Universities worldwide mark 'Israeli Apartheid Week'

LONDON - A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organizers have declared as "Israeli Apartheid Week" - and all three speakers are Israeli.

University campuses in more than 40 cities around the world are marking the week with lectures, films, multimedia events, cultural performances and demonstrations.

Since they were first launched in 2005, the events have become some of "the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar," according to its organizers.

Its aim, they state on their Web site, is to "contribute to this chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid and to bolster support for the boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign."

Though many of the details about those events were not being promoted on the Apartheid Week Web site, it did list several events being offered by Israelis.

Among them is Shir Hever, an economic researcher at the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, who is scheduled to give a series of lectures at the University of Amsterdam entitled "Could the Economic Policies of Israel be Considered a Form of Apartheid?"

In addition, Israeli activist and filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollak is screening his 2006 documentary "Bil'in Habibti," about Israel Defense Forces violence, at Boston-area universities.

Jeff Halper, the Israel-based professor of anthropology who is co-founder and coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was scheduled to speak on "Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS" at Glasgow University.

The participation of several Israelis in the anti-Zionist events is "atrocious," said David Katz, a member of Britain's Jewish Board of Deputies who grew up in South Africa and has long fought the comparison between that country's racial segregation and Israel's ethnic divisions.

"They are free to do as they please, but it's atrocious," he said of the participating Israelis. "I think they don't understand the analogy they are making... which is insulting to those who suffered under apartheid."

"It's like calling things 'holocaust' which are not the Holocaust or terming something 'genocide' which is not genocide," said Katz.

As part of efforts to counter the Apartheid Week events, one Jewish charity brought over Benjamin Pogrund, a South African immigrant to Israel who is the former deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, to speak to British university students about why Israel is not an apartheid state.

"The game plan of those who seek the destruction of Israel is to equate us with South Africa, a pariah state which had to be subjected to international sanctions," Pogrund has said. "Israelis coming to take part in this week should know better."

In Canada, the legislature in the province of Ontario unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week, voting for a resolution that denounced the campus events.

"If you're going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also... attacking Canadian values," Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life, a Toronto-based Jewish Web site.

"The use of the phrase 'Israeli Apartheid Week' is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I'm not certain it doesn't actually cross over that line," he said.

Source:

'U.K. police in Israel to probe passports used in Dubai hit'

Investigators from Britain's Serious Organized Crimes Agency have arrived in Israel to interview dual nationals whose names were used on forged passports by the assassins of a Hamas commander in Dubai last month, the Independent reported on Saturday.

The British agency said Friday that arrangements were already being made to speak to the six British-Israeli dual nationals whose names were among those used by the alleged hit squad.

Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed last month in his hotel room in what Dubai police have said they are near certain was a hit by Israel's Mossad spy agency. Police said the killers traveled to the Gulf Arab emirate using forged European and Australian passports.


Australia on Saturday said it is not satisfied with its Israeli envoy's explanation about the fraudulent use of Australian passports in the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai last month, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Rudd said his government had to "proceed very carefully" in the investigation because of its complex security nature.

Israel's ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem, was summoned on Thursday for an urgent meeting with Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.

"When it comes to Australian passport fraud or the use and abuse of Australian passports, this government has an absolutely hard line on defending the integrity of our passport system because millions of the traveling public depend on that each year," Rudd told reporters in Adelaide on Saturday.

"That is why the foreign minister has called in the Israeli ambassador and asked for an explanation. "Thus far we are not satisfied with that explanation," Rudd said.

Meanwhile, Dubai police said on Friday they have DNA proof of the identity of at least one of the killers of senior Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in the emirate country last month.

"We have DNA evidence ... from the crime scene. The DNA of the criminals is there," Dubai Police Chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim said on the Arab satellite television Al-Arabiya.

He said police had "categorical DNA proof on one of the assassins" and fingerprint evidence from several other suspects, providing "100 percent" proof of their identities.

Dubai said it was seeking at least 26 people it suspectd of involvement in the assassination in January.

Last week Interpol added 11 suspected assassins to their most wanted list, all of whom were apparently using forged passports.

The individuals who were charged by Dubai police as responsible for the killing of Mabhouh were tagged with "Red Notices," according to the Interpol's official website.

The website also specifies that Interpol chose to publish the photos of the suspected assassins since the identities the perpetrators allegedly used were fake, using fraudulent passports to aid them in accomplishing their aim.

Also, Dubai police chief ahi Khalfan Tamim said Interpol should issue a warrant to help locate and arrest the head of Israel's spy agency Mossad if the organization was responsible for the killing of a Hamas militant in Dubai.

Meanwhile, a Haaretz probe discovered that the passport photographs of the agents who assassinated Mabhouh in Dubai were doctored so the agents would not be identified.

The discovery casts doubt on claims that the espionage agency that carried out last month's hit on the senior Hamas operative committed grave errors.

Various features of the people in the photographs, such as eye color or the line of a lip, were changed - slightly enough so as not arouse suspicion at passport control, but still enough that the real agent could not be recognized.

Source:

Report: Australia already warned Israel against faking its passports

Australian authorities had already warned Israeli intelligence against using doctored passports in its clandestine activities around the world, the newspaper The Australian reported on Thursday.

The Australian report came as Canberra warned Israel earlier Thursday that if it was involved in the alleged use of three forged Australian passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai, it would not be considered the act of a friend.

The Canberra government called in Israel's ambassador after three people holding Australian passports were listed on Wednesday among 15 new suspects in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai authorities are investigating the use of at least 26 possibly fake passports in connection with the killing.


According to sources quoted in the article, Australian authorities approached Israel in the 1990s to seek assurances that Australian passports would not be used in Mossad activities after it was feared Israeli agents had doctored New Zealand passports.

During that meeting, the article claims, the Israelis said they condoned such identity theft, with Australian participants describing their response as "enraged self-righteousness."

The Australian foreign minister at the time, Alexander Downer, confirmed to The Australian that the then Canberra government warned Israel in at least one occasion not to issue fake Australian passports to its intelligence operatives.

"I'm not 100 per cent sure that I didn't myself raise it with the Israelis," Mr Downer told The Australian.

Downer added that the warning was issued in the context of a series of botched operations involving Mossad agents travelling on fake passports. "My recollection is that over time we have raised this issue with the Israelis," he said.

"We have raised the issue of Israeli intelligence officers using foreign passports and that they should not consider using Australian passports."

Dubai police have said they were almost certain that members of Israel's Mossad spy agency killed Mabhouh in his hotel room in January. The emirate Wednesday identified 15 new suspects in the assassination; Haaretz has learned that 10 of them share the names of Israelis who hold dual citizenship.

A list of 11 people suspected in the assassination released last week by Dubai also included the names of six British-born Israelis, whose names appeared on forged British passports thought to have been used by the killers.

Australia's Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said investigations were still under way, but the three Australians were also apparently innocent victims of identity theft.

"I made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as an act of a friend," Smith said.

In an interview with Australian radio, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also emphasized the severity of the situation. "We will not be silent on this matter. It is a matter of deep concern. It really goes to the integrity and fabric of the use of state documents, which passports are, for other purposes," Rudd told Australian radio.

"Any state that has been complicit in use or abuse of the Australian passport system, let alone for the conduct of an assassination, is treating Australia with contempt and there will therefore be action by the Australian government in response," said Rudd.

Source:

Israel's immigrant children fight deportation

Noah Mae (second from left) dreams in Hebrew, but does not know the Philippine language Tagalog

Five little girls giggle and scream with delight as they chase each other round the playground, their pigtails flying as they run.

The girls' parents come from the Philippines, Thailand and Sudan but they sing, shout and chat together in Hebrew.

Like her friends, bright-eyed, eight-year-old Noah Mae was born in Israel. This is her home, she says.

I've come to meet her at a community centre run by the Israeli Scouts movement in southern Tel Aviv.

She proudly shows me her schoolbook, where she got top marks for her Hebrew writing and spelling.

Here parents might come from the Philippines but she feels truly Israeli. Hebrew is the language she dreams in, she tells me.

Pressure groups

But Israel's government now wants Noah Mae to leave. Here it's illegal for migrant workers to have children.

Hundreds of families face expulsion from Israel this summer. More than 1,000 children, including Noah Mae, expect to be deported at the end of their school year.

Noah May's mother, Emily Cabradilla, together with a number of Israeli pressure groups, is trying to fight the government's plan to include the children in a crackdown on illegal immigrants.

She said it broke her heart when she heard the news. "Noah Mae has never been to the Philippines. How can I tell her she's going home? She hardly speaks a word of Tagalog.

"She says she won't leave Israel. 'Mama,' she said to me, 'I am Israeli. I was born here and I will stay here.'"

But laws in Israel make it extremely hard for people to stay, to become citizens, if they are not Jewish.

Right from its birth, Israel called itself the Jewish State. This is a country built for and built by immigrants from all over the world but with a key common factor - a Jewish heritage.

According to Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, controlling immigration is largely about preserving Israel's Jewish character.

His government intends to deport all illegal immigrants by 2013 and also to drastically reduce the number of legal foreign workers in Israel.

In the face of some public opposition to the government's policy, Israel's Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Eli Yishai, accused Israelis of being hypocritical and sanctimonious. "Don't they [the foreign workers] threaten the Zionist project of the State of Israel?" he asked.

Mr Yishai caused an outcry in the autumn when he accused migrant workers of bringing with them "a profusion of diseases: hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, Aids and drug (addiction)".

And the plan to deport the children proved so controversial the government has delayed it from last summer until the end of the 2010 school year.

'Like a stranger'

A new immigration police force - the Oz Unit - now patrols Israel's streets as part of the government crackdown. We accompanied a team of policemen around the old central bus station in southern Tel Aviv.

The teeming, narrow pedestrian alleys here reveal a social world rarely seen in Israel. Here Chinese men sell cigarettes and children's clothes, Sudanese refugees hawk CDs and DVDs while Philippine and Thai women share a joke on a street corner.

Israel increased the number of work permits it issued to South East Asian workers in particular after the start of the second Palestinian uprising.

They've taken the place of Palestinian workers; Israel's government severely restricts their permits and presence in Israel for security reasons, it says.

Everyone here looks uncomfortable as the police approach.

Commander Igal Ben Ami says he doesn't enjoy deporting people who have made friends and have a life here but he says he has to follow orders.

"Look around this part of town," he says, listing to me dozens of nationalities who hang out here, especially at night.

"This is an Israeli street, a Jewish street, but I feel the stranger here."

Mr Netanyahu says Israel will always open its doors to refugees from war-stricken countries but will not let thousands of foreign workers "flood the country".

History of persecution

While his government speaks of the need to expel non-Jewish migrant workers and their children born here, it sponsors organisations that encourage Jewish people from all over the world to move to Israel.

Israel insists this has nothing at all to do with racism. Most here feel having a Jewish state is important considering the Jewish people's long history of persecution.

Mark Rosenberg works for Nefesh B'Nefesh, a group that encourages Jews to move to Israel.

He explains that Israel offers citizenship to anyone with a Jewish grandparent, because under the Nazis anyone with a Jewish grandparent was eligible to be murdered in the gas chambers.

"Especially in the shadow of the Holocaust, many Jews chose to come and live here - 85% of the country is Jewish. The idea is that this nation is a homeland where Jews can be free."

But the children of foreign workers in Israel say they know no other home. Israeli governments used to turn a blind eye but no longer.

'Punished'

Young Israeli campaigner Rotem Ilan heads the Children of Israel organisation.

She says children like Noah Mae are being punished for a crime they didn't commit.

The fact that they were born in Israel is Israel's responsibility, she insists.

It allowed the children's parents to come here.

Her organisation is one of a number of NGOs organising protests against the children's deportation.

"For 20 years Israeli governments have turned a blind eye to these children. They are now part of the fabric of this country. They go to school here. They celebrate the same holidays as us. If there is something we [Jews] have learned from our history is that you must not, you cannot deport children."

Israel's government did not respond to our requests for an interview.

Noah Mae and her friends hope politicians may yet change their minds and let them stay.

And how will she feel if they don't?

"Bad," she said sadly. "I love Israel."

Source:

U.S. lawmakers in Israel 'puzzled' by Ayalon boycott

A delegation of U.S. Congress members on Wednesday harshly criticized Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon for boycotting a meeting with them due to the fact that they arrived in Israel with members of the left-leaning pro-Israel lobby J Street.

"It was with real surprise and disappointment that we read a headline in this morning's paper saying, 'Foreign Ministry Boycotts Members of Congress,'" said Rep. William Delahunt (D-Massachusetts), who is heading the group of Democratic Congress members visiting Israel.

"We were puzzled that the Deputy Foreign Minister has apparently attempted to block our meetings with senior officials in the Prime Minister's office and Foreign Ministry - questioning either our own support of Israel or that we would even consider traveling to the region with groups that the Deputy Foreign Minister has so inaccurately described as 'anti-Israel,'" Delahunt continued.

"In our opinion this is an inappropriate way to treat elected representatives of Israel's closest ally who are visiting the country - and who through the years have been staunch supporters of the U.S.-Israeli special relationship."

Regarding J Street, Ayalon on Tuesday said, "The thing that troubles me is that they don't present themselves as to what they really are. They should not call themselves pro-Israeli."

Delahunt went on to ask the government for clarification regarding Ayalon's boycott, saying, "We ask the Israeli government to clarify its position toward this delegation and future congressional delegations."

As a member of the House Subcommittee on Europe, Delahunt said he became familiar with Ayalon's behavior during a recent diplomatic crisis with Turkey in which the Deputy Foreign Minister humiliated Ankara's envoy.

During a meeting between the two to protest a television show in Turkey that Israel viewed as anti-Semitic, Ayalon told cameramen in Hebrew: "Pay attention that he is sitting in a lower chair ... that there is only an Israeli flag on the table and that we are not smiling."

Ayalon later issued an apology for the incident.

Delahunt said that there are a range of opinions in Israel and in the U.S. about "how best to secure our common goal of peace and security for Israel and all the peoples of the region."

However, he added, "It is unwise for anyone to take disagreements as to how to accomplish our common goals and purpose - which is to achieve peace and security - and to misrepresent those differences as questioning support and concern for the state of Israel itself."

Source:

U.S. congressman: U.S. should break Israel`s blockade of Gaza

Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington state, also urged President Barack Obama's Mideast envoy to visit the Hamas-ruled territory to get a firsthand look at the destruction caused by Israeli's military offensive last year.
Read More

Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri warns of Israel 'threat'

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri says he is concerned about "escalating" threats posed to the Middle East by Israel.

Mr Hariri told the BBC that Israeli planes were entering Lebanese airspace every day, and he feared the prospect of another war with Israel.

He accused Israel of making a huge mistake by allegedly threatening both Lebanon and neighbouring Syria.

His comments come days after Syria and Israel exchanged hostile accusations.

The BBC's Natalia Antelava in Beirut says that while such rhetoric is hardly new, there is concern it could lead to more serious confrontation.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Hariri said: "We hear a lot of Israeli threats day in and day out, and not only threats.

"We see what's happening on the ground and in our airspace and what's happening all the time during the past two months - every day we have Israeli war planes entering Lebanese airspace.

"This is something that is escalating, and this is something that is really dangerous."

Mr Hariri also said that Lebanon was united, and that the government would stand by Hezbollah - the Lebanese militant group which fought Israel in 2006.

"I think they're betting that there might be some division in Lebanon, if there is a war against us.

"Well, there won't be a division in Lebanon. We will stand against Israel. We will stand with our own people."

His comments come just days after the foreign ministers of Syria and Israel exchanged aggressive accusations, which fuelled both media speculation and public fear about what many in the region describe as the "imminent next war".

Such hostile rhetoric is hardly new to the Middle East, and yet, because calm in this is region is so fragile, many are concerned that it could lead to a more serious confrontation.

Source:

Israeli gov’t steps in to help settlers in East Jerusalem

The Israeli government has stepped in to save a house built illegally by Jewish settlers in a volatile Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, complicating already troubled US efforts to renew Mideast peacemaking, the Associated Press reported.

The move is meant to skirt a court order to evacuate and seal the house, thus easing settler anger over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to slow Jewish settlement construction.

But it is likely to fuel new frictions with the Palestinians, who hope to establish a future capital in that sector of the holy city.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Israel’s latest attempts to entrench its presence in East Jerusalem only further discourage peace efforts.

Israeli officials “know for sure that there will never be peace without East Jerusalem being the capital of Palestine”, Erekat said Tuesday. “By undermining this, they’re undermining the peace process.”

Sovereignty over East Jerusalem is one of the most highly charged issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians, and competing claims to it have erupted into deadly violence in the past.

The latest controversy surrounds a seven-storey building built by the ultranationalist settler group Ateret Cohanim in 2004 in the Silwan neighbourhood. After years of legal battles, a court last July determined the structure was illegally built and ordered residents to leave.

Jerusalem’s Mayor Nir Barkat, who opposed the ruling, caved in last month and agreed to evacuate the building where eight families have been living under 24-hour government guard.

But the evacuation orders were abruptly cancelled Monday after Netanyahu’s interior minister reportedly decided to give the house - named for Jonathan Pollard, the American Jew convicted of spying in the US for Israel - retroactive approval.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s office did not return calls seeking comment, and Netanyahu’s office said he was not involved in the matter.

The Palestinians refuse to resume peace talks until Israel halts all settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, arguing the widening Israeli presence chips away at land they claim for a future state.

Israel occupied both areas in the 1967 Mideast war.

Netanyahu has offered a partial settlement freeze in the West Bank, but says East Jerusalem is off limits and will remain Israel’s forever.

Washington’s Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, has been trying to break the deadlock for more than a year and recently proposed shuttle diplomacy through American mediators.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signalled Tuesday he was open to Mitchell’s proposal and that Palestinians “must keep the doors open and give him the opportunity” to restart the process.

Indirect Middle East peace talks should begin soon, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reported, in the first public comment by an Israeli official on a US initiative.

Lieberman made the remarks during a visit to Azerbaijan, when he told President Ilham Aliyev “that in his estimation, indirect talks with the Palestinians would begin shortly”, the foreign ministry said.

Lieberman’s comments came a day after Palestinian officials said Abbas had agreed in principle to indirect talks with Israel under US mediation but requested a number of guarantees.

The latest US proposal for renewing peace talks suspended more than a year ago would have the two sides hold three months of indirect negotiations and have Israel make several goodwill gestures to the Palestinians.

The Palestinians would continue to require a complete freeze of Israeli settlements before any direct negotiations but not as a precondition to indirect talks.

The Palestinians said if accepted, the talks would begin February 20 with US envoy Mitchell shuttling between the two sides.

The two sides have been at loggerheads for months as Washington has called for the renewal of negotiations that were suspended when Israel launched its three-week Gaza offensive in December 2008.

The Palestinians have refused to return to the negotiating table without a complete freeze of Jewish settlement growth in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.

Israeli security forces on Tuesday arrested nine Palestinians in a second raid in as many days in a refugee camp in mainly Arab East Jerusalem after youths hurled stones at them.

“Nine people were arrested after border police and police came under attack from stone throwers,” said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

Several dozen youths could be seen hurling rocks, bottles and paint at security forces for the second consecutive day in the Shoufat refugee camp.

The camp is a crowded neighbourhood of dilapidated concrete blocks that house Palestinian refugees and the descendants of those who fled or lost their homes when Israel was created in 1948 or when it occupied East Jerusalem with the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War.

Source:

UN likely to refer Goldstone findings to The Hague

The United Nations is likely to refer the findings of the Goldstone report to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, diplomatic sources in New York said on Saturday.

A decision to bring the report on last year's Gaza war before the court would follow a debate in the UN General Assembly over Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's response to the document last week.

Assembly president Ali Abdussalam Treki announced on Saturday that member states were drawing up a plan of action over Ban's answer to the report, in which retired South African Judge Richard Goldstone accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.

Treki, a senior Libyan diplomat, did not give a target date for a debate by the assembly - but the tone of his press release implied that he would push for a full discussion of the issue, diplomats said.

Ban himself is thought not to support a general session, fearing that further criticism of Israel would only delay the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Most UN-watchers believe that Arab member states will demand a plenary session on the report, however.

Senior UN diplomats note, meanwhile, that one consequence of the Goldstone inquiry is that Hamas, which along with Israel issued a formal response, has become a quasi-official actor in the UN arena.

In his report, Ban wrote that Israel had responded to all the accusations against it. But he added that it was too early to say whether recommendations had yet been implemented by Israel and Hamas, as the parties were still conducting investigations.

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem said on Friday that Israel was satisfied with Ban's statement, which was an "accurate representation" of the Israeli submission.

Hamas on Saturday appeared to backtrack on last week's apology for harming Israeli civilians in rocket attacks. The Goldstone report accused Hamas of firing rockets indiscriminately at civilians.

The militant group, which controls the Gaza strip, had said previously that its rockets were meant to defend Gazans against Israeli military strikes: "We apologize for any harm that might have come to Israeli civilians," the Hamas government wrote in an intial reponse to the Goldstone report.

But on Saturday Hamas said in statement that its response the UN had been misinterpreted and contained no apologies. Hamas officials declined to give any further comment.

"Hamas is a terror organization whose main purpose is to attack civilians, so it's not surprising that they would retract their apology," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Andy David told the Associated Press on Saturday.

"For years Hamas has boasted about deliberately targeting civilians, either through suicide bombings, by gunfire or by rockets," Palmor said Saturday. "Who are they trying to fool now?"

Source:

'I look at the good'

"If  we all had the attitude of Alice, this would be a better world for everybody"
Chet

LONDON - Nothing in her appearance, behavior or speech betrays the advanced age of Alice Herz-Sommer, who recently celebrated her 106th birthday. Sommer, who was born in Prague in 1903, still keeps to a regular and independent routine, decades after her peers have passed away. She is coherent, clear-eyed, witty, funny and opinionated, smiles often - and is very content with life.

The encounter with her, at the small apartment in which she lives by herself, is like traveling in a time machine that alternately moves forward and backward. One moment she excitedly recalls the happy hours she spent with her friend Franz Kafka; then she talks painfully about her mother and her husband, who were murdered in the Holocaust; speaks reverently of her love for the piano, which she says saved her life at Theresienstadt; grows sad once again over the death of her only son, eight years ago; and thereafter smiles at the sight of the flowers on her windowsill.

"Everyone wants to reach an advanced age, but to be elderly is actually to be sick all the time. The body can no longer resist disease," she says.

And yet Sommer is in fact quite healthy: She is able to stand up and walk on her own, answers the phone, reads books and enjoys music.

"I have trouble moving these two fingers," she says with an embarrassed smile, waving her hand and explaining why she plays the piano with just eight fingers. Other than that, knock wood, everything is in working order.

"Only when you get to be very old are you aware of life's beauty," she explains. "Young people take everything for granted, whereas we, the elderly, understand nature. What I have learned, at my advanced age, is to be grateful that we have a nice life. There is electricity, cars, telegraph, telephone, Internet. We also have hot water all day long. We live like kings. I even got used to the bad weather in London," she adds with a smile.

Sommer was born into a secular and educated Jewish family. Besides her twin sister, Mariana, she had another sister and two brothers. She discovered a love for music at the age of 3, and it has remained with her to this day. Her family home in Prague was also a cultural salon where writers, scientists, musicians and actors congregated. One of these, author Franz Kafka, she remembers well: He was the best friend of the journalist, author and philosopher Felix Weltsch, who married her sister Irma.

"Kafka was a slightly strange man," Sommer recalls. "He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly," she says, and then grows silent. "And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him."

She says she knows about the ongoing trial in Israel, at the center of which is the question of who owns the rights to Kafka's estate.

"Kafka would have been against this. Don't forget that he asked his friend Max Brod not to publish his writings. That much I know," says Sommer - she is the last person alive who knew Kafka personally.

When World War I broke out, she was 11. Five years later she enrolled at the German music academy in Prague, where she was the youngest pupil. Within a short time she became one of the city's most famous pianists, and in the early 1930s was also known throughout Europe. Max Brod, the man who published Kafka's works, recognized Sommer's talent and reviewed several of her performances for a newspaper.

"Music is my world. I am wealthier than everyone, thanks to music," she declares.

In 1931 she married Leopold Sommer, also a musician. Six years later their only son, Rafael, was born. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Several of Sommer's friends and relatives fled to Palestine, including her two sisters, Mariana and Irma, her brother-in-law Felix Weltsch and their close friend Max Brod. The group boarded the last train that left Prague on March 14, 1939, the day before the Germans entered the country, en route to Romania, from where they sailed for Palestine.

This was a very difficult time for Sommer, who had stayed behind. The Nazis forbade Jews to perform in public, and so she stopped holding concerts and participating in music competitions. At first she was still able to make a living by giving piano lessons, but when the Nazis forbade Jews to teach non-Jews, she lost most of her pupils.

"Everything was forbidden. We couldn't buy groceries, take the tram, or go to the park," she says.

But the hardest times of all still lay ahead. In 1942 the Germans arrested her sick mother, Sophie, who was 72 at the time, and subsequently murdered her.

"That was the lowest point in my life," Sommer says. "A catastrophe. The bond between a mother and her child is something special. I loved her so much. But an inner voice told me, 'From now on you alone can help yourself. Not your husband, not the doctor, not the child.' And at that moment I knew I had to play Frederic Chopin's 24 etudes, which are the greatest challenge for any pianist. Like Goethe's 'Faust' or Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.' I ran home and from that moment on I practiced for hours and hours. Until they forced us out."

'Who is Hitler?'

In 1943, Sommer was sent to the Terezin-Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with her husband and their son, who was then 6 years old. The Nazis allowed the Jews to maintain a cultural life there, in order to present the false impression to the world that the inmates were receiving proper treatment. Sommer thus performed there together with other musicians.

"We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year," she recounts. "The Germans wanted to show its representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn't come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have."

Once, Sommer says, a Nazi officer came up to her in the camp and said: "Are you Frau Sommer? I can hear your concert from the window. I come from a musical family and understand music. I thank you from the bottom of my heart."

Her son Rafael also took part in the musical effort and appeared in the lead role in the Czech children's opera "Brundibar," with music by Hans Krasa and libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, which was staged at the camp.

"He was happy," Sommer says, "but he asked questions like: Who is Hitler? What is war? Why is there nothing to eat? For two years we ate only black coffee and soup. It's not easy for a mother to see her child crying, and to know that she does not even have a little bread to give him."

In September 1944, her husband Leopold was sent to Auschwitz. He survived his imprisonment there, but died of illness at Dachau shortly before the war ended. His departing words to her at Theresienstadt saved her life, says Sommer: "One evening he came and told me that 1,000 men would be sent on a transport the following day - himself included. He made me swear not to volunteer to follow him afterward. And a day after his transport there was another one, which people were told was a transport of 'wives following in their husbands' footsteps.' Many wives volunteered to go, but they never met up with their husbands: They were murdered. If my husband hadn't warned me, I would have gone at once."

In May 1945, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. Two years later Sommer and her son immigrated to Palestine, where they were reunited with her family: her twin Mariana, who had meanwhile married Prof. Emil Adler, one of the founders of Hadassah Medical Center (their son, Prof. Chaim Adler, is an Israel Prize laureate for education), and with Irma and her husband Felix (their grandson is actor Eli Gorenstein).

"I don't hate the Germans," Sommer declares. "[What they did] was a terrible thing, but was Alexander the Great any better? Evil has always existed and always will. It is part of our life."

In 1962, she adds, she attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: "I have to say that I had pity for him. I have pity for the entire German people. They are wonderful people, no worse than others."

Despite everything she went through? "Yes," she answers. "I would not be alive without pity. That is the reason I am still alive: I think about the good. That takes a lot of practice."

For almost 40 years Sommer lived in Israel, making a living by teaching music at a conservatory in Jerusalem. "That was the best period in my life," she recalls. "I was happy."

Jewish humor

On the walls of her London apartment are pictures of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, among other things; alongside Kafka's works, her bookshelves hold several volumes by Amos Oz.

"Jews are an extraordinary and complicated people. They are helpful and generous, but not always easy to live with," she notes, with a laugh. "A sense of humor is what makes me particularly Jewish. Nobody has this kind of humor. And the same goes for a sense of family. We are far more family-oriented than others. Not like the English, who spend time with their dogs."

She emphasizes that for her, however, Judaism is not connected to religion per se: "I am Jewish without religion. The past - Einstein, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Spinoza - is what defines us as Jews. And the [emphasis on] education of our children: Everyone has to be a doctor. The best doctors, scientists and writers are Jews."

In 1986, Sommer followed her son, a cellist, and his family to London. She continued playing and teaching; to this day she devotes three hours a day to practicing. She speaks lovingly of her two grandchildren, whose father, Rafael, died of a heart attack in Israel in 2001, at the end of a concert tour. He was 64.

"His birth was the happiest day of my life, and his death was the worst thing that happened to me," she notes, but manages to find a bright spot even here. "I am grateful at least that he did not suffer when he died. And I still watch my son play, on television. He lives on. Sometimes I think it will be possible someday to postpone death through technology."

What is your secret to a long life?

Sommer: "In a word: optimism. I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive."

And what about diet?

"My recommendation is not to eat a lot, but also not to go hungry. Fish or chicken and plenty of vegetables."

Aren't you afraid of death?

"Not at all. No. I was a good person, I helped people, I was loved, I have a good feeling."

Source:

Iran's proud but discreet Jews

Although Iran and Israel are bitter enemies, few know that Iran is home to the largest number of Jews anywhere in the Middle East outside Israel.

About 25,000 Jews live in Iran and most are determined to remain no matter what the pressures - as proud of their Iranian culture as of their Jewish roots.

It is dawn in the Yusufabad synagogue in Tehran and Iranian Jews bring out the Torah and read the ancient text before making their way to work.

It is not a sight you would expect in a revolutionary Islamic state, but there are synagogues dotted all over Iran where Jews discreetly practise their religion.

"Because of our long history here we are tolerated," says Jewish community leader Unees Hammami, who organised the prayers.

He says the father of Iran's revolution, Imam Khomeini, recognised Jews as a religious minority that should be protected.

As a result Jews have one representative in the Iranian parliament.

"Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us," says Mr Hammami.

'Anti-Jewish feeling'

In the Yusufabad synagogue the announcements are made in Persian - most Iranian Jews don't really speak Hebrew well.

Jews have lived in Persia for nearly 3,000 years - the descendants of slaves from Babylon saved by Cyrus the Great.

Over the centuries there have been sporadic purges, pogroms and forced conversions to Islam as well as periods of peaceful co-existence.

These days anti-Jewish feeling is periodically stirred by the media.

Mr Hammami says state-run television confuses Zionism and Judaism so that "ordinary people may think that whatever the Israelis do is supported by all Jews".

During the fighting in Lebanon a hardline weekly newspaper, Yalesarat, published two photographs of synagogues on its front page full of people waving Israeli flags celebrating Israeli independence day.

The paper falsely said the synagogues were in Iran - even describing one as the Yusufabad synagogue in Tehran and locating another in Shiraz.

"This provoked a number of opportunists in Shiraz," explains Iran's Jewish MP, Maurice Mohtamed, "and there was an assault on two synagogues."

Mr Mohtamed says the incident was defused by the Iranian security forces, who explained to people that the news was not true.

And with the coming to power of an ultra-conservative like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there has been increased concern internationally about the fate of Iranian Jews.

'Holocaust denial'

Mr Ahmedinejad has repeatedly used rabid anti-Israeli rhetoric - slogans like "wipe Israel off the map" - and most controversially he has questioned the number killed in the Holocaust during World War II.

Mr Mohtamed has been outspoken in his condemnation of the president's views - in itself a sign that there is some space for Jews in Iran to express themselves.

"It's very regrettable to see a horrible tragedy so far reaching as the Holocaust being denied ... it was a very big insult to Jews all around the world," says Mr Mohtamed, who has also strongly condemned the exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust organised by an Iranian newspaper owned by the Tehran municipality.

Despite the offence Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has caused to Jews around the world, his office recently donated money for Tehran's Jewish hospital.

It is one of only four Jewish charity hospitals worldwide and is funded with money from the Jewish diaspora - something remarkable in Iran where even local aid organisations have difficulty receiving funds from abroad for fear of being accused of being foreign agents.

Most of the patients and staff are Muslim these days, but director Ciamak Morsathegh is Jewish.

"Anti-Semitism is not an eastern phenomenon, it's not an Islamic or Iranian phenomenon - anti-Semitism is a European phenomenon," he says, arguing that Jews in Iran even in their worst days never suffered as much as they did in Europe.

Israeli family ties

But there are legal problems for Jews in Iran - if one member of a Jewish family converts to Islam he can inherit all the family's property.

Jews cannot become army officers and the headmasters of the Jewish schools in Tehran are all Muslim, though there is no law that says this should be so.

But their greatest vulnerability is their links to Israel - where many Jews have relatives.

Seven years ago a group of Jews in the southern city of Shiraz was accused of spying for Israel - eventually they were all released. But today many Iranian Jews travel to and from Iran's enemy Israel.

In one of Tehran's six remaining kosher butcher's shops, everyone has relatives in Israel.

In between chopping up meat, butcher Hersel Gabriel tells me how he expected problems when he came back from Israel, but in fact the immigration officer didn't say anything to him.

"Whatever they say abroad is lies - we are comfortable in Iran - if you're not political and don't bother them then they won't bother you," he explains.

His customer, middle-aged housewife Giti agrees, saying she can easily talk to her two sons in Tel Aviv on the telephone and visit them.

"It's not a problem coming and going; I went to Israel once through Turkey and once through Cyprus and it was not problem at all," she says.

Gone are the early days of the Iranian revolution when Jews - and many Muslims - found it hard to get passports to travel abroad.

"In the last five years the government has allowed Iranian Jews to go to Israel freely, meet their families and when they come back they face no problems," says Mr Mohtamed.

He says there is also a way for Iranian Jews who emigrated to Israel decades ago to return to Iran and see their families.

"They can now go to the Iranian consul general in Istanbul and get Iranian identity documents and freely come to Iran," he says.

The exodus of Jews from Iran seems to have slowed down - the first wave was in the 1950s and the second was in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.

Those Jews who remain in Iran seem to have made a conscious decision to stay put.

"We are Iranian and we have been living in Iran for more than 3,000 years," says the Jewish hospital director Ciamak Morsathegh.

"I am not going to leave - I will stay in Iran under any conditions," he declares.

Source:

Who will pray at Lebanon's rebuilt synagogue?

Work has begun in Beirut on rebuilding its long-abandoned synagogue

Rumours of the reconstruction of the city's historic Magen-Abraham Synagogue have been around for years but no one, it seems, could quite believe their eyes when the work actually began.

Regular outbreaks of fighting, most recently in 2006, and decades of hostilities between Lebanon and Israel have virtually obliterated Lebanon's once-thriving Jewish community.

Officially, the two countries have been in a state of war since the 1948 creation of Israel.

Jews began leaving Lebanon en masse in the late 1960s.

Those who stayed still keep an extremely low profile.

And so it came as a great surprise when a tiny Jewish community, believed to be fewer than 100 people, announced that they had managed to secure funds and permission to reconstruct their temple.

Work is now in full swing.

Fresh cement

Only a few months ago, the old synagogue was in ruins.

It reeked of urine and decay. Trees and bushes grew under its collapsed roof and anti-Semitic graffiti covered the walls.

Today the tall roof is back, walls have been freshly cemented and workers are about to begin painting.

But the project is surrounded by secrecy.

"We are not afraid. We are just wary of the circumstances," said a representative of the Jewish community, who did not want to be identified.

Lebanon is home to armed Palestinian groups and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

Hezbollah, a militant group which wants to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, is part of the Lebanese government.

But the representative of the Jewish community is confident that the reconstruction will be completed.

He says that so far the community, with the help of overseas donations, has managed to raise $2.5 million (£1.6 million) - half of the amount needed.

He also confirmed that Solidaire, a development company which is part of the business empire that belongs to the family of the country's Prime Minister Saad Hariri, has promised a $150,000 (£94,000) donation.

"Overall, reaction to the renovation has been positive," says Nada Abdelsamad of BBC Arabic, who recently wrote a book about the Jews of Beirut.

"All political parties, including Hezbollah, said they welcomed the reconstruction."

"The question is, what will happen after. Will it be an active synagogue?" she asks.

Rare funerals

Neither Solidaire nor Beirut municipality agreed to BBC requests for interviews.

One Jewish man explained why everyone involved in the project seems to be shying away from it.

We spoke at an old Jewish cemetery in Beirut.

It's a resting place for more than 4,000 Jews and funerals, although rare, still take place here.

Over the years, the cemetery has been often looted, dozens of graves are missing their marble plates and many are covered in rubbish.

"We suffer the most from the lack of education, from the fact that people don't realise that being Jewish and being Israeli are two different things," he said. He would not give his name.

Officially, Jews are still one of 18 sects that make up Lebanon's multi-confessional society.

But Beirut today is very different from the place that still lives in the memories of Dr Abraham Albert Elia and his wife Lucy.

Magen-Abraham Synagogue is where they first met and fell in love 50 years ago.

Today both of them live in Israel.

"We had a very happy life in Lebanon. We never felt it was dangerous or that we faced any sort of risk. We had parties, picnics, we went out," remembers Lucy Elia.

She says the decision to leave was driven not by threats to themselves, but the realisation that their children had no future in Lebanon.

Tourist attraction?

Back in Beirut, Lisa Nahmoud, a Jew who chose to stay in Lebanon, believes her community still has no future here.

Long ago she destroyed every single piece of paper identifying her as Jewish.

"I am Lebanese," she says, "all my friends are Muslims and Christians"

We spoke just around the corner from the synagogue, where Lisa feeds her favourite street cats.

"There are hardly any of us left here. Who will go to this synagogue?" she asked.

"But renovation is a good thing. Maybe the synagogue will attract tourists."

Against the odds, the Jews of Lebanon have managed to save their temple.

But their ageing community is disappearing and, until there is peace with Israel, their renovated synagogue is likely to remain a monument to the past rather than a promise of a future.

Source:

Dubai: We will go after Netanyahu if Mossed killed Hamas man

We will issue a warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's arrest if it turns out Israeli intelligence was behind last month's killing of a Hamas strongman, Army Radio quoted Dubai's police commissioner on Thursday.

Dubai's police chief Dahi Halfan referred to the January 20 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was reportedly responsible for the smuggling of Iranian arms to Gaza.

"Benjamin Netanyahu will be the first one wanted, since he is the one that signed the decision to execute al-Mabhouh," Halfan added, claiming that the killers' modus operandi was "typical Mossad."

On Wednesday, Dubai's police chief warned international intelligence agencies from working "behind our back," saying anyone who did so "should be wary of his own back.

Halfan added that that threat was also applicable "to any intelligence organization around the world, whether Mossad, Hamas or any other agency."

The Dubai police chief added that he believed the Hamas leader was in Dubai for business and not for any kind of arms transactions.

Halfan added that if Al-Mabhouh would have been interested in meeting Iranian officials in Dubai, as the Israeli media has claimed, he could have done so in either Syria or Iran itself.

The Dubai police commissioner refused to reveal the identity of the suspects linked to the incident, denying a Hamas claim that the assassins had entered the country by participating in Minister Uzi Landau's entourage, when he visited Dubai earlier that month.

Source:

Fear of peace will be the death of Israel

By Bradley Burston

SHEIKH JARRAH, Jerusalem - As the grandson of anarchists, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for fanatics. Expressions of extremism, and passionately reasoned, exquisitely twisted world views make me feel, how shall I put this, at home.

So it was with a certain relish that I approached the cover story of a recent issue of Commentary, "The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace," written as it was by a talented colleague and friend, Evelyn Gordon.

The thrust of the piece, which Commentary Editor John Podhoretz understandably calls "groundbreaking," is that Israel's international standing has plummeted to an unprecedented low - and the number of Palestinians killed by Israel has concurrently soared - specifically because of Israel's having done much too much for peace.

"The answer is unpleasant to contemplate, but the mounting evidence makes it inescapable," she writes. "It was Israel's very willingness to make concessions for the sake of peace that has produced its current near-pariah status."

The essay has the seamless, compellingly elegant, hyper-lucid, parallel universe logic of a hallucination - or a settlement rooted in the craw of the West Bank. Until I read it, it was difficult for me to comprehend the current runaway-freight recklessness of Israeli authorities and a certain segment of the hard right, bolstered by shady funding from abroad.

It was hard to fathom why Israeli police in this quiet hollow of the Arab half of Jerusalem, would choose to openly flout and violate the rulings of an Israeli court. I was unable to grasp why they would manhandle and arrest non-violent demonstrators - among them the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel - for protesting the official expulsion from their homes of more than two dozen Palestinian families here, driven out and into the street, so that subsidized and sheltered settlers could move in.

It was beyond my understanding why an Israeli government which views the idea of a Palestinian Right of Return as tantamount to annihilation of the Jewish state, would set a legal precedent that paves the way for just such a right.

Just as I was clueless as to why the Knesset was to vote Wednesday on a bill that would make aiding asylum seekers fleeing African genocide, granting them shelter, medical care, food, a crime subject to up to 20 years in prison.

Or why there were vigorous new campaigns to increase gender segregation at the Western Wall and on public buses, and why women have been arrested and interrogated on suspicion of having worn prayer shawls while praying on their side of a barrier raised so that they would no longer be able to watch their sons' bar mitzvah on the mens' side.

Or why a sudden and ferocious campaign against human rights organizations and charity work agencies in Israel is coinciding with new human rights outrages against Palestinians and foreigners, some of them unable to leave, others forced to.

It was not until I saw the title of the Commentary piece that it all made sense.

The right is terrified of peace. And, in the end, the right's fear of peace will be the death of Israel.

They are afraid of peace, in part, because it threatens the core of what has come to replace other values as the goal of Judaism: permanent settlement of the West Bank. But that is only a part of it.

They are afraid of peace because they are afraid of the world. They dismiss fellow Jews who want to see a two-state solution - a majority of Israelis - as unrealistic, as living in a bubble. The name of the bubble these moderates live in, however, is planet Earth.

The right, meanwhile, wants to wall off Israel as the world's last remaining legally mandated Jewish ghetto. A place where all the rules are different, exit and entry, citizenship and human rights, because the residents within are Jews. A place where non-Jews, dehumanized as congenital Jew-haters, are rendered invisible. A place which, if suffocating and insufferable, still seems safer than the scary world outside.

A place which, because of its walls and its politics and its cowardice, is losing its ability to function as a part of the world, reveling in cheap-shot humiliations of key foreign ambassadors, deliriously proud of its sense that of all the world, including most of its Jews and Israelis - only the right sees the real truth.

This braid of thought was venomously endorsed this week both by an uncharacteristically Kahane-sounding Alan Dershowitz, and the obscenely infantile Im Tirtzu movement. According to them, where Cast Lead was concerned, the real war criminals are Richard Goldstone and Naomi Chazan - two people who are open about their love of Israel, and who have worked their whole adult lives for its well-being.

The fears of the right are not mere devices of rhetoric. The risks of making peace are real. Every bit as real as the risks of failing to make peace.

It all comes down to belief. It comes down to the kind of country the believer wants Israel to be. And for that reason, there is a civil war going on for Israel's soul.

It will not be weaponry that decides this war, but courage. People who care about the direction that Israel is moving, and whose watchword is moderation, would do well to choose one facet of the fight, and join. One place to start, is to support the New Israel Fund and the groups it supports.

Another place to start is this one. At the weekend, challenging the threats of rightist thugs and law-scorning police, the weekly demonstration on behalf of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah doubled in size. The police backed down on their vow to break up the protest, and the Kahanists barely showed.

If non-violent peace activism scares the right to this extent, there must be a great deal of power in it.

After all, most Israelis can sense that if peace is to be the enemy, more dangerous even than the threat of war, this is one doomed ghetto.

Things have reached such a devastating point, that for the first time in recent memory, even Ehud Barak is beginning to get it: "The simple truth is, if there is one state" including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, "it will have to be either binational or undemocratic," Barak told the Herzliya Conference Tuesday.

"If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

The fear of peace has left Israel as a country which is prepared for nuclear warfare but not for non-violent protest on behalf of Palestinians. The fear of peace, and the blackmail of the right on behalf of settlement, has contorted Israel into a body which, unable to countenance the perils of treating the sickness of occupation, will eventually be killed by it.

Israel's defense minister, for one, is convinced: "The lack of a solution to the problem of border demarcation within the historic Land of Israel - and not an Iranian bomb - is the most serious threat to Israel's future."

Source:

LEBANON: Probe launched into Israel's alleged cross-border abduction of teenage shepherd

The Israeli-Lebanese border is a perilous tripwire that has already sparked one major war in the last few years.

So Israel's alleged abduction of a young Lebanese shepherd over the weekend had sparks flying.

The 17-year-old's temporary detainment by Israeli soldiers has prompted an investigation into the incident by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and created a diplomatic tussle.

"UNIFIL has launched an investigation to establish the circumstances of the incident, including the exact location where the man was apprehended," UNIFIL representative Neeraj Singh was quoted as saying by the Lebanese English-language newspaper the Daily Star. "The investigation is ongoing."

Rabih Mohammed Zahra was tending to a flock of sheep on Sunday in the Bastara Farm village near the disputed border area of Shebaa Farms when he was arrested by Israeli soldiers on Sunday, media reports say.

The Shebaa Farms, an area of roughly 10 square miles at the junction of southeastern Lebanon, southwestern Syria and northern Israel, has been occupied by the Jewish state since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It's been disputed turf ever since.

But a joint inspection conducted by the Lebanese army and UNIFIL concluded the shepherd was arrested on Lebanese territory, according to Lebanon's official National News Agency.

A statement by the Lebanese Foreign Ministry called the incident a "clear violation" of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which ended the July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, and Lebanese territorial sovereignty.

After spending several hours in Israeli detention, Zahra was handed back to members of UNIFIL at its base in southern Lebanon on Monday morning and then given over to the Lebanese army.

A Lebanese army spokesman told Agence France Presse that Zahra had been beaten while in detainment, saying the shepherd came back with bruises on his face and neck.
Others media reports said Zahra had been interrogated by his Israeli captors about the activities of Hezbollah in the area.

Israeli media, meanwhile, reported that Zahra was carrying a weapon when he was apprehended by Israeli soldiers. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israeli security forces had arrested " a shepherd carrying a commando knife."

Israel has previously arrested people in the disputed border area in southern Lebanon. In recent months, cattle also have crossed the border from one country to another. Last fall, Lebanese media reported that UNIFIL was working on plans to put up a fence in some areas in the Lebanese south to prevent Israeli cows from straying into Lebanon.

Source:

UN find challenges Israeli version of attack on civilian building in Gaza war

UN team find remains of aircraft-dropped bombs, contradicting Israeli report on military conduct during three-week conflict.

A new Israeli report defending the military's conduct in the Gaza war was challenged tonight after evidence emerged apparently contradicting one of its key findings.

Israel submitted a 46-page report to the UN on Friday saying its forces abided by international law throughout the three-week war last year. It was meant to avert the threat of international prosecutions and to challenge a highly critical UN inquiry by South African judge Richard Goldstone, which accused both Israel and Hamas of "grave breaches" of the fourth Geneva convention, war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

The Israeli report looked in detail at a handful of incidents, including the attack on the al-Badr flour mill in northern Gaza, which was severely damaged.

The UN mine action team, which handles ordnance disposal in Gaza, has told the Guardian that the remains of a 500-pound Mk82 aircraft-dropped bomb were found in the ruins of the mill last January. Photographs of the front half of the bomb have been obtained by the Guardian.

This evidence directly contradicts the finding of the Israeli report, which challenged allegations that the building was deliberately targeted and specifically stated there was no evidence of an air strike. Goldstone, however, used the account of the air strike as a sign that Israel's attack on the mill was not mere collateral damage, but precisely targeted and a possible war crime.

The flour mill attack was not the most serious incident of the war: although nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in just three weeks, no one died at the mill. However, because it was a civilian building producing food – the only operational mill in Gaza – the incident received particular criticism from Goldstone, who concluded that the building was hit by an air strike, the attacks were "intentional and precise", and they were "carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population". He added that the attacks violated the fourth Geneva convention and customary international law and may constitute a war crime.

In its defence, the Israeli report admitted the building had been hit by tank shells but said it was a "legitimate military target" because there were Hamas fighters "in the vicinity of the flour mill". It said the mill was "not a pre-planned target" and specifically denied it was hit by an air strike.

"The military advocate general did not find any evidence to support the assertion that the mill was attacked from the air using precise munitions, as alleged in the human rights council fact-finding report," it said. The military advocate general "found no reason" to order a criminal investigation.

But the Guardian visited the mill days after the war last year and on the first floor of the building saw what appeared to be the remains of an aircraft-dropped bomb in the burnt-out milling machinery.

The UN mine action team said it identified an aircraft-dropped bomb at the mill on 25 January last year and removed it on 11 February. "Item located was the front half of a Mk82 aircraft bomb with 273M fuse," according to the team. "The remains of the bomb were found on an upper floor in a narrow walkway between burnt-out machinery and an outside wall." The bomb was made safe by a technical field manager and removed.

The team also provided two photographs of what it said were the bomb remains, marked with the date and time it was identified: "25 Jan, 14:38". The team did not do a damage assessment of the building to see what other ordnance hit because that was not its task.

Asked to explain the new evidence today, the Israeli military referred the Guardian to an Israeli foreign ministry statement that summarises last week's report and states that the military is "committed to full compliance" with the law of armed conflict and to investigating any alleged violations.

As well as the heavy death toll, the Gaza war damaged a large amount of civilian infrastructure: more than 21,000 buildings and apartments were wholly or partly destroyed, including more than 200 major factories.

The al-Badr flour mill was the largest mill in the strip, with production lines spread over five floors – each of which were hit. Gaza's largest concrete factory, at a different site a few miles away, was also destroyed, as were several large food processing plants.

Goldstone said the nature of the attack on the flour mill "suggests that the intention was to disable its productive capacity" and said there was no plausible justification for the extensive damage. "It thus appears that the only purpose was to put an end to the production of flour in the Gaza Strip," his report said. It is not clear why Goldstone did not use evidence from the UN team in his report.

Rashad Hamada, one of two brothers who owns the mill, gave evidence at a public hearing in Gaza last June and said the mill was hit by an air strike. He said the ­factory twice received phone calls from the Israeli military telling them to evacuate the building in the days before the strike, but the factory was not used by Hamas or other Palestinian fighters.

Both Hamada brothers possess hard-to-obtain businessmen's permits to enter Israel and were therefore regarded as ­credible ­witnesses by the Goldstone team.

"What happened at the mill is total destruction of the whole production line of the factory," Hamada said. He ­estimated his losses due to the destruction were $2.5m (£1.7m) and said he believed that the mill had been targeted because it was working.

Four other flour mills in Gaza that were not operational were not targeted, he said. "As for the targeting, it is because [it was] a flour mill that is ­working," he said.

Source:

Israel police not charged over activist shooting

Tristan Anderson was shot in the face and critically injured

Charges will not be brought against the police officers who shot an American pro-Palestinian activist in the face, Israel's justice ministry has said.

Tristan Anderson suffered severe brain damage when he was shot at a rally in the West Bank town of Naalin last year.

The officers did not have any "criminal intent" when they shot Mr Anderson, a ministry spokesman said.

Mr Anderson, 38, was in a coma for months and can only communicate with basic sounds, friends say.

The case was closed without indicting anyone after an internal police investigation because "there was no proof of criminal behaviour by the police", Justice Ministry spokesman Moshe Cohen told the AFP news agency .

Regular clashes

Mr Anderson, from Oakland California, was among 400 people demonstrating against the building of the West Bank barrier.

The village is one of several places where stone-throwing Palestinian youths clash regularly with police.

Mr Anderson was shot by a riot policeman from between 60-70 m (213ft), it was reported.

The Anderson family's lawyer said Mr Anderson had not been throwing rocks at police, according to AFP.

"The demonstration was actually for all practical purposes over," said Michael Sfard, who insisted the family would appeal the decision.

A number of European or American activists have been killed or injured in demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza.

Tom Hurndall, 22, was shot by an Israeli sniper in 2003 while at a demonstration in Gaza, he died in Britain nine months later.

Rachel Corrie, 23, was also killed in Gaza a month earlier when a bulldozer crushed her.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory ruling that the barrier was illegal and should be removed.

Israel's official position is that the barrier is a security fence, defending its citizens from attacks by Palestinians.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, view it as as a land grab as the route of the wall cuts deep into the West Bank in places.

Only 15% of the barrier follows the Green Line, the internationally recognised boundary between the West bank and Israel.

The barrier, is a mixture of fences, barbed wire, ditches and concrete slabs up to 8m (26ft) high.

Source: