israeli politicians and military leaders keep stating that another round of attack against Hezbollah is not far away.

One should remember that Israel has been continually accusing Iran of sending weapons to Hezbollah through Syria, and keeps asking the UN to investigate the matter. Two days before this Israeli piracy the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon released a report to the UN security Council, in which he stated that the UN had taken Israeli allegations of weapons smuggling to Hezbollah seriously, but investigation had shown no evidence of such allegations.

It would be so foolish to believe that Iranians would risk sending any arms to Syria through a sea route full of Western (American, British, French and German) and Israeli war ships patrolling the international waters, starting from the Persian Gulf and through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, intercepting every ship and subjecting them to scrutinizing search for alleged arms smuggling to Hamas or to Hezbollah. These war ships have been described by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem as official pirates in the seas, who under the guise of security and inspection obstruct trade between countries.

It would be safer, faster, shorter, and probably cheaper for Iran to airlift arms to its neighboring Syria if it really wanted to. Besides the two countries have the legal right to sell and buy weapons like any other countries in the world. It certainly has been legal for Israel to sell weapons to Turkey, India, China, Russian Georgia, South Africa, and even to Iran itself during the Iran/Iraq war.

Israel's justification of its piracy as self defense in the form of preventing other countries from arming Israel's enemies is really a very dangerous justification. If endorsed, it would give justification to any country to intercept and kidnap any ship under the claim of such self defense. It would mean that Iran and Syria have the legal justification of intercepting and confiscating American arms shipments to Israel.

It should be noticed that this alleged Iranian arms shipment had come two days ahead of the UN General Assembly discussing Goldstone's report accusing Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its holocaust against Palestinian civilians in Gaza Strip. Many had accused Israel of staging the arms shipment incident in order to divert attention away from Goldstone's report and to justify its war crimes.

Looking back into Israel's history one finds that Israelis had used piracy as a tool to further their terrorist agenda. Even before the establishment of Israel, Zionist terrorists had destroyed ships carrying Jews to Palestine in order to bring attention to the Zionist agenda (Naeim Giladi's "Ben-Gurion's Scandals" found on the net). Zionists had bombed the Patria ship in November 25th 1940, the ship Struma in February 24th 1942, the Empire Life Guard ship in July 23rd 1947, and the Egoz boat in January 10th 1961.

In June 8th 1967 during the Six-Day War Israeli planes and torpedo boats attacked the American USS Liberty ship while in international waters with the full knowledge of its identity killing 34 crew members and wounding 171 others. This was a clear act of war the US, but President Lyndon Johnson, at the time, chose to ignore the matter.

In December 2008 Israel perpetrated its holocaust assault against Gaza. After 19 days of attack an Iranian ship attempted to deliver 2000 ton of humanitarian aid Gaza after coordinating with the Palestinian Red Cross. The Israeli gun boats intercepted the ship and under the threat of arms prevented it from docking into Gaza.

In February 6th 2009 the Lebanese Brotherhood Ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza victims was attacked by Israeli navy while in Egyptian territorial waters and kidnapped to the Israeli port of Ashdod. All 18 passengers including former Greek Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem Hillarion Capucci, 86 years old, and crew members were abused, beaten, handcuffed, blindfolded and imprisoned for hours before turned in to UN Interim Force in Lebanon. All the humanitarian goods were confiscated by Israel.

The campaign to end the siege of Gaza had sent several boats with humanitarian aid to Gaza. The pirates of the Israeli nave had intercepted the boats, shot at them, damaged some of them, kidnapped some to Ashdod, imprisoned international humanitarian organizers, and confiscated goods. The famous incident was the kidnapping of the "Spirit of Humanity" boat in July 2009 with 21 international human rights workers from 11 countries including Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and ex-member of the American House of representatives Cynthia McKinney. Israel jailed the activists for few days before releasing them.

The Israeli navy went a little further when they torpedoed an Iranian ship off the coast of Sudan in April 2009. The Israeli Haaretz paper reported that the Iranian ship was suspected of carrying weapons to Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

A more serious and dangerous act of Israeli piracy was the boarding and kidnapping of the Russian ship "Arctic Sea" end of July 2009. Israeli special forces had intercepted the Russian ship while en route from Finland to Algeria. Israel suspected that the ship was carrying Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missile batteries to be delivered to Iran. This piracy prompted Netanyahu's mysterious half-day trip to Moscow to resolve the problem.

Israeli state pirates are worse than the Somali pirates. Western countries had turned Somalia into a nuclear waste dump, had destroyed its economy, had waged proxy wars against the country and massacred its inhabitant. Somalis were, thus, driven into piracy in order to make a living. Israelis on the other hand had chosen piracy as a tool to further its occupation of Palestine and to perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity in gross violation of all international laws.

UN member countries have sent their ships to stop the Somali pirates, would they send their ships to stop the Israeli pirate?

* Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the "Nakba" of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the "Nakseh" of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.

"Other observers are concluding that Israel and the Bush administration must foment a civil war in order not to "lose" Lebanon and be driven from the region."...

..."Their reasoning is that if Bush and Olmert can provoke Hizbullah into turning its guns on Lebanese rivals, which it has never done and refuses to do, (Nasrallah recently declaring that "they can kill 1,000 of the opposition and we will still refuse to participate in a civil war") the U.S. and Israel can invade, destroy the Lebanese resistance and set up another "more sustainable" government, to borrow a pet term from Condoleezza Rice."...

More here...

I'm grateful for all the friends who send me daily links to material that is worth reading/watching/archiving, etc... They really enrich the arguments here, but what's better than sharing friends are reading and sharing? Here is some of this material:

Deception as a Way of Life - Israeli Myths: In a state established on a founding myth -- that the native Palestinian population left of their own accord rather than that they were ethnically cleansed -- and in one that seeks its legitimacy through a host of other lies, such as that the occupation of the West Bank is benign and that Gaza's has ended, deception becomes a political way of life. And so it is in the "relative calm" that has followed Israel's month-long pounding of Lebanon, a calm in which Israelis may no longer be dying but the Lebanese most assuredly are as explosions of US-made cluster bombs greet the south's returning refugees and the anonymous residents of Gaza perish by the dozens each and every week under the relentless and indiscriminate strikes of the Israeli air force while the rest slowly starve in their open-air prison... Read the full article By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth - Palestine [Hat tip: Ann]

We knew how the war started but we never know how it is going to end: One month before Israel started the war in Lebanon on July 12th, this 32 years old man, a Post-doctoral Associate at the Department of Geological Sciences (University of Missouri-Columbia), traveled to his country to develop field investigations concerning earthquake potential in the Middle East and northwest Africa. It was also a opportunity for him to visit his family in Roum, within the Jezzine district, which lies at the northern end of south Lebanon, where he was born and his parent live currently. But Tony Nemer did not know he would come back to Columbia on August 2nd witnessing a war. His face mirrors the sorrow and worrying of leaving his people in such a condition, but fortunately also his strength as a go-getter is able to share with us his thought, feeling and experiences on this war... Read the complete interview By Laura Ramiro Cid.

"You don't see, you don't feel, and you don't look" -- An Israeli Combat Soldier Breaks the Silence: Yehuda Saul, told me he had made it his personal mission to speak out against the Israeli army when its actions were immoral. The Canadian American-Israeli veteran said that his "arch-conservative family" had slated him for a career in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). But during his third year of service the young platoon sergeant witnessed a scene of looting and killing at a combat mission in Hebron that had troubled him so much that he decided to leave the army.... We had three well-positioned posts in Palestinian neighborhoods. We posted snipers and grenade guns. My post was at a former Palestinian school in Hebron. Our mission was to target Palestinian houses. I remember being shocked when I heard this. "You mean we should shoot into the neighborhoods, where people live?" I thought about the safety rules I had learned during training. In order to shoot live grenades, no one should be within a distance of one mile on each side of the target. And now I was supposed to shoot into a neighborhood where people lived. The grenade gun is not an accurate weapon. One grenade kills everyone within the radius of eight meters, and injures everyone within the radius of 16 meters. At night, after the Palestinians shot, we received the order to pull the trigger. On the first day, during the four to five seconds before the grenades hit, you prayed that you didn't hurt anyone innocent. On the second day you are less tense, and on the third day even less. And after a week, it's a game... When you are a combat soldier in the Occupied Territories, you can't see Palestinians as equal human beings. Because then you couldn't hop through a roof in the middle of the night, wake up a family, force the women into one corner and the men into another, and tear apart the place. At least when you stand at a checkpoint you see the shape of human beings: One head, two hands, and two legs. But when I was shooting live grenades into neighborhoods where people lived every night - why, that was a computer game! Read full article by By Daniel Sturm [hat tip: Sam]

When Criticism of Cluster Bombs is "Anti-Semitic": The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reports that the head of Germany's Jewish community accused a minister in Angela Merkel's German government of "anti-Semitism" because of the minister's statement on Israel's use of cluster bombs. Development Aid Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul had asked for a United Nations probe into Israel's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon... Read full article by By Stanley Heller

Criticize Israel? You're an Anti-Semite!
How can we have a real discussion about Mideast peace if speaking honestly about Israel is out of bounds? Publish something sharply critical of Israeli government policies and you'll find out. If you're lucky, you'll merely discover that you've been uninvited to some dinner parties. If you're less lucky, you'll be the subject of an all-out attack by neoconservative pundits and accused of rabid anti-Semitism. This, at least, is what happened to Ken Roth. Roth -- whose father fled Nazi Germany -- is executive director of Human Rights Watch, America's largest and most respected human rights organization. (Disclosure: I have worked in the past as a paid consultant for the group.) In July, after the Israeli offensive in Lebanon began, Human Rights Watch did the same thing it has done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Congo, Uganda and countless other conflict zones around the globe: It sent researchers to monitor the conflict and report on any abuses committed by either side... Read full article by Rosa Brooks (LA Times) [Hat tip: Editerette13]

Israelis believed Nasrallah over Peretz: Polls conducted by Dr. Udi Lebel, political psychology lecturer, found sad picture of Israeli PR... During the poll, entitled "the management of Israeli PR during the second Lebanon war," members of six groups were asked to watch video recordings of Israeli PR in Israel and abroad, and to answer questions. Lebel says he held polls in the past on issues of strategic press, political psychology, and army-media relations. The result of his latest poll show that Israeli PR was so lacking, that in my cases the public was forced to rely on the reports of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Lebel says a good media leader relies on three points - gripping the audience, being watchable, and giving the feeling of certainty. The participants of the poll were asked who gave the a sense of certainty regarding the continuance of the war, and who was most authentic. The results were unequivocal: The Israeli public chose Nasrallah's speeches as giving it both... Read full story by Anat Breshkovsky [Hat tip: Ganesh]

Seems that the Israeli intelligent are so stupid, dump and confused these days to mix between the real Hassan Nasrallah and the kidnapped Hassan Nasrallah.

Al Jazeera: Israeli has claimed to have captured at least five Hezbollah fighters in a commando operation in the Lebanese town of Baalbek while 19 civilians were killed in airstrikes on nearby areas.

Lebanese police and Hezbollah claimed the captured men are civilians.

The five captives have been named as Bilal Nasrallah, his father Hasan Nasrallah, Muhammad Shukr, Ahmad al-Ghouta and Hasan al-Bourji.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said the men were brought to Israel.

She said none of the soldiers who took part in the operation were injured.

They had landed by helicopter near the al-Hikmah hospital in Baalbek in the eastern Bekaa valley.

Israel has continued airstrikes across South Lebanon, including the city of Tyre, the towns of al-Sultaniye, Froun and Jibbin and the border villages of Qabrikha, Qantara and Tallousa.

Of course, Hezbollah challenged the Israelis to show the captured civilians and said that four out of the five captured are more than fifty years old.

Expect to see more humor coming out from Israel soon, like refusing to register new born babies whose parents want to name ‘Hassan’ or ‘Nasrallah’!!!