january 2005

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Likud negotiations team to suspended coalition talks with Labor Thursday night.Sharon’s surprising move came in response to comments made by Labor's chief negotiator, MK Dalia Itzik. Itzik told the Labor Party convention Thursday afternoon that the premier was "groveling" to get Labor into his government. "He's running after us, not we after him, after 30 years, they [Likud] are seeing how right we were... They are contractors implementing [our policies]." She said.........."We've had enough of Dalia Itzik's games," said one Likud source furiously.

"They have reached an agreement. They will meet tomorrow (Saturday) to summarize it," said Sharon's spokesman Assaf Shariv on the 17th Dec., adding that the deal was likely to be signed on Sunday. Peres said last week that Labour should join the government "unconditionally" to speed up a plan to "disengage" from conflict with the Palestinians by evacuating all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four of 120 in the West Bank in 2005.

"Let's close (the deal) and go to a unity government," Channel 2 television reported Peres as telling Sharon on Friday. Labour officials were unavailable for comment, but party sources confirmed a deal had been reached.

The agreement, which was reached after a week of negotiations and still awaits approval by Labour's Central Committee, would give the party five ministerial portfolios -- none high-ranking says Corinne Heller, Reuters- -- and make Peres a deputy prime minister.Under the coalition deal, Labour would be given five ministerial posts -- interior, housing, national infrastructure, communications and tourism. Two party members will be appointed ministers without portfolios, Shariv said.These portfolios would normally be considered high rank responsibilities but we continue to witness the re-direction of financial expenditure, as in America, to the military expansion at the heart of Zionist "Israel". Sharon needs Labour to avoid an early election after his big coalition partner, the centrist Shinui party, bolted over a state budget dispute. Likud officials are still negotiating to bring in two Orthodox parties to secure a parliamentary majority.

Sharon said on Thursday he saw a unique chance for peace with new Palestinian leaders and was ready to coordinate some aspects of his Gaza withdrawal plan as a step to a broader deal.And this despite the fact that Gaza settlers have refused the programmes of re-settlement available to them.

The call for civil disobedience was proposed by Binyamin Regional Council chief Pinhas Wallerstein, who was asked by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to "reconsider" his remarks. Mazuz ordered an examination of the leaflet Wallerstein distributed to determine if it is incitement, and if the state believes the leaflet's rhetoric poses a clear and present danger to cause public disorder, they could decide to prosecute Wallerstein. "We believe that of all the burdens we have, the inability to fulfill a government decision is the worst of all," said Karadi at the annual conference of regional authority chiefs and their deputies, held in Kibbutz Maaleh Hahamishah. "It doesn't matter what any of us think about the disengagement plan or the evacuation. That's not the point. The fact that a state or government makes a decision and then it cannot implement it is dangerous to our very existence in the state of Israel and to any democratic country."Therefore, Karadi went on, "the minute we were given the assignment to conduct the evacuation as part of the disengagement, we cannot take it lightly. This is not a difficult mission because of the planning, but because of the execution, day in and day out."The Gush Katif evacuation, he said, "will be tougher than the evacuation of Yamit," because Yamit was not perceived by the national consensus as part of the state of Israel, while Gush Katif is considered settlement of Israel. "The settlement of Gush Katif is ideological and faith-based," he said. Major General Dan Harel, general of the Southern Command, is expected to approve the joint police-army evacuation plan this week. The plan will go to the general staff and the police general staff in January for approval by Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon and Karadi. Police deployment for the plan begins in March, when the police and army troops work on advance stages of training for the actual evacuation, due to begin in July right after the end of the school year. All the police and army forces to be used in the operation will take part in a four-week training session during June.The troops will be prepared in two stages, mental and physical. The mental preparations begin soon, through discussions with behavioral scientists who work for the police. The second stage, in March, will involve learning the doctrines developed for the actual behavior duringthe evacuation - how to approach a house that is being held by protesters, and how to remove people. The army and police are still considering building a virtual settlement to practice in. Karadi said the police will not be equipped with any special weapons for the operation. "We will not arrive with weapons nor with other violent instruments," he said. "The evacuation will be done by hand."Any case of a settler trying to resist forcibly or shooting at security forces will be handled by the army's troops, who will be armed, and not by police.The overall operation, said Karadi, will involve some 5,000 police, including 2,500 who will be taken away from directly fighting crime. "Clearly that means police will not be doing their main missions as crime fighters - and that has to be said clearly." http://www.barrychamish.com                         DO NOT SIGN THE WALLERSTEIN PROCLAMATION                                                 by Barry Chamish       A few days ago I signed the Wallerstein Proclamation which commits foreigners to coming to Israel to participate in non-violent protest against the withdrawal from Gush Katif. There were fewer than 500 signatories and I thought I'd try to beef up the numbers a bit, despite being Israeli.            http://www.petitiononline.com/eretzyis/         Tonight I joined a group of people to hear Pinchas Wallerstein, head of the Binyamin Regional Council, in Talmon. One of the topics of discussion on the way was why the proclamation wasn't in Hebrew. Why was Wallerstein aiming only at outside support? By the time the meeting was over, I knew why.          For the past few years, I've been receiving information about the heads of councils in Yesha. The following is not atypical:           Shalom Mr. Chamish, I've been living for nearly 10 yrs. in Itamar and some very strange things have been going on since Benzi Lieberman was elected. In the elections before his first term there was a suspicious incident with one of the ballot boxes 'disappearing'. Since the wave of terror in Itamar after the assassination of Gilad Zar, the regional council has cut the number of hours for Ambulatory help in the Gav-Hahar region (Bracha, Elon more, Itamar, Yitzhar) - no Ambulance is available on Shabbat and in the evenings; the ambulance in Itamar was removed under the pretext that there's nobody in Itamar who is a qualified paramedic. And last but not least just when the security officer Shlomo Miller was assassinated he was involved in a great dispute with the councill concerning the money which the Ministry of Security transferred to install electronic security equipment in Itamar and which the council is refusing to hand over to the Yishuv. This is only the tip of an iceberg and should be invested.         It should be noted that the same Benzi Lieberman publicly supported the Wallerstein petition.         One person who made a very open complaint against Wallerstein was Moshe Feiglin. In Chapter 5 of his book, Where There Are No Men, Feiglin revealed that after every act of protest by his Zo Artzeinu movement, Wallerstein, then Yesha Council head, would inform government officials that he denounced the protesters.          Which is precisely what he did this evening in Talmon. He denounced soldiers who would refuse orders to evacuate Jews from their homes, declaring that, "It's futile anyway. All regular army soldiers are in favor of the evacuation anyway." A patently false claim.           Next came his revolutionary program: a protest vigil outside the Knesset.           I chimed in: "Do you mean to say your goal is to influence the Knesset? Do you even know who  you are fighting?"           To which he gave numbers and figures in the Likud Central Committee who could be swayed by the vigil.           The authorities could not have devised a plan better suited to their purposes. Many in the audience of about 100 protested against the flimsy plan and Wallerstein told them to shut up because they were weakening unity. He then ended the meeting quickly.            I said to my companions, "You're finished. He's misguiding you on purpose. He's working against you."            Then we understood why the petition is only in English. Anyone who signs the petition will find his name entered in the passport control computers. As the day of disengagement nears, anyone who signed that petition will be returned home as a radical troublemaker. Already, over 1600 committed Jews and lovers of Israel have been identified. They are now lost to the cause.            DO NOT SIGN THE PETITION. IT'S A TRAP!            Come to Israel and join the fight. Just don't announce it or you'll never see the outside of the airport. end

Peres, 81, has forged an alliance with Sharon, a 76-year-old ex-general before. Peres served as foreign minister from 2001 to 2002 under a Sharon-led unity government.Right and Left the political world of extremes is rising the tension and the vision of its power, that can be depicted certainly by the rising scales of klezmer music - but will these scales of music and hysteria of morbid excitement remind us of the Nazi

Sharon's rightist Likud party had insisted on keeping the top cabinet portfolios in their hands as a condition for supporting Labour's entry into the government.

© Copyright 2004, Reuters (Excerpts from Reuters material)

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Sharon Rejects Right of Return; Return to 1967 Borders
IMEMC Staff & Agencies, December 17, 2004, 00:22

In a televised speech at the Herzliya Conference on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that he had reached a “strategic agreement” with the U.S. President to totally reject the right of return, as well as rejecting any withdrawal from Jerusalem. He stated that "Israel will not withdraw to the 1967 borders, and will not evacuate settlements in the West Bank".

Sharon said that he and Bush agree that "the new Palestinian leadership must show, at every step, their willingness to stop terrorism and incitement." He noted that 2005 will be a year of historic significance for relations between the Israelis and Palestinians, saying that "Arafat was the main obstacle to peace in the region" and that now, with Arafat gone, he hoped "Palestinians will have the ability to elect a leader who can reject terrorism and hatred".

He added "since Israel announced its goal last year, the country has taken many steps in the direction of achieving this goal." Sharon noted that "Israel has faced international isolation over the last four years, and some Israelis may have lost faith in our goal, especially with the increase in anti-Semitism all over the globe."

"Over these years, Israel has had to face two parallel and concurrent crises: terrorism and recession," Sharon noted, "We had to rebuild trust in ourselves and in our ability to maintain our security and to avoid economic collapse. And this is what we have done. ... The Israeli Defense Forces have managed to stop terrorism by carrying out a number of successful operations, including 'Operation Defensive Shield' [in Jenin and elsewhere] in 2002."

"The disengagement plan recognizes the demographic reality on the ground. It is clear that we will not remain in Gaza after a permanent agreement is reached. ... Disengagement unifies Israelis in a common goal: keeping Jerusalem, and maintaining our large security blocs in the West Bank; whose presence and inclusion into Israel will preserve the nature of Israel as a Jewish State."

Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat, in charge of negotiations with Israel, responded to Sharon's speech saying, "Sharon is delusional, thinking that he can present a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which completely rejects Palestinian rights and independence. If he wants to withdraw from Gaza or anywhere else, no one will stop him. But as far as permanent settlement issues, this is dictation. We need negotiation, not dictation.”

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zohri said Sharon's speech was "a declaration of war against the Palestinian people and our rights, including the right of return and full independence within a Palestinian state," adding that the Hamas response will be to "move ahead in our resistance against the occupation."
www.imemc.org

Israel's Holocaust victims are bilked by their own

By Jonathan Cook
Special to The Daily Star
Friday, December 17, 2004

Remember the longest-running story of the 1990's? It began at the turn of that decade with the revelation that European banks and financial institutions had been secretly profiting for more than half a century from bank accounts and assets deposited by European Jews who later died in Nazi concentration camps. The banks, it emerged, had avoided returning the money to surviving family members.

Soon financial houses across Europe were being called to account. The story reached its climax at the end of the 1990's with the Swiss banks agreeing to pay out the huge sum of $1.25 billion, after their initial foot dragging was exposed in a media campaign led by Holocaust reparation funds and the Israeli government. The Swiss banks affair had a sad coda: much of the restitution money never made it to the Holocaust families. Instead, a sizeable chunk went to the reparation organizations themselves to pay off the inflated salaries of the lawyers who had advised them.

But another, yet more embarrassing, Holocaust banking scandal is belatedly playing itself out today in Israel, even if no one - not even the reparation funds or the Israeli government - is drawing attention to it. In Jerusalem, auditors working for an investigative committee of the Israeli Knesset have unearthed thousands of dormant accounts belonging to Holocaust victims from which Israel's own banks have long been profiting. According to information leaked by the committee to the Hebrew-language media, the scale of the plundering of the victims' accounts is huge.

Even though the banks have withdrawn their cooperation - and, according to the chief auditor, access to key documents - the inquiry has reportedly identified at least 5,000 dormant accounts and safe deposit boxes, worth more than $220 million at today's values. One bank, Bank Leumi, is said to have benefited from the lion's share of the money, possibly in the order of $160 million. But rather than settle accounts with the Holocaust families, the banks, led by Leumi, are trying to silence the inquiry and continuing to deny that they hold any Holocaust money.

Leumi's lawyer, Ram Caspi, told the committee last month: "Bank Leumi is a publicly-traded company. It has to answer to stockholders. It cannot simply pay as a result of a committee's recommendations." Presumably Caspi fears that the stockholders will be worried that a restitution deal would erode the bank's record returns this year: In the first three quarters it racked up profits of $342 million - a 68 percent increase over last year.

Similar comments by Caspi prompted outgoing Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, himself a Holocaust survivor, to accuse Leumi of being "the last bank in the world that refuses to pay money to [Holocaust] survivors."

The Knesset committee leading the inquiry finished its damning report 18 months ago, but its work has yet to see the light of day. Endless legal wrangling by the banks has forced the committee to shelve the report for the time being. Instead, the banks have reached a private deal with the government to make the whole embarrassing episode go away. According to reports in the Israeli media, Leumi will pay the Holocaust families $8 million rather than the $160 million unearthed by the committee.

The valuation formula of the Holocaust assets proposed by Leumi - and rejected by the Knesset committee - offers far more generous terms to the Israeli bank than were offered to the Swiss banks. Whereas the Swiss had to pay the Holocaust families restitution adjusted for inflation and 4 percent interest, Leumi has demanded that inflation be excluded for the period before the creation of Israel - including the war years when inflation hit 300 percent - and that interest be reduced to 2 percent.

The effect of these changes on the restitution that will be offered Holocaust families, some of whose relatives invested their money in Leumi in the 1920's and 1930's, was predictable enough: It dramatically reduced the bank's liabilities.

The extent of the reduction is illustrated by the testimony provided to the committee by one woman who searched for her uncle's investments in Israel for many years. She eventually found that in 1940 he had opened an account at Leumi with £1,000, or enough today to buy three apartments in Tel Aviv. When the bank finally returned the money in 1979, she received a pittance.

The reason everyone involved, including the banks, the Israeli government and Jewish reparations organizations, appears happy to hush up the affair - in stark contrast to their behavior when the scandal broke in Europe - is the damage they fear the revelations will wreak on Israel's image abroad. Caspi has already warned the committee that the story of the Holocaust assets will give ammunition to critics that Israel has been hypocritical: "The Wall Street Journal will say the Israeli banks also hide money, not just the Swiss."

If pursued, the investigations are also certain to open up a Pandora's Box of revelations about other misuses of Holocaust assets made by Israeli firms, such as mortgage brokers, real estate companies, insurers, all of which have yet to cooperate with the inquiry. But most damagingly of all, further investigations would turn a spotlight on the even murkier role of the Israeli government in retaining Holocaust assets.

During World War II, the British authorities ruling what was then Palestine confiscated many of the assets invested in local banks and financial houses by European Jews living in enemy countries, including those under Nazi occupation. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, those assets were transferred by Britain to the custody of the Israel government. However, the Jewish state made little effort to trace the heirs; instead, it passed on the assets - including bank accounts, jewelry, land and property - to various ministries and to Zionist organizations like the Jewish National Fund.

Estimates widely quoted in the Israeli media suggest that the government may be holding as many as 10,000 bank accounts and some 5,000 properties belonging to Holocaust victims. That total would dwarf the sums being cited in the case of Bank Leumi. None of these revelations, however, is likely to get the attention it deserves so long as the Israeli government and the Jewish reparation organizations are left to decide who has misbehaved in exploiting the suffering of Holocaust families.

Jonathan Cook is a journalist "The Daily Star"
www,dailystar.com

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1221-04.htm
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An FBI official in a July 30 e-mail message described an incident at Guantanamo Bay that he found bothersome: "I saw a detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe flashing." He said the captive was in the custody of military officials at the time. "Such techniques were not allowed nor approved by FBI policy," the agentwrote.
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Nearly 200,000 Israelis have emigrated since 1990, the Central Bureau of Statistics told the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee Monday.

A CBS official said that some 184,000 emigrated between 1990 to 2002, and that there has been a rise in the number of emigrants in recent years apparently as a result of the economic and security conditions in the country.